India has formally joined Pax Silica, the U.S.-led initiative focusing on securing supply chains for advanced technologies, including semiconductors, AI infrastructure, critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, and data infrastructure. The announcement came from a special event hosted at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where India additionally signed a joint statement on the India-U.S. AI Opportunity Partnership in the presence of U.S. Ambassador Sergio Gor and U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth and Energy, Jacob Helberg, and the White House Director of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios.
Designed as an end-to-end initiative that aligns policy across the full technology stack, Pax Silica spans everything from rare-earth mining and refining to chip manufacturing and their deployment in AI foundation models and data centers. India is now the 12th nation to join Pax Silica alongside Australia, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, the UAE, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
India's inclusion is a notable shift from December 2025, when the initiative was first unveiled without India as a founding member. At the time, India's relatively limited semiconductor fabrication capabilities, especially when compared to other countries, were seen as a constraint.
The Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology for India, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said that the global semiconductor industry would require around one million skilled professionals, presenting a major opportunity for India. Vaishnaw also added that multiple semiconductor plants are in fact being developed and that the first commercial fab is expected to begin production soon.
Pax Silica has been designed as a platform for cooperation among allied nations, but its strategic focus is widely understood to be reducing dependence on China. With Beijing exerting major control over global rare-earth processing capacity, it remains dominant in various segments of legacy semiconductor manufacturing, which are extremely crucial to the global technology supply chain.
At its core, Pax Silica reflects the U.S.' broader strategy to maintain a technological edge in AI and advanced semiconductors. By bringing together export controls, subsidies, and capital flows across partner nations, the initiative aims to coordinate the development, funding, and deployment of advanced technologies. In simple terms, this approach may limit China's access to critical chip-making tools and AI training infrastructure while accelerating capacity-building within allied economies.
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