Smart fab: Resource optimization in semiconductor plants

Posted: October 22, 2025

Smartphones, EVs, data centers, medical devices, everything from smart fridges to factory automation systems—if it’s digital, it relies on semiconductors. As companies and governments around the world race to lead the field in AI innovation, the EV revolution, and the energy transition, demand for semiconductors is skyrocketing. Through 2030, experts expect semiconductor companies to pour more than $1 trillion into new fabrication plants.^[1]

Aside from massive capital expenditures, there’s another toll new fabs entail. Semiconductor fabrication is among the most resource-intensive of all modern industries. To transform raw silicon, specialty metals, and engineered chemicals into the chips that power the digital world, fabs consume enormous amounts of energy, process gases, chemicals, and vast volumes of ultrapure water (UPW). To produce 1,000 gallons of UPW, it takes roughly 1,400 to 1,600 gallons of regular water.

And, as chips become more complex, their production requires more and more of these resources. In 2019, for instance, Intel’s factories used more than three times as much water of Ford Motor’s factories.^[2] In 2021 in Taiwan, where most of the world’s semiconductors are produced, 10% of the island’s water went to semiconductor fabrication—and this in the midst of a record drought.^[3]

The industry, then, faces a dual challenge: to keep pace with demand, it must bring new fabs online at unprecedented pace. But, to limit its carbon footprint, it must devise new, scalable strategies to optimize resource efficiency across assets, sites, and global enterprises.

In this blog, we’re going to look at how one global semiconductor producer is working toward both these twin objectives with one future-proof SCADA platform.

Monitor, control, optimize

Electricity, process gases, compressed air, steam, chemicals, and UPW—all the utilities that go into chip fabrication require their own distribution networks, their own monitoring systems, and each produces massive quantities of information. Every second, thousands of data points are flowing in from sensors across the facility. The challenge is not only managing this complexity safely and efficiently, but pinpointing opportunities for optimization in this deluge of information. This is where the company’s new SCADA platform comes in.

With AVEVA™ System Platform, the semiconductor producer brought its teams and processes into a common SCADA environment, unifying disparate utility systems into one consistent view. In this shared environment, teams can easily access data, run combined analytics, and collaborate to optimize operations.

The platform’s high-fidelity process historian and operations management interface (OMI) empower operators with real-time monitoring with historical trend analysis. The combination allows teams to respond quickly to immediate issues and identify patterns over time, anticipating potential problems, benchmarking performance, and making data-driven improvements to fine-tune operations dynamically.

Standardizing across a global enterprise

The true value in this operations framework, though, is in its repeatability, which only really becomes apparent at scale. With AVEVA System Platform’s object-oriented, reusable engineering, the company can quickly and seamlessly standardize and replicate tried and true monitoring, control, and optimization strategies across multiple sites around the world.

That means new facilities can be brought online faster, operators can adopt proven workflows immediately, and best utilities management practices can be deployed consistently across the enterprise. One facility’s operational improvements become a blueprint for global performance.

This build-once-deploy-anywhere flexibility allows the company’s new SCADA platform to grow at the speed of its business, offering improved operational efficiency and more sustainable performance today, and a quicker time to market for tomorrow’s projects.

Sustainability at speed

Yes, semiconductors are resource hungry. And yet, as it happens, they are also foundational to the technologies best equipped to address the world’s resource and climate challenges. Without them, the green energy, AI, and EV revolutions halt before. Navigating that tension requires more than long-term sustainability objectives. It requires operational excellence and sustainability at speed.

^{[1] Wiseman, B., Marcil, H., & de Jong, M. (2025, April 21). Semiconductors have a big opportunity—but barriers to scale remain. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/semiconductors-have-a-big-opportunity-but-barriers-to-scale-remain
[2] James, K. (2024, July 19). The water challenge for semiconductor manufacturing: What needs to be done? World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/07/the-water-challenge-for-semiconductor-manufacturing-and-big-tech-what-needs-to-be-done/
[3] Barrett, E. (2021, June 12). Taiwan's drought is exposing just how much water chipmakers like TSMC use (and reuse). Fortune. https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-tsmc-water-usage/}