The Water Crisis in the Semiconductor Industry

Semiconductors or they're called chips often serve as the foundations of today's digital world and also have a huge water footprint. The chip manufacturing process relies on a large and steady source of ultra pure water throughout the fabrication cycle to rinse particles and chemicals from these very sensitive chip surfaces. It is really really hard for chip makers to decouple their capacity expansion with water consumption so that means more capacity, more sophisticated fabrication processes like the one that TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is aiming at in Arizona.