GX Group to Build India's First Advanced Photonics Facility, Betting on the Chips That Run Fibre and AI Networks

From a Fibre-Broadband Castoff to a Photonics Bet

GX Group is not a household name in Indian deep tech, and until recently it had no reason to be. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in the Netherlands, the company built its business quietly, manufacturing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) equipment — the unglamorous optical hardware that lets broadband reach the last mile into homes and offices. Rebranded in 2018, it spent a decade turning India from a market it sold into into a base it designs and manufactures from, under CEO Paritosh Prajapati.

That history is the backdrop to a much bigger move: an advanced photonics manufacturing facility that GX Group says will be India's first of its kind, aimed squarely at a category of components the country currently imports almost in its entirety.

What Is Actually Being Built

The push began in October 2025, when GX Group launched a dedicated subsidiary, GX Quantum Photonics Pvt Ltd, to build a photonics chip development, manufacturing and R&D hub in India, backed by a Rs 500 crore Phase 1 investment. The plan pairs Dutch government-linked financing — through Invest International — with technology from SMART Photonics BV, a Netherlands-based photonic integrated circuit (PIC) foundry, in what has been described as a roughly €49 million joint venture arrangement.

Reporting around August 24, 2026 filled in the operational detail that had been missing: the new subsidiary will be headquartered in Manesar, near Gurugram, with the manufacturing facility itself coming up in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan, alongside an expansion of GX Group's existing R&D centre in Chennai. Local production of chips is slated to begin from October 2026, with the wider facility targeted to be fully operational by December 2026 — putting commercial output within the current financial year's final stretch. The investment is expected to create more than 300 direct jobs across the Bhiwadi and Chennai sites.

Why Photonics, and Why Now

The products at the centre of the plan — TOSAs (Transmitter Optical Sub-Assemblies), ROSAs (Receiver Optical Sub-Assemblies), optical sub-assemblies more broadly, and SFP (Small Form-factor Pluggable) transceivers — sit at a genuine chokepoint in India's digital infrastructure. These are the components that convert electrical signals to light and back again inside optical fibre networks: every telecom backhaul link, every metro fibre ring, and increasingly every AI data centre's internal networking fabric depends on transceivers built around exactly this kind of photonic hardware.

Today, that hardware is almost entirely imported, mostly from China, Japan, Taiwan and a small number of specialist Western and Israeli suppliers. As India's telecom operators expand fibre backhaul for 5G and eventual 6G rollouts, and as hyperscalers and domestic groups race to build out AI-ready data centre capacity, demand for optical transceivers has been rising in lockstep — while the supply chain behind them remains a strategic dependency almost nobody in India's semiconductor conversation talks about as loudly as they talk about logic chips or memory.

That is the gap GX Quantum Photonics is positioning itself to fill. Unlike a conventional semiconductor fab, a photonics facility works with compound materials (typically indium phosphide) rather than silicon, and the SMART Photonics partnership is meant to bring foundry-grade PIC fabrication know-how that does not otherwise exist in the country. Chennai's expanded R&D centre is expected to handle design and qualification work, while Bhiwadi carries the manufacturing load.

Fitting Into a Bigger Pattern

The timing lines up with a broader shift in how India's semiconductor mission is talking about itself. With Semicon India 2026 set for mid-September and the government's ISM 2.0 push explicitly widening its scope beyond wafer fabs into equipment, materials, packaging and now — implicitly — adjacent categories like photonics, GX Group's plan reads as an early, privately-funded bet on a corner of the "chips" story that fabs alone cannot cover. Optical interconnects, not just logic silicon, are what much of the AI infrastructure boom actually runs on, and a domestic source of TOSAs and ROSAs would reduce one more import line that spikes every time global supply chains for photonics components tighten.

Whether GX Quantum Photonics can hit its October 2026 production start and December operational target will be the first test. Photonics fabrication is a narrower, more specialised discipline than general electronics assembly, and India has no existing base of trained PIC engineers to draw on at scale — meaning talent, not capital, may end up being the harder constraint to solve for.

Sources

• GX Group unveils €49M quantum photonics venture in India with SMART Photonics — PIC Magazine
• How an Ericsson Castoff Became the Backbone of India's Fibre Internet: The GX Group Story — YourStory
• GX Group to Start Photonics Production — Channel i AM
• India's GX Group Ignites Photonics Revolution with December Launch — IndianWeb2
• Netherlands-based GX Group announces Rs 500 crore investment to make photonics chips in India — Investment Guru India