How we’re working to advance carbon-aware semiconductor manufacturing

By Joe Palazzo, Technical Program Manager, Net Zero and Environmental Footprinting

Modern digital life—from streaming videos to using AI—runs on semiconductor chips, but manufacturing them requires immense amounts of electricity and potent greenhouse gases. With annual industry emissions on track to exceed 277 million metric tons of CO₂e¹ by 2030, reducing Google’s hardware footprint across our consumer devices and data centers means helping decarbonize chipmaking. Yet for many years, companies like Google lacked the data needed to pinpoint their chips’ carbon hotspots, since chipmakers couldn't share proprietary process details without risking their competitive edge.

To help solve this issue, Google partnered across the industry to support semiconductor research. Today, we’re sharing what we’ve learned in the process of forging this industry partnership in our new white paper, Empowering Carbon-Aware Manufacturing in the Semiconductor Industry. With this paper, we aim to demystify chipmaking emissions and propose a path for the industry to consider carbon alongside traditional semiconductor design pillars of power, performance, area, and cost.

This work builds on our previously shared work on Plastic-Free Packaging Design, Consumer Hardware Carbon Reduction, and Recycled Materials, reinforcing that progress moves far faster when our industry channels collective resources into shared solutions. We believe true transformation will happen when carbon-aware practices become the standard, and we hope our new paper is a helpful step toward more sustainable semiconductors.