Inox Air to bet ₹500 cr on gases for chip fabs
NEW DELHI : Inox Air Products Pvt. Ltd, India’s largest industrial gas producer, is planning to invest ₹300-500 crore to build ultra-high purification facilities and a supply chain for gases used by semiconductor fabrication facilities in India.
Inox Air Products managing director Siddharth Jain said that the investments are being made in a small way this year and will be scaled up going forward in tandem with the demand which will be generated by semiconductor fabrication companies that will set up their facilities in the country in the coming years. “We have already begun the investment of purifying the raw gases that are already available in India today—oxygen, nitrogen, argon, helium, nitrous oxide, methane, silane and ammonia.
These are the basic gases for which we are putting in the infrastructure to convert them to ultra-high purity," he said. Chip fabrication requires 50 different and extremely pure gases, of which only eight are available in the raw form in India.
The rest 42 need to be imported, and the infrastructure needed to transport and store all the gases is also imported. Jain said that while the investments are not immediately required, they will be needed for the long term since India was attracting chipmakers like Micron to set up chip assembly, testing, monitoring and packaging units or ATMP and eventually chip fabs locally.
He added that Inox AP, as a raw materials provider to chip fabs and solar cell makers, was in discussions with several chip fabs and ATMP units that were evaluating India for setting up shop. “Looking at the players we are talking to today, just us and the players we are talking to only in the electronic (semiconductors) segment, if everything goes to plan and all the investments
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