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Resources what a fab consumes

Power and water.

A leading-edge fab runs on three supplies: electricity by the gigawatt-hour, water by the million cubic metres, and gases far more potent than carbon dioxide.

The biggest chipmaker publishes its numbers, so this page uses TSMC's own reports wherever it can. Scroll to go on.

8.9%of Taiwan's electricity went to TSMC, 2023
153 Lof water per wafer, per mask layer
96%of TSMC's fluorinated gases abated, 2025

CommonWealth Magazine (2024); TSMC 2025 Sustainability Report.

01 Electricity

One company, one grid.

TSMC used 30,990 GWh of energy in 2025, 92.8% of it bought electricity. In Taiwan, that makes one company a large slice of the national grid. IEEE Spectrum reported that TSMC would soon use more power than all of Taiwan's homes combined.

TSMC's share of Taiwan's power0
Source-

TSMC 2025 Sustainability Report for energy use. Renewables were 20.1% of TSMC's electricity in 2025; its targets are 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2040. Reuters notes Taiwan's grid is over 80% coal and gas. The 2025 share is IEEE Spectrum's projection from 2024, drawn lighter.

02 Where the power goes

Half is for the room.

Only a little over half of a fab's electricity drives the tools that make chips. The rest keeps the building clean, still and cool: the air handling, the water plants, the pumps. EUV scanners, the most power-hungry tools, take about 11% of the total.

One low-NA EUV scanner draws up to 1,170 kW, and a High-NA one up to 1,400 kW, as TechInsights estimates. That is about ten times an immersion DUV scanner.

The 56/44 split is from the think tank Interface (2024). The EUV share and power draw are TechInsights estimates, as reported by Tom's Hardware (October 2024). The tenfold comparison is from Interface. TSMC reports cutting EUV peak power by 44% with a scheduling programme in 2025.

03 Ultrapure water

Rinse, layer, repeat.

Every layer of a chip is rinsed in ultrapure water: water so clean that its only conductivity is its own, at a resistivity of about 18.2 MΩ·cm. TSMC reports using 153.3 litres per 12-inch wafer, per mask layer. Leading-edge logic has 80 to 100 of those layers.

80
Water per wafer0
Per 1,000 wafers0

TSMC 2025 Sustainability Report; layer counts from Semiconductor Engineering; the per-wafer totals are arithmetic. Making 1,000 gallons of ultrapure water takes roughly 1,400 to 1,600 gallons of city water (World Economic Forum, 2024). In 2025 TSMC withdrew about 150 million m³ of water and recycled about 88% of its process water.

04 Process gases

Gases that outlast us.

Etch and chamber cleaning use fluorinated gases. Nitrogen trifluoride warms the planet 17,200 times as much as carbon dioxide over a century; sulphur hexafluoride 23,500 times, and it lasts about 3,200 years. The US EPA says 10 to 80% of these gases pass through the tool unreacted. Abatement systems have to destroy them before they reach the air.

96%
Unreacted gas that escapes0
TSMC reports96% abated, 2025

Global warming potentials from Wikipedia; pass-through from the US EPA; abatement rate from TSMC's 2025 Sustainability Report. Even so, TSMC reported 403,167 tonnes CO₂-equivalent from perfluorinated compounds in 2025.

05 Siting

Fabs follow water and wires.

In the 2021 drought, Taiwan's worst in over 50 years, chipmakers planned to buy water by the truckload. Since then, water has become a site question.

In Arizona, TSMC's first fab uses about 4.75 million gallons a day, 65% of it recycled; the three planned fabs are projected at 16.4 million gallons, and TSMC is building its own reclamation plant. In Kumamoto, TSMC's Japanese venture expects its first plant to use 3.1 million tonnes of water a year.

Tom's Hardware and Fortune (2021); Axios Phoenix (August 2025); The Japan Times (November 2024). Units differ by source and are kept as published.

06 Where to go next

The bill behind the chip.

Each of these supplies is part of the cost of a wafer and part of the case for or against a site.