In today’s edition of our newsletter, SCSP’s David Lin and Nyah Stewart unpack insights from our recent collaboration with Lux Capital, where we teamed up to run one of their immersive Riskgaming scenarios. The exercise forced participants to navigate the tradeoffs between advancing America’s national tech ambitions and managing the local realities of finite resources like water and energy.
When we think about America’s technological competitiveness, we tend to focus on federal funding, private capital, and breakthrough innovations. Yet there’s an even more critical and fundamental resource that doesn’t always make headlines —and it’s not energy: it’s water.
Just as electricity powers our digital infrastructure, water is becoming equally central to AI progress and tech development and, by extension, to America’s geopolitical strength. The semiconductor industry, now racing to meet the rising computational demands of advanced AI models, faces a stark truth: like other AI-infrastructure, such as data centers, semiconductor facilities are extremely resource-intensive.
Semiconductor manufacturing requires ultrapure water—thousands of times cleaner than drinking water—to rinse away every trace of residue, pollutant, or mineral from silicon wafers that could damage delicate chip structures or impair performance. Producing 1,000 gallons of this kind of water takes 1,400 to 1,500 gallons of municipal water, purified through intensive deionization and reverse osmosis. Additionally, a single semiconductor manufacturing facility can consume up to 10 million gallons of ultrapure water per day, roughly equivalent to the daily water usage of 33,000 households.
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