Drought? What Drought?
By Amy Smith, Fri., Nov. 2, 2001
Because the chip-making process requires massive volumes of water, Austin semiconductor companies (in bold below) rank among the city water/wastewater utility's biggest customers. Below is a chart of water usage by the city's top eight users. These are the city's only "industrial customers" -- so designated because they drink up 85 million gallons or more per year.
For a sense of scale, total city water usage for the charted one-year period was about 50 billion gallons -- so the three semiconductor companies represented about 6% of the city's total water usage for that period.
October 2000-September 2001
| Total (gallons) | Peak Month | ||
| Motorola | 1,553,296,100 | 150,470,300 | (Jan. 01) |
| AMD | 958,200,800 | 84,970,000 | (Dec. 00) |
| University of Texas | 542,435,600 | 66,033,100 | (Oct. 00) |
| Samsung | 492,532,400 | 46,931,600 | (June 01) |
| Reit Mgmt. Research Inc. | 183,588,100 | 18,540,200 | (Nov. 00) |
| Abbott Labs | 105,614,000 | 22,088,700 | (June 01) |
| Sematech (Consortium of semi-conductor companies) | 99,587,200 | 10,835,200 | (May 01) |
| Multilayer Tek L.P. | 95,330,100 | 19,056,300 | (Feb. 01) |
Source: City of Austin Water/Wastewater Utility
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