Analyst firm raises alarm about EUV chipmaking tools — each consumes as much power as a small city, fabs to consume 54,000 Gigawatts by 2030
Are power grids ready?
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is vital for modern process technologies and semiconductor manufacturing for years to come. However, at 1,400 kilowatts per EUV tool — enough to power a small city — EUV lithography systems have become a substantial consumer of power that impacts the environment. TechInsights believes that the power consumption of all fabs equipped with EUV tools will exceed 54,000 gigawatts (GW) of power per year by 2030, which is more than what many countries, like Singapore or Greece, consume per year.
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Current Low-NA EUV scanners require up to 1,170 kW, and next-gen High-NA tools are projected to need as much as 1,400 kW per unit (according to TechInsights). The number of these machines installed at fabs operated by Intel, Micron, Samsung, SK hynix, and, of course, TSMC, increases every year.
TechInsights believes that by 2030, the number of fabs with EUV scanners will increase from 31 today to 59, and the number of tools in operation will approximately double. As a result, all the installed EUV systems will consume 6,100 GW/year of power, which suggests that hundreds of the machines will be operational by then.
6,100 GW/year — power consumption comparable to Luxemburg's — is not a lot. However, each advanced chip takes over 4,000 steps to make, and there are hundreds of tools in a fab. EUV equipment accounts for approximately 11% of the total electricity use in a fab, with other tools, HVAC, facility systems, and cooling equipment making up the rest. As a result, the power consumption of all fabs equipped with low-NA and high-NA EUV tools is estimated to increase to 54,000 GW/year.
To put the number into context, 54,000 gigawatts a year of power is around five times more than Meta's data centers consumed in 2023. It is also more than Singapore, Greece, or Romania consume annually and more than 19 times the power consumed by the Las Vegas Strip per year. However, while this is a substantial amount of power, it is only 0.21% of the global power consumption in 2021 (25,343,000 GW/year), a rather small share.
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