On Nov. 5, construction was scheduled to 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.

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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.

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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.

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