Environment

Taiwan’s energy crunch could ‘throw a wrench’ into the global semiconductor industry

Published

1 year ago

June 10, 2024

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A chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

TSMC

Taiwan, the world’s semiconductor powerhouse, is facing a power crunch — and this could spell trouble for chipmakers.

Manufacturing chips requires a lot of energy and electricity, and the government is struggling to meet the island’s energy needs.

“Concerns over potential power shortages and the deterioration of power quality and reliability could pose operational risks for the semiconductor industry,” Chen Jong-Shun, assistant research fellow at Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, told CNBC.

There were three major outages in Taiwan in the past seven years, and the island has experienced a slew of smaller disruptions in the past year.

As recently as April, in Northern Taiwan alone, multiple power shortages were recorded over three days, according to local reports.

In 2022, there were 313 power outage incidents. A big power outage that year affected more than 5 million households, while another massive blackout in 2017 hit almost 7 million households.

“Taiwan has both an energy crunch and, even more importantly, an electricity crunch,” said Joseph Webster, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center.

Electricity squeeze

More than 97% of Taiwan’s energy needs are imported, and come primarily from coal and gas. The heavy reliance on other countries renders the island vulnerable to energy supply disruptions, experts told CNBC.

While the outages are partly due to an aging grid, the electricity crunch is largely the result of Taiwan’s underpriced electricity bills, which drives up demand and leads to supply shortfalls, Webster added.

While Taiwan recently hiked electricity rates by 15% for large industrial users, the rates for residential consumption remain unchanged.

Today’s electricity bills are cheaper than what they were 20 years ago, according to Taiwan’s Economic Ministry. Meanwhile, global commodity prices have soared.

As a result, Taiwan Power Company, or Taipower, has been racking up losses. The state-owned company reported a pre-tax loss of $6.3 billion in 2023, after an even bigger loss was recorded in 2022.

“Taipower has been losing money, which also raises concerns about potential power disruptions for both the semiconductor industry and the overall Taiwanese economy,” Michelle Brophy, director of research at market intelligence platform AlphaSense.

For one, with electricity prices rising for semiconductor firms, the higher costs are expected to be passed on to consumers, according to Brophy.

Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has disclosed it will will pass on cost increases to customers, in order to protect the company’s profit margin.

Implications for the chip sector

Taiwan’s industrial consumers accounted for over 55% of its electricity consumption in 2023, according to the Atlantic Council’s Webster. These consumers, including semiconductor firms, often require constant and reliable access to electricity.

“If Taiwan is forced to ration electricity more frequently in the future due to limited supplies, its semiconductor firms will suffer,” he added.

Any energy disruption will slow down chipmaking and raise global semiconductor prices, Webster said.

“Taiwan’s electricity crunch could throw a wrench in global semiconductor markets,” he said, adding that interruptions could reverberate across the global industry.

TSMC, the world’s largest manufacturer of advanced chips, accounts for about 60% of the global foundry revenue. The company is integral in the ongoing generative AI boom, and counts tech giants like Apple and Nvidia as clients.

The global semiconductor manufacturing industry is estimated to double its market size in revenue by 2030, and is poised to consume 237 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity by then, a Greenpeace report said.

If Taiwan is forced to ration electricity more frequently in the future due to limited supplies, its semiconductor firms will suffer.

Joseph Webster

Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center

Electricity consumption from Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry is set to increase 236% between 2021 and 2030, the same report found.

“The global electricity industry has been surprised by the pace and scale of electricity demand from artificial intelligence’s data centers,” said Webster, adding that Taiwan’s future electricity consumption is subject to “considerable uncertainty.”

Taiwan’s government plans electricity supply based on the needs of a few major companies, said Chen from Chung-Hua Institution.

Still, meeting Taiwan’s energy needs is an uphill task.

“Taiwan has struggled to meet its power infrastructure goals due to land constraints, overly ambitious and rigid policies, and a lack of understanding and ability to address power shortages,” Chen added

This raises further concerns among businesses about the reliability of future power supply commitments to major tech firms.

“Power is an ongoing issue in the sector,” especially due to Taiwan’s outsized influence on the semiconductor industry, said Brophy.

Environment

IONNA and Casey’s to bring more fast charging to the US Midwest

Published

5 hours ago

October 23, 2025

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IONNA and Casey’s to bring more fast charging to the US Midwest

Charging network IONNA is partnering with Casey’s, one of the US’s largest convenience store and pizza chains, to bring DC fast charging to EV drivers across the Midwest.

Starting this year, Casey’s customers can plug into IONNA’s 400 kW charging stations while grabbing a slice or stocking up on road-trip essentials. Eight “Rechargeries” are already under construction in six states and are expected to open in 2025:

Little Rock, Arkansas
Vernon Hills, Illinois
McHenry, Illinois
Terre Haute, Indiana
Parkville, Missouri
Kearney, Missouri
Blackwell, Oklahoma
Waco, Texas

The Casey’s deal pushes IONNA past 900 charging bays in construction or operation — more than double what it had just three months ago. IONNA says the partnership will “expand,” but doesn’t provide specifics.

“This partnership with Casey’s is key to expanding our presence in America’s heartland,” said IONNA CEO Seth Cutler. “With a shared respect and commitment to delivering quality customer experience, we are pleased to add Casey’s to our growing network of partners.”

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IONNA is a joint venture backed by eight of the world’s biggest automakers – BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota – working to rapidly scale a DC fast-charging network in the US.

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Environment

Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Published

7 hours ago

October 23, 2025

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Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Google, Anthropic agree to cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

The deal, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment yet and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026.

Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips.

While competitors tout even loftier projections — OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief among them — Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

A key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.

The company’s Claude family of language models runs across Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research.

Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic “strong price-performance and efficiency.”

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a release.

Anthropic’s ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints.

According to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

Google, for its part, is leaning into the partnership.

“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a release, touting the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.

Anthropic takes a page from Palantir as AI battle with OpenAI goes global

Claude’s breakneck revenue growth

Anthropic’s escalating compute demand reflects its explosive business growth.

The company’s annual revenue run rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude powers more than 300,000 businesses — a staggering 300× increase over the past two years. The number of large customers, each contributing more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within just two months of launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest-growing product” in history.

While Google is powering Anthropic’s next phase of compute expansion, Amazon remains its most deeply embedded partner.

The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s confirmed $3 billion in equity.

Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s chief cloud provider, making its influence structural and not just financial.

Its custom-built supercomputer for Claude, known as Project Rainier, runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. That shift matters not just for speed, but for cost: Trainium avoids the premium margins of other chips, enabling more compute per dollar spent.

AWS outage ripples across internet, puts pressure on Amazon ahead of earnings

Wall Street is already seeing results.

Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimated that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first, with its contribution expected to exceed five points in the second half of 2025.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that once Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage flows directly into AWS revenue — a dynamic he believes will drive AWS growth for “many, many years.”

Google, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role. In January, the company agreed to a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion and 10% equity stake.

Critically, Anthropic’s multicloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which did not impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.

Still, Anthropic isn’t playing favorites. The company maintains control over model weights, pricing, and customer data — and has no exclusivity with any cloud provider. That neutral stance could prove key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.

WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

Environment

JB Straubel’s Redwood snags $350M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Published

7 hours ago

October 23, 2025

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JB Straubel’s Redwood snags 0M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Redwood battery storage — Photo: Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO and cofounder JB Straubel, has raised $350 million in new funding to scale its US-made battery storage systems and critical materials operations. The company is ramping up to meet surging demand from AI data centers and the clean energy sector.

The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Eclipse, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and other new strategic investors.

As global supplies tighten, the US is racing to secure domestic production of critical materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. In July, Redwood and GM signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to turn new and second-life GM batteries into energy storage systems. Redwood launched a new venture in June called Redwood Energy that repurposes both new and used EV battery packs into fast and cost-effective energy storage systems.

Redwood says large-scale battery storage is the fastest and most scalable way to enable new AI data center rollout while unlocking stranded generation capacity and stabilizing the grid. Battery storage also helps industrial facilities electrify and balance renewable energy output. The company aims to deliver a new generation of affordable, US-built energy storage systems designed to serve the grid, heavy industry, and AI data centers, reducing dependence on imported Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.

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Redwood will use the new capital to expand energy storage deployments, refining and materials production capacity, and its engineering and operations teams.

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