Jonne Arjoranta 📚 (@jonne.arjoranta.fi)

The Ecological Cost of AI Is Much Higher Than You Think On Nov. 5, construction will start outside the Taiwanese city of Taichung on the world’s most advanced semiconductor plant, known as Fab 25. Owned and operated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Fab 25 is expected to churn through 100,000 metric tons of water a day to produce the state-of-the-art semiconductors needed for the functioning of burgeoning artificial intelligence data centers worldwide. “When a local group told me 100,000 metric tons of water a day, I told them it cannot be true, because the number is huge,” Po-Jen Hsu, deputy CEO of the Environmental Rights Foundation in Taipei, told me. One hundred thousand metric tons of water is equivalent to about 7% of the municipal demand from Taichung’s 2.8 million residents. As the semiconductor industry expands at a breakneck pace in Asia and the United States, it has left behind a long history of extraction and ecological degradation, with no plan to stop the destruction. To the contrary, tech companies have abandoned their sustainability targets in the race to build out the vast, energy-ravenous, carbon-spewing data centers. Over the past decade, Taiwan’s TSMC has become the unrivaled leader in semiconductor manufacturing, one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world (and one of only two in the top 10 outside Silicon Valley). Its roughly 26 fabrication plants in Taiwan, called fabs, are key to the health of the country’s economy. TSMC’s newest plant in the city of Kaohsiung is now producing the first “2-nanometer” semiconductors, TSMC’s latest generation. Elements etched onto these microchips, some made of rare earth minerals, will be 18-millionths of a millimeter wide, marginally bigger than an antibody. To achieve that precision requires clean rooms 10,000 times cleaner than a surgical operating theater. Cleanliness at that level demands huge amounts of water. Taiwan, however, suffers chronic water shortages due to reduced rainfall from typhoons reaching the island. The altered course of these drenching storms is a result of planetary heating. Historically, on average more than three typhoons bringing heavy rainfall have reached Taiwan each year. Since 2010, the number has dropped to 2½. However, climate change has also caused the number of extreme typhoons to increase. Super Typhoon Ragasa devastated swathes of Taiwan in September, killing 17, while another flooded Taichung in August. > “Farmers say they are being sacrificed for [the] semiconductor industry, and I think that’s a fair assessment.” The issue of who gets water and who doesn’t was highlighted during Taiwan’s two most recent drought crises, in 2021 and 2023, in which semiconductor manufacturers fell into direct competition with Taiwanese farmers. In 2021, as Taiwan’s reservoirs dropped to record low levels, fabs in Taichung and further south were ordered to reduce their water consumption by 15%. TSMC had to truck water from the north of the island to its fabs in the drought-stricken south to keep them running. In 2023, fabs in southern Taiwan had to reduce their water consumption again by 10%. Even so, rice farmers in the south were forced to stop planting rice for three years in a row, from 2021 to 2023. “Farmers say they are being sacrificed for [the] semiconductor industry, and I think that’s a fair assessment,” said Po-Jen Hsu. Fab 25 will also require a staggering amount of energy, at least 1 gigawatt, equivalent to the annual power demand of 750,000 urban households. In Taiwan, most electricity is generated with high-carbon emitting coal and gas. Worse, many of the gases used in semiconductor factories have far greater climate consequences, or climate forcing, than carbon dioxide. For example, sulfur hexaflouride, which can escape factories and settle in the atmosphere, has a heating effect 23,500 times that of CO2. What we are witnessing today is only the beginning of a fab growth spiral of constantly increasing demand for energy and resources. Production of each new generation of microchips requires more energy and water than the one before, because the processes to make them become ever more complex. (As a general rule, more complexity requires more energy.) Semiconductors are made with a lithography machine about the size of a double-decker bus, with a dense configuration of lasers and precision lenses, using prodigious volumes of ultraclean water to print infinitesimally small circuits onto silicon wafers the size of an old LP. These wafers are then shipped to other production facilities where they are cut into individual microchips called “graphics processing units.” The GPU market is dominated by Silicon Valley behemoth Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, now with a market capitalization of**** $5 trillion. As one of the biggest winners in the AI boom, Nvidia now commands a monopoly of over 90% of production of the GPU chips that every tech company desperately wants in order to run their AI models. Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, estimates that for every $60 spent by tech companies on new data centers, $35 goes to the purchase of Nvidia GPUs. Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have reportedly pleaded with Huang personally to get hold of more of them. President Donald Trump speaks as C.C. Wei, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., from left, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, listen in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on March 3, 2025. (Pool via AP) Nvidia’s GPUs keep getting bigger. Their latest AI GPU, the GB300, consists of three processors combined, two of which are well over 1 inch square, which is over seven times bigger than a standard Apple silicon microchip. Bigger chips normally require more energy and resources to manufacture. As a result, Nvidia’s carbon emissions rose by 87% in 2024 alone. When fully up to speed in 2028, Fab 25 will produce 50,000 wafers a month, for the manufacture of roughly 3 million GPUs a year — and even this isn’t nearly enough to keep up with demand from artificial intelligence companies. “At the beginning, TSMC said they will build only a single two-nano factory in Taichung,” Po-Jen Hsu told me. “But in the end, they built four factories.” South Korea and its largest company, Samsung, were once leaders of the semiconductor industry, but in the past decade the Taiwanese have pulled far ahead in technological advancement as well as production capacity. Samsung now sees the AI boom as a chance to catch up and is planning a “mega-cluster” of semiconductor fabs in Yongin, south of Seoul, that would dwarf TSMC’s expansion plans. According to SHARPS, a labor organization that campaigns for South Korean semiconductor workers, the mega-cluster alone would consume more than half of Seoul’s current total daily water usage, about 1.57 million tons, and one-seventh of the nation’s electricity, about 10 gigawatts. In South Korea, as in virtually all countries where semiconductor fabs are situated, the industry has significant political influence. Samsung is by far South Korea’s largest company, contributing as much as 23% to the economy. Lim Dayun, an organizer at SHARPS, said Samsung upheld a “no-union management policy” for decades even though that is unconstitutional in South Korea. After many years of worker campaigns, a union was finally formed a few years ago. However, in April this year, Samsung became the only company ever to be granted exemption from the South Korean statutory limit of a 52-hour work week, on the grounds of global competition. Today, Samsung semiconductor workers can end up working 64 hours per week. In February, soon after the announcement of the Yongin mega-cluster, Korean lawmakers passed the “K-Chips Act,” which offers support for the entire semiconductor industry, but is likely to favor Samsung, alongside another South Korean semiconductor giant, SK Hynix, with up to $6.6 billion in tax credits. Three energy laws were also passed with sweeping provisions for new energy infrastructure to satisfy the Yongin mega-cluster’s demand. > Samsung semiconductor workers can end up working 64 hours per week. “Transmission towers are [being] built to bring in power from other regions, sparking strong resistance from residents. There is even talk of introducing small nuclear reactors,” Lim told me. Alongside its escalating energy and water use, the chip industry in South Korea is notorious for spreading pollution and contaminants into air and water, and for putting its workers at risk of harm. SHARPS has documented numerous cases of leukemia, brain tumors and pancreatic cancer among workers at Samsung’s plants, Lim told me. The semiconductor industry, he said, uses “acutely carcinogenic, reproductive-toxic and neurotoxic substances.” For over 10 years, the company denied responsibility for workers’ occupational diseases, and only after relentless struggles by the victims and mounting social pressure did it finally agree in 2018 — through a mediated settlement — to apologize, provide compensation and promise measures to prevent recurrence. “Even now, Samsung still fails to provide workers with the right to know about hazardous risks in their workplaces,” said Lim. Semiconductor plants spew highly toxic waste, including large amounts of PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that don’t break down from natural processes, causing long-term contamination. Additionally, there’s the growing demand for minerals, such as copper and rare earths, with mining operations that increasingly target isolated regions and Indigenous territories. “Even where companies publish sustainability reports, they rarely disclose the full life cycle impacts,” said Sara Marcucci, founder of the AI and Planetary Justice Alliance, a group of researchers and campaigners exploring the impacts of AI supply chains. “Data on water use, emissions or labor conditions is fragmented or selectively released. This makes it very difficult to hold them accountable.” “The structural denial of risks is a defining feature of the semiconductor industry as a strategic high-tech industry,” said Lim. And this has “catastrophic consequences for both workers and surrounding communities.” The infrastructure for these industrial complexes — power plants, landfills, road expansion — continuously fuels conflicts with local communities. A single large-scale semiconductor plant can generate around 70,000 tons of wastewater per day. Lim recalls the testimony of a worker who stated that Samsung had “kept fish at the final stage of its wastewater treatment process to show local residents during plant tours. But on one occasion, the fish all died suddenly, and the tanks were covered up.” Po-Jen Hsu has seen many of the same waste issues in Taichung. “TSMC claims 90% of waste will be reused,” he told me. “But what kind of waste? Because it can be pretty toxic. So there’s a big issue here. Not simply, what’s being left in the waste, but also the transparency.” Like Samsung in South Korea, TSMC enjoys protected status as a critical strategic asset for Taiwan’s security. The Environmental Rights Foundation has filed a case against Fab 25’s environmental impact assessment to block the construction, but it is pursuing the case very cautiously. “We’ll do it in a quiet way. It’s a very politically sensitive issue.” The semiconductor industry started in California in the 1950s, and the origins of the name Silicon Valley are in no way metaphorical, for the toxic residues of that era remain. Underneath the sleek campuses of today’s tech giants, the Valley contains more Superfund sites of toxic waste than anywhere else in the U.S. With the CHIPS Act, which incentivizes the manufacture of semiconductors in America and is the one vestige of the Biden administration that Trump wants to uphold, the fabs are now returning to the U.S., along with their pollutants. Over 20 fabs are planned or being built in the U.S. currently. The most high-profile of these is TSMC’s Fab 21 in Phoenix. A few miles away in Peoria, Ariz., another semiconductor company, Amkor, is planning a packaging fab. This is another vital node in the AI supply chain, where the printed silicon wafers are taken to be cut up and then “packaged” on boards to produce the finished microprocessor. Semiconductor packaging is especially dependent on PFAS chemicals. “There’s more than a thousand applications for PFAS in the semiconductor supply chain,” said Judith Barish, coalition director of CHIPS Communities United, which campaigns for protection of neighborhoods and workers affected by the new fabs springing up across the U.S. as a result of the CHIPS Act. According to Barish, the chemical industry in the U.S. has beefed up its production of PFAS because of the semiconductor boom. “They’ve used the importance of semiconductors as an excuse to push back against regulations,” she said, “because chips are so important for national defense, national security and global competitiveness.” President Joe Biden greets Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Chairman Mark Luises during a ceremony at the building site for a new TSMC chip plant in Phoenix on Dec. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) Mary Martin, a community leader who has been campaigning with CHIPS Communities United against the Amkor fab in Peoria, notes that the industry, as in South Korea and Taiwan, can exercise a powerful influence on government regulators and elected officials. “There was a lot of anger, as residents have felt deceived by the city council due to NDAs to keep the development secret,” said Martin, “and because of the misleading initial descriptions of the factory.” (It eventually quadrupled in size.) The semiconductor industry often claims to bring high quality employment with it, but this is far from accurate. “People think that they’re great jobs; they’re clean, they’re green, they’re high tech,” said Barish. “Actually, as manufacturing jobs go, they’re not particularly well paid. They’re not very safe and they’re very high pressure.” As in South Korea, the U.S. semiconductor industry is notorious for union busting. “When workers try to join a union, they have been fired, blacklisted and retaliated against,” Barish told me. “There’s almost no unionization at all in the semiconductor industry.” In West Lafayette, Indiana, the SK Hynix semiconductor firm is planning a fab for high-bandwidth memory, also an essential component for AI GPUs. Consequently, the SK Hynix fab is central to the Trump administration’s stated goal of semiconductor self-sufficiency in U.S. manufacturing. Debra Ellis, a West Lafayette resident involved in the campaign there with support from CHIPS Communities United, worries about the fab’s impact on birds and wildlife, and is especially concerned about traffic coming in and out of the fab. “These trucks are not carrying benign loads of cargo,” she told me. “They will be bringing in loads of toxic chemicals and leaving with toxic waste.” SK Hynix has not only been supported by the West Lafayette City Council, but also by nearby Purdue University. For Ellis, like other campaigners in the CHIPS Communities United network, the issues they raise go far beyond their own communities. “Because of this focus close to home, little attention has [been paid to] the more expansive violence this industry produces from sourcing materials,” Ellis told me. “There’s the impact on those who work in the mines, be it in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, Argentina, Mongolia or elsewhere, the cost of procuring and transporting these rare earth minerals over long distances, the development and transport as finished products to them becoming waste. The carbon footprint is astronomical.” > “There’s more than a thousand applications for PFAS in the semiconductor supply chain.” Alongside the impact of energy and water use, and the toxic contaminants released during fabrication, semiconductors also require what are described as critical minerals, including copper, nickel and rare earths. The International Energy Agency forecasts that extraction of critical minerals will need to increase 400% by 2040 as a result of AI, digital and renewable technologies. Much of that mining will take place in remote regions and areas with especially fragile ecosystems, many of which are also carbon sinks. In recent years, and no doubt under pressure from its major customers, like Nvidia, TSMC has made considerable progress in recycling water, reducing energy use and minimizing dependency on toxic gases. All of these efforts have been welcomed by campaigners. But the rate of the industry’s expansion means those efforts are at best only slowing the acceleration of fabs’ ecological impact. In an internal memo from September, CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI’s “audacious long-term goal is to build 250 gigawatts of capacity by 2033.” If Altman achieves this goal, OpenAI will need almost exactly as much electricity as India’s 1.5 billion people, and is likely to emit nearly twice as much carbon dioxide as ExxonMobil, the world’s largest non-state carbon emitter. That is enough energy to run at least 60 million**** of Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs. Because AI GPUs are worked so hard, they are assumed to have a lifespan of only two years. So OpenAI would require 30 million of these GPUs every year going forward, or their equivalent. That suggests OpenAI would require the entire output of another 10 fabs just like the 2nm fab in Taichung, along with all the memory and packaging fabs to support them. There are at least five other AI companies with mountains of capital to spend on building their own multigigawatt data centers. If these plans are left unchecked, the current energy and water demands and exposures to toxic waste and PFAS chemicals are only a foretaste of what communities across the world will face from the AI and semiconductor supply chain. As Silicon Valley CEOs anxiously figure how much computing it will take to propel artificial intelligence forward, the real question we should be asking is how much more artificial intelligence the planet can take. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-ecological-cost-of-ai-is-much-higher-than-you-think/