As the world's largest wafer foundry factory, Taiwan's electricity operation consumes a lot of power, accounting for about 9% of Taiwan's total power consumption. In order to effectively reduce operational costs and achieve its sustainable development goals, NTU launched a project called "EUV Dynamic Energy Saving Program" in September 2025, with the purpose of the project being to significantly reduce the power consumption of the ultraviolet (EUV) exposure machine known as high power consumption. Based on the latest published results, this energy measure has shown significant results.
According to the report of Tom’s Hardware, TEK has successfully achieved a major breakthrough in energy use efficiency by strengthening its crystalline factory automation capabilities and combining with advanced control systems. These control systems can dynamically adjust the energy use of tools based on real-time production needs. The surprising result of this effort is that the maximum power consumption of the EUV exposure machine has been successfully reduced by 44%. The company pointed out that this not only achieves more efficient operations, but also ensures that production, quality or yield will not be affected in any way.
In fact, TEK has been committed to improving the energy efficiency of its EUV exposure machines for many years. As early as mid-2024, the company announced that it had successfully reduced the power consumption of its EUV exposure machines by 24%. However, no specific implementation was disclosed at that time. Therefore, EUV dynamic energy planning, which started in September 2025, has received special attention, and it is expected that Taiwan Electric's Fab 15B, 18A and 18B will all start to promote. NTD is aiming to fully deploy this project to all its EUV exposure machines around the world by the end of 2025.
In addition, the company also plans to plan this session and set it as the baseline requirement for all future new crystal plant facilities. For example, the second phase of Fab 21 and subsequent assembly operations in Arizona will force this dynamic energy standard. According to the telco electricity estimate, from now until 2030, the EUV dynamic energy project will bring a total of 190 million degrees of electricity and reduce carbon emissions by 101,000 tons. From the perspective of economic benefits, these power banks are estimated to save approximately US$22.44 million (about NT$672 million) if calculated at a rate of NT$3.78 per dent.
Although Telco has not disclosed the specific technical details of the EUV dynamic energy planning, it is certain that Telco is studying the possibility of applying similar dynamic energy control mechanisms to other equipment, including deep ultraviolet (DUV) exposure machines, and other equipment outside the microfilm department. According to the estimation, the plan may involve the implementation of a suitable power adjustment using real-time operating conditions. For example, when the wafer is not yet queued for immediate processing, the EUV exposure machine can intelligently pause operation or switch to low power states instead of continuing to maintain full power operation. To achieve such detailed energy management, real-time data exchange of the entire dust-free room and optimization of the process and production process levels are required.
reported that although 190 million degrees of savings can be seen by 2030, the power reserved for the overall power consumption of the NTD cannot be considered a large-scale reduction. According to SemiVision data, the total power consumption of NT$25.55 billion in 2024, of which 21.94 billion in DETAIL comes from non-renewable energy and 3.61 billion in DETAIL comes from renewable energy. In addition, only 46.1% of the total power consumed by NT$ comes from actual wafer-rodge tools, while the remaining 53.9% is consumed in various support systems. This shows that in the pursuit of continuous operation, NTU still has a wide space to explore in reducing the power consumption of the support system.