The Handful of Companies That Control Chipmaking Equipment

Imagine any country in the world, India included, deciding to build a semiconductor fab, covered under the Dholera Fab discussion elsewhere on this site, and discovering that regardless of where the fab is physically located or who owns it, the actual manufacturing equipment inside it, lithography systems, deposition and etching tools, comes from an extraordinarily concentrated group of just a handful of global companies, ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and KLA, that together control the overwhelming majority of the specialised equipment every fab in the world depends on.

This equipment concentration matters directly for India's fab ambitions covered throughout this page, building fabrication capacity, whether at Dholera's mature-node scale or any future advanced-node facility, genuinely requires securing supply relationships with these specific equipment makers, meaning India's semiconductor manufacturing sovereignty, however successfully achieved on the fabrication side, still depends on continued access to foreign-controlled equipment, a real limitation to how completely self-reliant chip manufacturing can genuinely become for any single country.

ASML holds particularly concentrated importance specifically for advanced-node manufacturing, covered under the EUV Lithography discussion elsewhere on this site, as the sole global supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines essential for producing the most advanced chips, meaning any country's ambition to eventually move beyond mature nodes like Dholera's 28nm toward genuinely cutting-edge fabrication depends entirely on securing ASML's cooperation, a single-supplier dependency with genuine strategic implications.

This equipment dependency connects directly to the iCET partnership covered elsewhere on this site, Applied Materials' Bengaluru hub specifically represents exactly this kind of equipment-maker relationship being cultivated deliberately, India building genuine, trusted commercial and government-level relationships with these critical equipment suppliers well before needing to actually negotiate equipment access for future, more advanced fabrication projects, a genuinely forward-looking relationship investment given how concentrated and strategically important this equipment supply chain layer remains globally.