By Chris Librie
Jul 18, 2023

SEMICON West 2023 is now in the rear-view mirror, yet its impact will be felt for many years to come. For the first time in my experience as a sustainability professional, I witnessed industry leaders coming to grips with an inherent contradiction: the promise of semiconductors marching toward becoming a $1 trillion market, while simultaneously creating a path to Net Zero carbon emissions. The industry’s growth and carbon footprint are invariably linked, presenting an enormous challenge that we must meet as an industry.

Applied Materials President and CEO Gary Dickerson presented a keynote titled, “A Collaborative Pathway to Net Zero,” where he delivered a call to action for the entire semiconductor industry to get serious about collaborating to execute real, achievable plans to reach Net Zero in carbon emissions. Gary shared Applied’s playbook for Net Zero – a framework we’ve been developing for more than a year. Significantly, that playbook goes beyond our own Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, which come from running the company and from the energy we purchase. In fact, Applied has made great progress in reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which Gary shared and you can read more about in our latest Sustainability Report.

However, the bulk of Gary’s talk was about Applied’s Scope 3 emissions, the upstream emissions from our supply chain and the downstream emissions from the use of our products by customers. Since these are not in our direct control, you might say that’s someone else’s problem. But Applied agrees with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) framework, which says companies must reduce their Scope 3 emissions to achieve Net Zero. After all, these are over 99% of Applied’s footprint.

It’s not an easy task. Gary showed that as we grow industry revenue, we grow carbon emissions. In fact, as the new AI and IoT computing era promises to double semiconductor revenue by around 2030, carbon emissions are forecast to quadruple. If we don’t collaborate to bend that curve as semiconductors become more pervasive throughout the economy and society, our industry won’t become more sustainable.