04 · Energy
What it all runs on.
Chips and the machines that use them are a power problem before they are anything else. Almost no chipmaker publishes an absolute electricity figure, so this page leads with the statistical offices that do, and shows company disclosure for what it is: patchy.
01
National data-centre electricity
Metered, official, quarterly. Ireland publishes the cleanest data-centre series anywhere; Taiwan is shown as national context for its fab clusters, not as a semiconductor series.
02
What operators publish about themselves
Straight from each company's own sustainability or annual report. Nothing estimated, nothing interpolated, blanks left blank.
03
What this does and does not show
- The Netherlands is missing on purpose. CBS publishes its data-centre figure in a news release, not as a StatLine table; the full 5,000-table catalogue has no data-centre series. Scraping a press release and calling it a time series would be worse than the gap.
- These are national totals. Fabs and data centres sit inside them and cannot be read out separately. Ireland does not split its data-centre figure by tenant, so Intel's Leixlip campus is in there and invisible.
- A data centre is not a fab. They are shown together because they compete for the same grid, not because the numbers are comparable.
- TSMC's own report appendices switch between "total energy consumption" and "indirect energy, non-renewable" across years. Those are different metrics, so they are not joined into one line here.
- Water is reported as withdrawal, not consumption, and definitions differ between operators. Treat cross-company comparison with care.
- No forecast, no attribution of any total to any company, and no view on whether any of it is too much.