ForgetMeNot: Understanding and Modeling the Impact of Forever Chemicals Toward Sustainable Large-Scale Computing

Abstract

Fluorinated compounds, often referred to as forever chemicals, are critical in various steps of semiconductor fabrication like lithography, etching, chamber cleaning, and others. Forever chemical emissions can exhibit global warming potentials thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide and persist in the atmosphere for millennia. Despite their severe impact, most sustainability works in computer systems have focused on carbon emissions alone. We address this gap by introducing ForgetMeNot, a modeling tool that quantifies fluorinated compound emissions by integrating fabrication facility-specific practices and hardware specifications, and validate its accuracy using real-world emission data from fabrication facilities. We show how ForgetMeNot can enable fabrication facilities to optimize design and material usage decisions for emission reduction and provide researchers with a methodology to calibrate emission estimates for hardware designs. When ForgetMeNot is applied to analyze emissions for manufacturing CPUs, DRAM, and storage, it illustrates how hardware generations, lithography techniques, and capacities impact fluorinated compound emissions. Finally, we demonstrate how datacenter operators can assemble low-emission servers while balancing performance demands. By factoring in fluorinated emissions into manufacturing decisions, ForgetMeNot paves the way for building more sustainable systems.