About This Tracker

How the China Semiconductor Tracker sources, verifies and corrects its data — methodology, units, freshness policy and known gaps.

What This Is

The China Semiconductor Tracker is a curated, open-source resource monitoring semiconductor manufacturing facilities, chip design firms, and equipment/materials suppliers across mainland China.

It is maintained by Pranay Kotasthane at the Takshashila Institution, part of Takshashila’s Siliconpolitik Project. It is a companion to the India Semiconductor Tracker.

Scope

This tracker covers mainland China (PRC) only. Taiwan and the Taiwanese semiconductor ecosystem are out of scope — a distinct political and market story that would need its own tracker.

Naming Convention

Facility, company, design-firm, and equipment/materials-firm names are given in three forms where verified: English, simplified Chinese (简体), and Hanyu Pinyin. City and province names are given in English only. An entry showing “Chinese name not yet verified” reflects a genuine data gap, not an editorial choice.

Units

Investment figures are shown in ¥ (RMB) 亿 (100 million yuan) — the unit Chinese financial press and company filings typically report in — with a dollar figure alongside where a firm’s investment is only disclosed in USD.

Sourcing Strategy

  • Listed-company filings (SMIC and Hua Hong on HKEX/SSE) are treated as primary sources for financials and capacity, sourced via exchange disclosures or cninfo.com.cn.
  • Chinese financial and industry press (Caixin, 21世纪经济报道) is cited directly, with the same scrutiny applied to any credible outlet.
  • State media (Xinhua, CCTV, People’s Daily) is treated as a primary source for the fact of an announcement, not for its interpretation — the same standard applied to a government press release from any country. Science and Technology Daily (科技日报), the Ministry of Science and Technology’s newspaper, is the reference for the official position on equipment and lithography progress, and is used to check claims that circulate on social media or in blog reposts before they are recorded here.
  • Export-control evasion, smuggled equipment, and actual sanctioned-node yields are structurally under-covered by domestic sources; these rely on SemiAnalysis, BIS Federal Register entries, and investigative reporting (Reuters, Nikkei Asia, FT).
  • LLM tools (including DeepSeek) are used only as research aids — locating candidate sources, translating filings, summarizing documents — never cited as the source of a fact. Every figure traces to a cited source; where a source only gave year- or month-level precision, this site displays that same precision rather than a fabricated exact day.
  • Conflicting reports are stated, not silently resolved. Where independent sources disagree on a figure or a facility’s current status (for example, JHICC’s production status, or SMIC Beijing’s investment figure varying by roughly $0.1B across outlets), the disagreement is noted directly in that entry’s narrative rather than picking one number without comment.

Cancelled Projects

Abandoned projects such as Wuhan Hongxin (HSMC), Dehuai/Tacoma, and GlobalFoundries Chengdu stay on the site because they are part of the story of China’s fab drive. They are drawn as hollow grey markers on the map and faded bars on the timeline, and their announced investment is excluded from every headline total, since that money was never spent.

Freshness

Every entry on this site carries a data-age signal, and the aggregate is shown honestly below. Each facility and materials profile shows a Last Verified date where one has been recorded; where it has not, the profile shows the date of the newest cited source instead, labelled as such. Design-firm profiles show the newest cited source date (no explicit verification dates are recorded for them yet). The What Changed page lists every data update in date order, and a fortnightly automated sweep flags drift between manual review passes.

Data age (days since newest cited source) Entries
over 1 year / no dated source 5
181–365 days 9
91–180 days 12
31–90 days 34
≤ 30 days 53

Stalest entries — the first candidates for the next sweep:

Export-Control Designations

Two distinct US designations appear on this site where relevant: the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Entity List, which restricts exports of controlled items, and the Department of Defense’s Section 1260H list of Chinese military-linked companies, a disclosure designation with different legal consequences. Each flagged entry names which list applies. All designated entities across facilities, design firms, and equipment/materials firms are consolidated on the US Designations register.

Technical Complexity Index

Each facility is scored 1 (low) to 5 (high), benchmarked against a cutting-edge 3nm fab (5/5): composite = Technology Difficulty (55%) + Capital Intensity (45%).

Data Status

As of October 2026, this tracker covers 57 facilities (including cancelled projects kept on record), 48 chip design firms, and 8 equipment/materials firms. Coverage of operating fabs was reconciled in October 2026 against a full national fab list (see below); it does not yet reach every one of China’s 100+ fabs.

Known gaps queued for a future research batch, not omitted by oversight: the remaining smaller facilities toward full national coverage; Wingtech/Nexperia’s China operations; process-node history and monthly wafer capacity for the remaining fabs (the October 2026 research batch covered the SMIC, Hua Hong, Nexchip, memory and foreign-invested fabs from company filings; SMIC stopped disclosing capacity fab by fab after 2018, so its newer joint-venture fabs show planned capacity only); and equipment-origin data (domestic tool share, key foreign tools), which is shown as “Not yet assessed” on every profile until it has been researched. Completed October 2026: SMIC’s primary advanced-node Shanghai fab (中芯南方 / SPCL — the Zhangjiang SN1/N+2/N+3 facility behind the Kirin export-control story), SMIC’s legacy campuses (Zhangjiang 8-inch S1, Beijing/北方 NORIC, Tianjin ex-Motorola 8-inch, the Shenzhen 8-inch line), Hua Hong’s Wuxi Fab 7 and Shanghai 8-inch Fab 1/2/3, TI Chengdu, UMC’s Hejian Suzhou 8-inch fab, Worlds Chongqing, SK hynix Chongqing back-end, Sanan IC compound fabs, Hanking’s Fushun MEMS line, and the cancelled-project cohort (武汉弘芯 HSMC, 德淮/Tacoma, GlobalFoundries Chengdu) — this batch came from a full reconciliation against Wikipedia’s List of semiconductor fabrication plants (all 85 mainland-China rows checked). Deliberately excluded from that reconciliation as out of this tracker’s facility scope: LED/optoelectronics plants (Sanan’s LED campuses, Everlight, 华雷, Lite-On opto), legacy discrete/small-signal sites (SiSemi, APT, Creative Sensor, Xiamen Jaysun, 矽成西安, Seiko), fabless-converted firms (上海贝岭 — confirmed no owned fab since 2008), and untraceable rows in the source list (e.g. “Sino King Technology, Hefei DRAM” — no such company found; likely a garbled alias of the CXMT announcement). See the project’s GitHub repository for current status.

Foreign-invested facilities: this tracker now covers the major foreign-owned fabs physically located in mainland China — Samsung Xi’an (NAND), SK Hynix Wuxi (DRAM) and Dalian (NAND, a former Intel fab), Intel Chengdu (assembly/test only, no fab), TSMC Nanjing and Shanghai, and UMC Xiamen. Checked and explicitly ruled out: GlobalFoundries cancelled its planned Chengdu fab in 2018 before it ever became operational and has no current fab in mainland China.

Foreign equipment and materials firms: checked specifically for actual manufacturing (not sales, service, or repair) presence in China. Added Linde and Air Liquide — both confirmed to operate real specialty-gas production plants on Chinese soil supplying named fab customers directly, not merely regional offices. Checked and explicitly excluded as non-manufacturing: Applied Materials’ Xi’an site (confirmed to be a global service center for existing 200mm tools, not a production facility), ASML’s Beijing repair center, Lam Research’s Shanghai training center, and Tokyo Electron’s Kunshan plant (which manufactures flat-panel-display equipment, not semiconductor wafer-processing equipment — a different industry despite the same parent company).

Large-diameter silicon wafers, checked twice: searched specifically for China-based manufacturing by the three foreign majors that otherwise dominate advanced (12-inch) wafer supply — Shin-Etsu, SUMCO, and SK Siltron. Both search passes found their current capacity-expansion investments landing in Japan (Shin-Etsu, SUMCO: Saga) and South Korea (SK Siltron: Gumi) instead, with no confirmed China wafer fab for any of the three. This tracker treats that as a real finding, not a research gap: it lines up with the broader pattern that advanced silicon wafers remain one of China’s clearest import-dependency chokepoints, filled by domestic champions (National Silicon Industry Group, TCL Zhonghuan’s semiconductor-wafer business) rather than foreign joint ventures, unlike the specialty-gas segment where Linde and Air Liquide do manufacture locally. TCL Zhonghuan itself is primarily a solar-wafer company (the world’s largest by shipment volume) — only its separate, smaller semiconductor-wafer business and a new dedicated Shenzhen project are in scope here, flagged explicitly to avoid overstating its role in the chip supply chain.

Download the Data

The full datasets are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with attribution:

The CSVs are flat summaries, one row per entry. The JSON files keep the full nested record (milestones, sources, node history) exactly as it appears in the source YAML.

Have an Update?

This tracker is maintained on a weekly cycle — reported errors and new information are reviewed and pushed to the site every week.

  • Quick update (no account needed): Email us — name the facility, what changed, and a source link if you have one.
  • Detailed contribution (GitHub): Open a GitHub Issue with the same three things — which facility, what changed, and a source URL or document reference.

All submissions are checked against the tracker’s sourcing standard before being incorporated.