I grew up on a subtropical island formed six million years ago in an ongoing collision of tectonic plates, the Pacific and the Eurasian, which have experienced intense seismic activity ever since. The island’s subtropical atmospheric condition, exposure to typhoons and heavy rains, as well as active geological features has deeply affected my elemental thinking with water. Through an environmental kin study¹ of the drought experienced in Hsinchu, Taiwan, I analyze two scales of particular waters related to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)²: molecular waters and the hydrosocial cycle of TSMC. The environmental kin studies are formed through attunement, listening practices, and noticing at many interconnected scales of relations to people and lands. Against the ubiquity of the case-study approach, in Kanngieser’s words, the kin study is a practice of amplifying self-determination and self-representation, ways of being and knowing that often go unacknowledged by historical narration. This essay attempts to bring together the political and analytical aspects of scale while moving across scalar registers to unpack the socio-technological construction of the drought in Taiwan of 2021. It also considers the global semiconductor supply chain as extractive forces towards local waters and will aim to reintroduce the scale structure of reading waters. As Kate Crawford writes in Atlas of AI, “to see the full supply chains of AI requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place.”³
While my study of two scales of particular waters exemplifies the intimate entanglements of the Touqian River in northern Taiwan, the kin study repositions those stories, making both writer and consumer of such histories attentive to the complexities of place on the local scale.

In 2021, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) located in Hsinchu, Taiwan was threatened by the worst drought in decades. Commonly three typhoons each year contribute precipitation in Taiwan, but the drought was considered “special” in 2021; no typhoon passed the island to bring much-needed rain to the reservoirs. Gripped by drought, the Taiwanese government ordered industries to cut water use and halted irrigation, affecting around a fifth of Taiwan’s irrigated land. The government flew planes and burned chemicals to seed clouds above its reservoirs. Around the same period, it built a mobile seawater desalination plant in Hsinchu, where TSMC’s headquarters are located. TSMC, the world’s largest foundry, controls 84% of the market for chips with the smallest, most efficient circuits. The company needs 156,000 tons daily, roughly one-third of all water used in Taiwan’s key science parks.⁴  During the drought, TSMC hauled truckloads of water around the clock from other areas. According to Hsu Huang-Hsiung, a climate change expert at the Taiwanese government-funded think tank Academia Sinica, “Taiwan has been suffering from a significant decrease in the number of rainy days each year since the 1960s.”⁵ Ironically, one could say that the profit growth of TSMC is much more predictable than the rainfall in Taiwan. In the case of the global chip shortage in 2021, the drought evidences the wider detriment to global supply chains. At the same time, the climate crisis has revealed the high water demands of chip production and how water shortages affect production capability.

Even the process of weather forecasting itself has high energy demands. Advanced weather prediction models require immense computational power to analyze vast amounts of meteorological data and run complex simulations. As Tung-Hui Hu points out,“the cloud is a resource-intensive, extractive technology that converts water and electricity into computational power, leaving a sizable amount of environmental damage that it then displaces from sight.”⁶ Nearly 99% of weather observation data that supercomputers receive today come from satellites, with about 90% of these observations being assimilated into computer weather models using complex algorithms. These algorithms, known as numerical weather prediction models, convert observational data into a numerical representation of the atmosphere in time to make weather predictions.⁷ Climate science largely relies on models; however, the complexity and unpredictability of the atmospheric climate system, these models must be continually involved. The global AI demand may be accountable for 4.2 – 6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of 4–6 billion cubic meters in Denmark, and half of that of the United Kingdom.⁸ Through this lens, computation is both a victim of and a contributor to the climate crisis. Climate computing, the AI industry, and global telecommunications rely on TSMC for the ultra-high precision of its chip. Most likely, the meteorological satellites and supercomputers are powered by TSMC microchips, too. This environmental kin study focuses on TSMC as part of the supply chain capitalism of AI and reveals its social and environmental impacts on the local water networks.

On February 24, 2021, the day after TSMC started tanking operations, US President Joe Biden held up a single semiconductor during remarks made before he signed an executive order on the nation’s economy. Biden called the semiconductor a “twenty-first-century horseshoe nail.”⁹ The announcement deemed semiconductors as the strategic assets in the new Cold War era. Unlike the scientific hydrologic cycle in which human activity is absent, the hydrosocial cycle of TSMC sheds light on the intervention of state power in water governance. In what follows I consider how this drought led to a climate of crisis that only legitimized the intense water demand of semiconductor manufacture. However, in this event, the global semiconductor supply chain is not only disrupted by the climate crisis, but also affected by deteriorating relations between China and the US. A combination of national security concerns and economic benefits obscures the logistical network of connections that extracts and distributes Earth’s resources for chip manufacturing. 

Molecular Waters

Water is commonly described as a “resource,” a term which gives bodies of water a fixed material identity that allows it to be managed in abstraction. As geographer Jamie Linton has put it, “modern water is the presumption that any and all waters can be and should be considered apart from their social and ecological relations and reduced to an abstract quantity.” As a result, “all water is made known as an abstract, isomorphic, measurable quantity that may be reduced to its fundamental unit – a molecule of H2O – and represented as the substance that flows through the hydrological cycle.”¹⁰ The reduction of plural waters to a homogeneous chemical compound strips bodies of water of their specificity. Derived from anthropocentric attempts to translate nature into a mathematical formula, the scientific representation of water as H2O obscures the ecological, social, and political dimensions of bodies of water. In other words, the scientific representation of water as H2O engenders a visible blindness that conceals the multiplicity of waters.

From ultra-purified water, which contains only H2O as standard, to local water conflicts between industrial, agricultural, and domestic waters in Hsinchu, the crisis of modern water is not only a matter of dwindling supplies. The capitalist economization of water and water services is built on the presupposition of the latent scarcity of water. The logic of scarcity in nature is maintained by the accepted definition of water as a commodity. Nature always takes the blame as the principal “cause” of water scarcity rather than the political and economic powers that harness it. In fact, the constitution of this drought involved three interrelated practices: meteorological modeling, demand forecasting and a modern water regulatory “game” influenced by contemporary neoliberal perspectives and national security concerns. As the environmentalist Vandana Shiva has argued, how water is conceptualized and represented is instrumental in determining who gains access to it and on what terms.¹¹

Domesticated and materially engineered water as an economic resource not only transforms water into quantifiable assets, it also makes it susceptible to scarcity. Nowadays the source of raw water for TSMC comes from upstream tributaries of the Touqian River. The River’s farthest source is Syakaro and Yebakan Creek, which begin in the Hsuehshan Range (Syakaro is the name of the Formosan Michelia tree in Atayal language). However, the primary source of domestic water comes from the midstream of the Touqian River, which has a lower quality than the industrial water upstream. The Hsinchu Science Park, where TSMC foundries are located, administers the territory upstream of the Touqian River for manufacturing operations. However, 40% of the domestic water that comes from midstream is contaminated by household sewage, as well as industrial and medical wastewater.

For semiconductors, ultra-purified water is the holy water for the manufacturing process. Water molecules, a single atom of oxygen linked with two hydrogen atoms, have been instrumentalized in the flawless manufacturing process. By removing sodium, potassium, bacteria, organic compounds, metallic impurities, and anionic compounds, the filter system erases the stories of the waters to complete the conceptual abstraction of the chemical formula H2O. As a human-made product, ultra-purified water’s social and historical ingredients have been left out but the combination of oxygen and hydrogen. The element of water is carrier and connector. Its carrier nature is utilized as a cleansing agent in semiconductor fabrication. Those positively and negatively charged parts of the pure water molecules attract the unwanted materials for chip production. It holds nothing but pure water molecules and their economic identity.

The Hydrosocial Cycle of TSMC

Formed in the mid-1990s, the Hsinchu Science Park (HSIP) is home to more than 400 technology companies that are mainly involved in the semiconductor, computer, telecommunication and optoelectronics industries. This technological convergence has remained central to subsequent governments in what researcher Yu Jun Tsao has called an “HSIP-centered hydraulic order.”¹² This prioritization is due to the economic efficiency of semiconductor manufacturing, evidence of which can be found in its influence on global supply chains which have advanced the monopoly of local waters by state operators and capitalist entities. Crucially, the increasing national security concerns of the global semiconductor supply chain and several invasion threats from China have made it even harder for the people in Hsinchu to question the “HSIP-centered Hydraulic Order”. 

Since the 1990s, the ‘Global Semiconductor Supply Chain-centered Hydraulic Order’ has been supported by the Taiwanese government and media. The 1990s were the years when the word ‘globalization’ first became commonly used. As historian Chris Miller has observed, “though the chip industry had relied on international production and assembly since the earliest days of Fairchild Semiconductor, Taiwan had deliberately inserted itself into semiconductor supply chains since the 1960s, as a strategy to provide jobs, acquire advanced technology, and to strengthen its security relationship with the United States.”¹³ Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, who, for several decades, had worked with Texas Instruments, was first hired by the government of the Republic of China to lead the Industrial Technology Research Institute in 1985. Two years later, TSMC was founded with the backing of the government with tax benefits to ensure the company had the capital for investment. Miller further explains how, “from day one, TSMC wasn’t really a private business; it was a project of the Taiwanese state.”¹⁴ TSMC and its partners account for nearly 40% of Taiwan’s exports and are a pillar of the national economy. This also explains why the central government took over agricultural water and used it in the service of the Science Park. 

The water infrastructure of the Science Park is built upon the agriculture drainage system in Hsinchu. This means that the Science Park took over the administration of the local waters from the farmers whose rice fields are sustained by the water from the Zhudong Canal. Zhudong Canal is the main hydraulic structure across Hsinchu City and County. The upstream tributaries of the Touqian River converge at Zhudong and the canal system diverts the water from the Shang-ping River to the rice fields, covering a distance of some 21 kilometers. Since the mid-1990s, the conflicts between agricultural and industrial waters have intensified “drought by drought.”¹⁵ The 2021 drought was not the first time that the government decided to block the irrigation of farmlands. This response can be observed in the fallow periods in 2002, 2015, and 2020 during which agricultural water rights were widely reduced and restricted.¹⁶ Even though the government provides fallow compensation to the farmers, the tenant farmers and up-and-downstream agricultural supply chain are excluded from the compensation plan. The series of droughts and fallows weaken the structure of the agricultural water and hand over the water to the industrial water.

Since 1996, industrial companies in the Science Park that manufacture materials such as semiconductors and liquid crystal displays, have formed industrial unions which pressure the government to loosen up regulations and energy policies in order to serve enterprises in obtaining water resources more smoothly. The allocation of water resources is increasingly decided by state representatives working closely with industrial and agricultural executives. As a result, the standing of the HSIP-centered Hydraulic Order was steadily consolidated through this period. Fallow compensation plans show that the government changed the list to prioritize the provision of water at the Science Park for manufacturers. The farmers’ water rights are undermined by this dominant hydraulic order which is controlled by the state. However, the early plans of the Hsinchu Science Park didn’t take into account the accelerated demand for industrial water. Consequently, the original water supply dispatching system and its infrastructure proved insufficient in coping with the surge in water demand between 2001 and 2005, leading to increasing water conflicts. Nevertheless, the daily water demand of the HSIP has grown since 2013 from approximately 120,000 tons per day to 150,000 tons in 2021, which is double the water demand of 1998. Furthermore, the Hsinchu Boashan 2nm plant, which will start its production in 2025, will require 98,000 tons of water per day. Studying the socio-technological construction of drought in 2021 reveals that the HSIP-centered Hydraulic Order has expanded to a global semiconductor supply chain-centered Hydraulic Order. 

On the February 17, 2023, Forbes highlighted the global semiconductor supply chain with the report titled, “The World’s Most Vulnerable Supply Chain Impacts All Supply Chains.” The supply chain analyst Steve Banker elaborates on the risk to the chip supply chain centered in Taiwan because of TSMC.¹⁷ Miller pointed out that no other facet of the global economy is so dependent on so few firms as global semiconductor supply chain, “chips from Taiwan provide 37% of the world’s new computing power each year. Two Korean companies produce 44% of the world’s memory chips. The Dutch company ASML builds 100% of the world’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, without which cutting-edge chips are simply impossible to make.”¹⁸ If any of these networks is disrupted, the global supply chains are on hold. Furthermore, the mineral extractions for global semiconductor supply chains can not be overlooked. According to an Nvidia corporation report, TSMC manufactured its graphics processing unit (GPU) in Taiwan using Tantalum from Kazakhstan, Tin from China, Tungsten from Brazil, and gold from Colombia, among others.¹⁹ Earth’s resources, labor, and capital are mobilized in fragmented but linked economic systems, creating complex, interconnected extractive machines where specialization and interdependence coexist on a continent-crossing scale. Analyzing the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain-centered Hydraulic Order, we can read how the extractive forces from the supply chain manage the local waters. From the perspective of the Taiwanese government, TSMC’s dominant role in the global supply chain is a ‘silicon’ shield that protects the nation. The environmental cost and water monopolies could be covered by economic prosperity and national security concerns. In this essay, I focussed on the local water conflicts caused by chip design and manufacturing, which is only one section of the supply chain capitalism of AI. Crawford reminds us that “the life cycle of an AI system from birth to death has many fractal supply chains: exploitation of human labor and natural resources and massive concentrations of corporate and geopolitical power.”²⁰ All along these chains and its life cycle across continents, Taiwan is thus not an isolated example of where social inequalities, particularly regarding access to water, are manifested.

Footnotes

1. Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd, “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study,” History and Theory, Vol. 59, No. 3 (September 2020): 385–393: p. 391. ↑

2. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest chip manufacturer in Taiwan, founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, who worked at Texas Instruments for several decades and helped build America’s early chip industry. Today, TSMC makes about 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. ↑

3. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI. Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 38. ↑

4. Cheng Ting-Fang, “TSMC tackles Taiwan drought with plant to reuse water for chips,” Nikkei Asia, April 22, 2021, <https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-tackles-Taiwan-drought-with-plant-to-reuse-water-for-chips#:~:text=TAIPEI%20%2D%2D%20Taiwan%20Semiconductor%20Manufacturing,tackle%20Taiwan's%20crippling%20water%20shortage.> (accessed July 25, 2024). ↑

5.  Cindy Sui, “Why the world should pay attention to Taiwan’s drought,” BBC Asia, April 20, 2021, <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56798308> (accessed 25 July 2024). ↑

6. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), p. 146. ↑

7. Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). ↑

8. Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam and Shaolei Ren, “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models” (unpublished paper, University of California, Riverside and University of Texas at Arlington, 2023). ↑

9. President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden at Signing of an Executive Order on Supply Chains,” Washington DC: The White House, February 24, 2021, <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/24/remarks-by-president-biden-at-signing-of-an-executive-order-on-supply-chains/> (accessed July 25, 2024). ↑

10. Jamie Linton, What is Water: The History of a Modern Abstraction (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), p. 14 ↑

11. Shiva takes two water war statements as examples. One is the statement of the Vice president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, who in 1995 claimed that, “if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” Shiva argues that these wars are both paradigm wars—conflicts over how we perceive and experience water—and traditional wars, fought with guns and grenades. See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002), p. ix. A further example of this debate is Jim Yardley, “For Texas Now, Water, Not Oil, is Liquid Gold,” New York Times, April 16, 2001, <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/16/us/for-texas-now-water-and-not-oil-is-liquid-gold.html> (accessed July 25, 2024). ↑

12. Yu Jun Tsao, From Agrarianism to Technology Industrialism: A Study on the Post- 1990s HISP-centered Hydraulic Order (unpublished master’s thesis, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, 2021), p. 1. ↑

13. Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022), p. 163. ↑

14. Ibid. ↑

15. According to Researcher Tsao Yu Jun’s data, from 1996, the water conflicts between agricultural and industrial waters often occurred during the low water period. The Council of Agriculture announced fallow and only the farmers who own the farmland could receive fallow compensation. It further leads to the conflicts between the local farmers in Hsinchu and the Science Park. See Yu Jun Tsao, From Agrarianism to Technology Industrialism, p. 53. ↑

16. Tsao Yu Jun studies three fallows in areas irrigated by the Touqian River in 2002, 2015 and 2020 as three key moments in which the central government took control of water sources for agricultural production. In March 2022, in response to the Council of Agriculture cutting off the irrigation water without warning, farmers protested in Zhudong. Previous droughts, such as the drought in 2015, the affected the agricultural sector is not only in Hsinchu but also included the neighboring regions, for example, Miaoli and Taoyuan. In 2020, the announcement of fallow after the formal restructuring of the Farmland Water Conservancy Association showed the agricultural waters in Hsinchu is controlled by the central government administration. See Yu Jun Tsao, From Agrarianism to Technology Industrialism, p. 77. ↑

17. As Miller elaborates, “a typical chip might be designed with blueprint prints from the Japanese-owned UK-based company called ARM, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When the design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan which buys ultra-pure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit, and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies one Dutch, one Japanese, and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer” (Miller, Chip War, p. xxiv). See also Steve Banker, “The World’s Most Vulnerable Supply Chain Impacts All Supply Chains,” Forbes, February 17, 2023, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2023/02/17/the-worlds-most-vulnerable-supply-chain-impacts-all-supply-chains/> (accessed July 25, 2024). ↑

18. Unlike oil, which can be bought from many countries, our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points (Miller, Chip War, p. xxv). See also Banker, “The World’s Most Vulnerable Supply Chain Impacts All Supply Chains.” ↑

19. “Conflict Minerals Report of NVIDIA Corporation,” December 31, 2022, <https://fintel.io/doc/sec-nvidia-corp-1045810-ex101-2023-april-26-19473-799> (accessed July 26, 2024). ↑

20.  Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, p. 32. ↑