The Fab of 2030 is Being Designed Now: Abstracts of the AI Era

If you want to know where semiconductor fabs are heading, the UltraFacility agenda shows an insider glimpse into the direction of travel.

The abstracts for UltraFacility 2026 went through a rigorous review process, accepting only those which answer future questions from our end-users and experts. As such, the confirmed papers reflect the industry wish-list which solution providers can tap into to enable the next-generation of semiconductor facilities in the AI era.

In 2024, the semiconductor industry set a target to hit $1 trillion revenue by 2030. Now, it seems that the industry will exceed that target by the end of 2026. Growing faster than even the industry itself realised, semiconductor facilities have an unfulfilled hunger for solutions to their soaring water and energy usage.

Here are 5 trends transforming the advanced manufacturing sector in the face of the AI boom:

1. ZLD is the new normal – but nowhere near solved.

With most water-scarce semiconductor sites opting for ZLD to reduce withdrawals, major technological blockers emerge. Thermal evaporation is expensive, energy-intensive, and the industry wants to engineer its way around it.

However, the best-known practices for enabling ZLD mega-projects are still evolving:

• A presentation from FTD Solutions challenges assumptions about ZLD configurations and the boundary between reclaim systems and ultrapure water production. A top-rated abstract by our technical advisory committee, its models show that a plant’s ‘optimal’ configuration might change – sometimes dramatically.
• Meanwhile, Veolia will present a real scenario from a US-based manufacturer which has surpassed piloting and is now under construction at full scale. It will show a membrane-based process which eliminates the thermal evaporator from the ZLD flowsheet entirely, feeding directly to a crystallizer.
• Offering a complementary non-thermal brine concentration approach, the presentation from Aquafortus demonstrates treatment at over 400,000 ppm TDS (10 times saltier than seawater). An emerging player, this presentation shows how the intense requirements of semiconductor manufacturers is making room for new market entrants.

2. Resource recovery – from a niche ‘nice to have’ to mainstream strategy

With a ZLD project easily costing $500 million, manufacturers must find ways to recover value from what goes out the door. Three years ago, UltraFacility only included one resource recovery presentation on the agenda but now, the topic dominates. Solutions for recovering IPA, TMAH, and copper all feature this year:

• TMAH is worth $4,200 per metric ton, but fabs are currently pouring it down the drain. The electrolysis-based recovery system which De Nora will present has been running at full-scale while also providing reductions in power consumption and carbon footprint compared to biological treatment.
• The copper question is anchored by a GlobalFoundries presentation mapping copper mass balance across three separate waste streams simultaneously, integrating recovery, compliance, and acid reuse into a single framework. The economics – with up to 100 lbs of copper waste being produced at a single fab per day – make a straightforward business case for reuse rather than paying for disposal fees.

3. UPW continues to surprise with disruptive innovations

There is sometimes an implicit assumption that UPW is a solved, mature discipline. The UltraFacility agenda keeps puncturing that, as new innovations emerge to enable AI-era purity.

• Ovivo and Intel’s presentation on metal-free polishing technologies will answer the challenge of ‘stickiness’ – that trace metals don’t just contaminate at the point of contact but adsorb onto the internal surfaces of UPW components and then release unpredictably. A brand-new metal-free UPW polish system is now operational at full-scale, offering UPW experts the chance to benchmark against conventional approaches.
• Georg Fischer asks whether the materials used in UPW systems for decades are causing yield losses, and answers that question with on-wafer data. With implications for the next era of UPW systems, this paper will deep-dive into the impacts of PEEK, PVDF and PFA. As one of our technical reviewers put it, the research is ‘an incredible value-add to the progressive development of treatment technology.’
• Entanglement Technologies reports field deployment data from continuous VOC monitoring at a real water facility: 34 species detected, 15 of which were invisible in the original calibration. With a technology not-yet-seen at UltraFacility, it has big implications for understanding chemical signatures of contaminants.

4. End-users vs. Energy – the next major frontier

It has been made clear to us at UltraFacility that the industry is desperately in need of energy reduction solutions, and our technical advisory committee especially highlighted the untapped impact of Machine Learning (ML).

The semiconductor energy constraint is already binding, even before accounting for data center competition for power. A recent UltraFacility webinar laid out that the semiconductor industry globally consumed 20 GW in 2024 and will reach 40 GW by 2030. New power generation capacity cannot be permitted fast enough to bridge that gap, requiring fabs to cut energy intensity by 5% per wafer.

However, levers exist and will be presented by the end-users themselves across the UltraFacility program:

• Schneider Electric and Micron will present validated results from a live fab deployment harnessing ML for energy reduction. Achievements include 10% annual energy savings on compressed air and 6.5% on chilled water. What distinguishes this from a typical AI pitch is the governance wrapped around it: physics-based validation, change management, and structured measurement built into the workflow.
• Onsemi will present a different kind of lever. Engineers have long known that first-cost thinking kills good projects – the cheaper system wins the capex battle and loses the sustainability and long-term cost benefits. This presentation of lifecycle cost analysis finally gives facilities teams the methodology and the real-world data to get energy reduction projects approved.

5. The industry is amping up towards its nuclear renaissance.

We received more abstracts on electrical infrastructure than ever before, reflecting that power reliability keeps facilities directors up at night. A single unplanned outage destroys work in progress, representing millions in materials costs.

This year’s presentations will spotlight both short-term resilience and long-term energy security:

• Black & Veatch's RAM analysis talk addresses the immediate reality: a framework that translates redundancy decisions, extended equipment lead times and maintenance strategies into quantified financial risk. One of our end-user reviewers believes this approach answers ‘a fundamental problem with semiconductor fab design, that needs to be addressed’.
• Beyond the short term, the same company’s talk on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) addresses a practical roadmap: planning for new entrants, site-screening and the cost of Nuclear Regulatory Commission docketing. Nuclear is no longer a distant possibility being floated at energy conferences – it’s being planned for among facilities operators.

The semiconductor industry’s power demand cannot be met by one strategy alone. Our day 0 workshop on power will bring together discussions of grid capability, renewables, onsite generation and energy reduction in one place.

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Each year, UltraFacility presents the top-rated solutions redefining facility operations. It’s never been harder to get on the agenda: with a record number of abstracts submitted this year, we’ve had to reject more proposals than ever before – always a hard decision for the committee.

The upside: The average rating each paper received has never been so high and the impact of the technical agenda we’ll be presenting this September look assured.

Only the best abstracts got accepted – find those relevant to your role.