Chip manufacturing is characterised by highly complex and resource-intensive production processes. In particular, front-end fabrication relies on more than 50 equipment types, around 300 chemicals, and over 1000 individual process steps. As manufacturing nodes advance, production becomes increasingly intricate, requiring more water, energy, and specialised materials to meet performance and precision requirements.
These characteristics translate directly into a substantial climate and environmental footprint. Semiconductor fabs consume a lot of energy and depend on fluorinated process gases with high global warming potentials, which account for up to 90% of direct emissions. In addition, production is embedded in water- and resource-heavy upstream supply chains.
Reducing this impact is challenging. The fragmented nature of semiconductor production, combined with stringent technical requirements and rapidly evolving process technologies, means that mitigation is unevenly distributed across manufacturing stages, firms, and technologies. As demand for chips continues to evolve and fabrication becomes more complex, emissions and energy consumption are likely to remain under upward pressure. Understanding where emissions occur, how they change over time, and which actors drive these dynamics is therefore critical.
Against this backdrop, tracking industry reporting and performance is central to obtaining a good picture of the sector's environmental and climate footprint. Some semiconductor firms are obligated to publish sustainability disclosures under corporate reporting frameworks or national stock-exchange requirements, while others report voluntarily to meet investor expectations. Many companies choose to align their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting with global norms like the GHG Protocol, an international standard for measuring and managing greenhouse gas emissions. The Protocol is an important point of reference as it constitutes the most standardised publicly available source of information on companies' emissions and energy use.
CSR reports typically measure GHG emissions in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (MTCO2E), differentiating between three categories or scopes defined in the GHG Protocol, (Hess 2024; The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Revised Edition):
It is important to note that CSR reporting comes with data that is often inconsistent and difficult to compare. The lack of transparency makes it harder to understand the real footprint.
Throughout the exercise of collecting CSR data from semiconductor manufacturers, we encountered several significant limitations, which we addressed in a dedicated section of this microsite. For example, these limitations consist of different definitions of terms and levels of granularity across companies, variability across calculation methodologies, as well as some undisclosed upstream or process-level details.
This microsite aims to increase transparency, make data gaps visible, and support better-informed discussions on how the semiconductor industry can reduce its climate and environmental impact. By gathering and updating information directly from companies' annual CSR reports, the tracker offers an accessible way to see how disclosures are evolving and where improvements are still needed. The microsite is updated annually and aims to serve as a publicly available resource presenting the most up-to-date overview of semiconductor emissions trends.
The Emission Tracker section presents all available data extracted from CSR reports published by semiconductor manufacturers in the form of interactive charts:
This microsite was developed as a continuation of the Semiconductor Emission Explorer, an interface quantitative analysis published in 2025 that visualises the evolution of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy consumption from global chip production starting from 2015. The publication also examined key problems of collecting data from publicly available CSR Reports; showing that CSR data is often inconsistent, incomplete, or difficult to compare across companies. In addition, the previous work also highlighted the importance of contextualising CSR trends with broader industry dynamics. By adding market data as a second analytical dimension, our publication helped identify both the drivers of reported emissions and energy consumption stemming from semiconductor manufacturing globally. This approach allowed for an exploration of the reasons behind observed trend developments.
The 2025 Semiconductor Emission Explorer publication provides important context for understanding emissions data from 2015 to 2023. While this microsite is based on an updated dataset that incorporates the most recent CSR disclosures from the last reporting year, it does not include the market data featured in the original publication. Readers might therefore find it useful to consult it as a companion resource, as it clarifies how companies report their emissions, factors in market dynamics, explains why data gaps occur, and what limitations affect comparability across the sector.
Our analysis is based on data published in the annual CSR reports of the largest global semiconductor manufacturers (based on production capacity) from 2015 to 2024. Prior to 2015, only a handful of companies provided information on CSR. We focus on gathering data published on the following emission indicators: direct (Scope 1), indirect (Scope 2) and upstream and downstream emissions (Scope 3) according to the GHG Protocol. To maintain consistency, we excluded chip manufacturers focused primarily on optoelectronics, such as LEDs, because their manufacturing processes differ significantly from those for logic, memory, analogue and other chip types (OECD).
We analysed chip manufacturers' reporting based on the GHG Protocol. The GHG Protocol is a standardised framework for global carbon disclosure and serves as guidance for companies and other organisations to measure and manage GHG emissions (Greenhouse Gas Protocol 2024). It covers the accounting and reporting of seven GHGs according to the Kyoto Protocol (UN Climate Change 2025): carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) (Ranganathan et al. 2004). The initiative is rooted in a multi-stakeholder partnership of businesses, non-governmental organisations and others. It was founded by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBSCD) in 1998 (World Business Council for Sustainable Development 2004). Even though the GHG Protocol itself is not a binding regulatory framework, it has been widely adopted across several industries as part of their voluntary sustainability and emissions management efforts. Furthermore, emission-heavy industries, such as aluminium and cement, partnered with the initiative to develop industry-specific calculation tools (World Business Council for Sustainable Development 2004). Additionally, some regulatory bodies, such as the European Union Emissions Trading System or the United Kingdom's GHG reporting programme, have already referenced and incorporated elements of the GHG Protocol into their regulations or standards (Department for Energy Security; European Commission).
In our original dataset used for the Semiconductor Emission Explorer publication, we considered all companies with more than 100,000 wafer shipments per month, as identified in the SEMI World Fab Forecast 2023 (SEMI World Fab Forecast). This resulted in an initial dataset of 59 companies, covering 82% of the global manufacturing capacity in 2023. For the purposes of the original publication, out of those 59 companies, usable data were available for 28 companies, covering 68% of the total global manufacturing capacity in 2023. Please consult the Annexe B in the 2025 publication for further information (Semiconductor Emission Explorer 2025).
For the purpose of this site, however, we have been able to incorporate data from one additional company, DB HiTek, compared to the 2025 publication - covering 76.4% of the total global manufacturing capacity in 2024 (SEMI World Fab Forecast, 2025). The microsite therefore draws solely on data from 29 relevant players for the following reasons:
We manually calculated the data due to missing details for specific years in Samsung's CSR reports, as excluding these gaps would have significantly affected overall trends (see table below).
Samsung, the largest manufacturer by global capacity, operates in two divisions: Device eXperience (DX), which produces end-products (e.g., TVs, washing machines and smartphones), and Device Solutions (DS), representing the chip production segment (Samsung CSR Report, 2024). Before 2020, Samsung reported aggregated CSR data for both divisions. Since 2020, they have provided separate figures for the DS division for Scope 1 and Scope 2, as well as energy consumption. Since 2022, they have also provided separate figures for Scope 3. To estimate DS-specific data for 2015–2020 for Scope 1, Scope 2 and energy consumption as well as DS-specific data for 2015–2021 for Scope 3, we used ratio-based allocation, deriving proportions from 2020–2024 division-specific data.
On average (2020–2024), DS accounted for 95,40% of direct emissions (S1), 92,07% of indirect emissions (S2) and 87,15% of energy consumption. For upstream and downstream (S3) emissions, the average for the years 2022 and 2024 was 14,29%. Using these ratios, we applied the mean values to the aggregated CSR data for direct emissions, indirect emissions and energy for the years 2015–2020 and Scope 3 emissions for the years 2015–2021:
| Electricity | Energy | Scope 1 | Scope 2 | Scope 3 | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DS | Total | % | DS | Total | % | DS | Total | % | DS | Total | % | DS | Total | % | |
| 2015 | 13.629 | 15.368 | 88.68% | 16.826 | 19.478 | 87.38% | 2.33 | 2.44 | 95.36% | 7.19 | 7.75 | 92.84% | 3.00 | 18.53 | 16.21% |
| 2016 | 14.709 | 16.587 | 88.68% | 18.203 | 21.073 | 87.38% | 2.43 | 2.55 | 95.36% | 8.40 | 9.05 | 92.84% | 1.24 | 7.65 | 16.21% |
| 2017 | 16.362 | 18.450 | 88.68% | 20.230 | 23.419 | 87.38% | 3.49 | 3.67 | 95.36% | 9.20 | 9.91 | 92.84% | 2.40 | 14.78 | 16.21% |
| 2018 | 18.231 | 20.558 | 88.68% | 22.484 | 26.028 | 87.38% | 4.63 | 4.86 | 95.36% | 9.56 | 10.30 | 92.84% | 2.58 | 15.91 | 16.21% |
| 2019 | 18.765 | 21.160 | 88.68% | 23.236 | 26.899 | 87.38% | 4.83 | 5.07 | 95.36% | 8.11 | 8.73 | 92.84% | 2.69 | 16.61 | 16.21% |
| 2020 | 19.654 | 22.916 | 85.77% | 24.556 | 29.024 | 84.61% | 5.45 | 5.73 | 95.14% | 7.55 | 9.08 | 83.11% | 2.39 | 14.73 | 16.21% |
| 2021 | 22.624 | 25.767 | 87.80% | 27.926 | 32.322 | 86.40% | 7.34 | 7.60 | 96.54% | 8.27 | 9.80 | 84.41% | 19.98 | 123.23 | 16.21% |
| 2022 | 25.249 | 28.316 | 89.17% | 30.850 | 35.177 | 87.70% | 5.72 | 5.97 | 95.75% | 8.97 | 9.08 | 98.77% | 14.76 | 124.72 | 11.84% |
| 2023 | 27.042 | 29.956 | 90.27% | 32.384 | 36.399 | 88.97% | 3.52 | 3.73 | 94.35% | 9.46 | 9.56 | 98.93% | 18.09 | 119.73 | 15.11% |
| 2024 | 28.996 | 32.083 | 90.38% | 34.592 | 38.772 | 89.22% | 4.49 | 4.72 | 95.01% | 10.06 | 10.16 | 98.96% | 22.90 | 105.61 | 21.68% |
| Avg | 88.68% | 87.38% | 95.36% | 92.84% | 16.21% | ||||||||||
| Previously | 88.25% | 86.92% | 95.45% | 91.31% | 13.47% | ||||||||||
In any other case, we did not estimate values for missing data points over the years. The interactive chart "Quality of reporting" transparently depicts missing data points for specific companies. Please refer to the attached Excel sheet for further details. For full details on the methodology we used, please refer to the Semiconductor Emission Explorer publication.
Our data brief explores how the global AI boom, by driving up high-bandwidth memory chip demand, may be causing a renewed increase in direct emissions from semiconductor manufacturing.