Chip design in Ukraine

A fabless company designs chips but does not own a factory. It sends its finished designs to a foundry, a company that manufactures chips for other firms. Most foundries operate in Taiwan and other Asian countries. In November 2023, at the Ukraine Global Innovation event, Valeria Ionan, the deputy minister of digital transformation, announced that Ukraine would create a network of fabless companies for automated microcircuit design. The stated goal is to produce up to 50,000 chips per month within three years for precision weapons^[2,3]. Mykhailo Fedorov, the deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation, said the ministry planned to develop and present a Ukrainian chip in 2024^[4]. The sector the plan builds on is real. According to market data cited by UkraineInvest, more than 5,000 companies and individual entrepreneurs in Ukraine were engaged in electronics manufacturing as of late 2024^[11]. The stated customer is defense production. The Ministry of Defense reported that drone output grew from a few thousand units in 2022 to 4 million in 2025, with a target above 7 million for 2026^[33,34]. Drones and guided munitions are built around microcontrollers and radio chips.

The Lashkaryov Institute of Semiconductor Physics in Kyiv is the country's main research institute for semiconductors. It was founded in 1960 as part of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine^[6]. The Microelectronics Department of the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute trains chip designers, and it is one of the country's oldest university programs in the field^[8].

Foreign fabless companies already design chips in Ukraine. Melexis, a Belgian maker of sensor chips, runs a design office in Kyiv where Ukrainian engineers define, design, lay out and test microchips^[5,9]. In 2018 the company opened a joint analog electronics laboratory with the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, which trains the engineers the industry needs^[7]. The wider technology sector that feeds this pipeline is large: IT services exports reached 6.66 billion dollars in 2025, the largest services export in the country^[35].

The Ministry of Digital Transformation planned to introduce the Chips Act UA in 2024. This legal package, modeled on the European Chips Act, would offer subsidies, tax reductions and clear rules for technology transfer^[10,12]. The government's innovation strategy, approved by the Cabinet of Ministers on 14 January 2025, sets the goal of placing Ukraine among the top 15 countries in microelectronics and reaching 1% of global chip production by 2030^[10,11]. The Semiconductor Association of Ukraine (NSAU) unites companies, researchers and state institutions to build the ecosystem the strategy needs^[1].

Diia City is a special legal and tax regime for technology companies that has operated across Ukraine since 2022. The Parliament created it through the law On Stimulating the Development of the Digital Economy of 15 July 2021, and residents pay reduced tax rates on income and profits^[13,14].

Industrial parks operate under the law On Industrial Parks, and about 100 parks were registered as of 2025. The 2025 state budget allocated 1 billion hryvnias, about 25 million dollars, for investment incentives for significant investors and industrial parks^[15]. In April 2025 Ukraine and the United States signed an agreement establishing the Reconstruction Investment Fund, a joint fund that draws revenues from future licenses for Ukrainian mineral deposits^[17,18]. The Ministry of Economy publishes a catalogue of the registered parks in English^[30], and the European Union's Ukraine Facility, in force since March 2024, provides up to 50 billion euros for 2024 to 2027, with disbursements linked to the reforms in Ukraine's plan^[29].

Ukraine holds the largest titanium reserves in Europe, about 7% of the world total, and ranks among the top five countries in explored graphite reserves^[19]. The Irshansk mining complex in the Zhytomyr region, operated by the state company UMCC Titanium, mines ilmenite, a titanium ore used in aircraft parts, paint and electronic components^[21]. The Zavallia deposit in the Kirovohrad region is the only one of Ukraine's six graphite deposits currently mined; graphite is the material of battery anodes and steelmaking electrodes^[22].

The Polokhivske lithium deposit in the Kirovohrad region holds over 760,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, which makes it one of the largest lithium deposits in Europe^[23,24]. Ukraine's other major lithium deposits, Shevchenkivske in the Donetsk region and Kruta Balka in the Zaporizhzhia region, lie in territory occupied by Russia^[25]. The government's raw materials strategy, which runs to 2056, aims to develop 20 exploration and extraction projects and to build domestic processing for titanium, graphite anodes, batteries and rare earth oxides instead of exporting raw ore^[20]. The occupation reaches beyond lithium: according to the SecDev assessment cited by the BBC, Russian forces held 63% of Ukraine's coal mines and about half of its manganese, caesium, tantalum and rare earth deposits^[31], and the Azovske rare earth deposit in the Donetsk region and the Novopoltavske deposit in Zaporizhzhia, which carries rare earth and niobium ores, lie inside the occupied territory^[32].

Ukraine designs chips but does not make them. Government plans describe a fabless industry that foreign foundries would serve, and the production models the ministry examined rest on the Chips Act UA legislation, which as of 2026 had still not gone to the Verkhovna Rada, though the ministry expects the draft to reach parliament by the end of 2026^[12,36]. The production targets announced in 2023 were goals for the next three years^[2].

The mineral wealth is largely untapped. UkrLithiumMining, the company that holds the license for the Polokhivske deposit, received the right to use it without a tender, and extraction has not started years later^[26,27]. Before 2022 Ukraine was a significant supplier of titanium, gallium, manganese and iron ore to Europe, and the European Commission identifies Ukraine as a potential source of more than 20 critical raw materials, but extracting them requires large investment, and several of the largest deposits lie in occupied territory^[19,25].

The map on this page is a visualization of public datasets. The primary sources are listed below.