Power and water
A leading-edge fab runs on three supplies: electricity by the gigawatt-hour, water by the million cubic metres, and gases that warm the air thousands of times as much as carbon dioxide.
TSMC publishes these figures for its own fabs every year, so this page uses its reports wherever it can, beside the statistics offices and agencies that count the rest. The site turning here is generic: a fab, its power line, its water plant and its exhaust stacks.
One company, one grid.
TSMC used 30,990 GWh of energy in 2025 across all its sites, 92.8% of it bought electricity. By our arithmetic, its total less its overseas sites, its operations in Taiwan used about 26,000 GWh of electricity: 9.2% of all the electricity Taiwan consumed that year, up from 6.0% in 2021. Taiwan's homes used 19.0%.
Each tile is 1% of Taiwan's electricity in a year. Coal and gas made 83.0% of what Taiwan generated in 2025; TSMC's electricity was 11.5% renewable in Taiwan and 20.1% worldwide.
Tools first, then the room.
In a 300 mm fab making 130 nm logic, measured from 2002 to 2006, Krishnan and colleagues found the process tools, with the pumps, chillers and abatement beside each, used about two-thirds of the electricity. The rest kept the building: clean-room air first, then process cooling water, then the ultrapure water plant.
Where the line falls depends on where the subfab is counted; McKinsey puts it under facilities. Three cleanrooms Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory measured in 2001 put the process share at 35%, 13% and 9%.
Water with everything else taken out.
Samsung cleanses its wafers between each step with ultrapure water: water with all minerals, particles, bacteria, microbes and dissolved gases removed, also called de-ionized water because its ions are gone too. Pure water barely conducts, so the less is dissolved in it, the higher its resistivity: the theoretical maximum is 18.2 to 18.3 MΩ·cm at 25 °C, and MIT.nano's cleanroom runs its water at 18.2.
City water comes in on the left. Each stage takes something else out; the order follows Samsung's list and a Kurita patent, which names other combinations too.
Filters: Samsung's list starts by removing sediment and fine matter; Kurita's patent names flocculation, flotation and filtering.
Reverse osmosis: water is pushed through membranes at a pressure stronger than osmotic pressure, in SK hynix's words. Kurita's patent has two such stages in its primary system.
Degassing: Samsung's list takes out the gas dissolved in the water.
UV: Samsung lists UV sterilization; Kurita's polishing system uses low-pressure mercury lamps for UV oxidation.
Ion exchange: Kurita's patent uses a mixed bed of ion exchange. Samsung's other name for the water, de-ionized, comes from what this takes out.
Ultrafilters: the last stage of Kurita's polishing system. SK hynix's ultrafilters, in its water recycling plant, filter down to 2 nm.
To the fab: the polished water goes on to the tools. The tank and the line are drawn.
Rinse, layer, repeat.
TSMC drew 153.3 litres of tap water for every 12-inch wafer and every mask layer in 2025, down from 161.0 in 2024; it counts a layer by its photomask. No chipmaker publishes how many layers a given chip has. Nikon writes that the loop is repeated several tens of times; in 2017 Semiconductor Engineering expected 80 to 85 layers at 7 nm and wrote that 5 nm could have 100.
The slider starts at 57 layers, where two of TSMC's 2025 figures meet: 8.8 m³ of tap water a wafer (its withdrawal over its wafers) over 153.3 litres a layer gives at most 57.5 layers, by our arithmetic, an average over every wafer it made.
Gases that outlast us.
Plasma etch and chamber cleaning use fluorinated gases. Over 100 years nitrogen trifluoride warms the air 17,400 times as much as the same mass of carbon dioxide and stays about 569 years; sulphur hexafluoride 24,300 times, about 1,000 years; carbon tetrafluoride 7,380 times, about 50,000 years.
The US EPA writes that 10 to 80% of these gases pass through the tool chambers unreacted. Abatement at the tool burns or breaks them, and a water scrubber washes out the acid gases left. Pick a gas and both sliders take the IPCC's defaults for it.
TSMC reports a fluorinated gas "abatement rate" of 96% for 2025, a term it does not define, and 403,167 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent from perfluorinated compounds.
One day's water, four sites.
From mid-2020 to mid-2021 Taiwan had what its Water Resources Agency calls a once-in-a-century drought; TSMC called it the worst in 70 years. Main reservoirs fell to 1 to 3%, and Miaoli, Taichung and north Changhua had water five days a week from 6 April to 6 June 2021. Science and industrial parks with their own water main got reduced supply rather than cuts; TSMC trucked reclaimed water to its fabs from April 2021.
Each cube holds one day's water beside a pool, and the four measure different things. Kumamoto's is the groundwater JASM's Fab 1 is said to draw, about 1.9% of what the region draws, by our arithmetic. Arizona's is what TSMC's first fab there uses; TSMC says 65% of its Arizona water will come from its own recycling at startup, and expects a reclamation plant in 2028. Hsinchu's and Tainan's are TSMC's consumption at all its fabs in each science park, from a chart that prints no year.
The bill behind the chip.
What chipmakers publish about their own electricity and water, each in its own terms, is on this record's energy page. The sites in the last chapter are on the fab map, among them JASM Fab 1 and TSMC Arizona's first fab.
Companies cited on this page: Applied Materials, Nikon, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and TSMC.
- Anatomy of a fabthe subfab where the water and gas plants live02
- What a fab buysthe money side of a new site11
- Where a chip gets madewho makes what, where15