TSMC has signed a 30-year power purchase agreement for 100% of the electricity produced by the Hai Long offshore wind project, locking in more than 1 gigawatt of capacity across three sites in the Taiwan Strait. The deal with Canada-based Northland Power, announced April 30, lands as Taiwan's grid absorbs the loss of one-third of its usual liquefied natural gas supply after Iranian drone strikes damaged Qatari facilities in March 2026. TSMC's chip fabs already consumed nearly 10% of Taiwan's total electricity in 2023, a figure S&P Global expects to climb toward 25% by 2030.
Hai Long's turbines, supplied by Siemens Gamesa, each carry a 14-megawatt capacity and 108-meter blades. The wind farms began feeding Taiwan's grid in 2025 and are scheduled to reach full operation in 2027, with enough output to power the equivalent of more than 1 million Taiwanese households. For TSMC, the contract is the third major wind deal in six years and the most ambitious by duration.
The chipmaker previously signed a 2020 agreement with Denmark's Ørsted for 920 megawatts from the Greater Changhua offshore wind farm, which is set to become fully operational later in 2026. A 2021 deal with Germany's WPD covers more than 1 gigawatt of additional onshore and offshore wind capacity. Stacked together, these contracts represent the backbone of TSMC's path to 60% renewable energy across its global operations by 2030 and 100% by 2040.
Key facts
- 01TSMC signed a 30-year power purchase agreement covering 100% of the Hai Long offshore wind project's output, more than 1 gigawatt across three sites.
- 02Hai Long's wind farms began feeding Taiwan's grid in 2025 and are scheduled to be fully operational by 2027, with capacity to power over 1 million households.
- 03TSMC consumed nearly 10% of Taiwan's electricity in 2023, a share S&P Global expects to approach 25% by 2030 as AI chip demand rises.
- 04Taiwan lost one-third of its usual LNG supply after Iranian drone strikes hit Qatari facilities in March 2026; natural gas plants generate roughly 50% of the island's electricity.
- 05TSMC also holds a 2020 deal with Ørsted for 920 megawatts from Greater Changhua and a 2021 deal with WPD for more than 1 gigawatt of additional wind capacity.
The urgency is structural. Taiwan imports nearly 97% of its overall energy needs, according to the Global Taiwan Institute, and natural gas plants supply roughly half its electricity. The island typically holds just two weeks of fuel in reserve, a thin buffer that the Qatar disruption exposed in real time.
“TSMC's energy needs hit nearly 10% of Taiwan's total electricity in 2023 and could reach almost 25% by 2030 as the chipmaker scales AI manufacturing.”— Jaeden Schafer
Taiwan's Vice Minister of Economic Affairs said at a May 6 energy forum that the government had secured enough oil and gas supplies to operate normally through August and possibly September, after tapping alternative suppliers in Australia and the United States. That patches the immediate gap but does nothing for the structural problem: AI chip manufacturing keeps drawing more power per generation, and TSMC keeps building more of it.
President Lai Ching-te's administration is responding on two tracks. It is moving to restart shuttered nuclear plants while accelerating renewables, with a target of 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity available to developers by 2035. The Hai Long agreement effectively pre-sells a meaningful chunk of that pipeline to a single buyer.
That single-buyer dynamic is the part worth watching. When one customer signs 30-year offtake on 100% of a gigawatt-scale project, project finance gets easier and developers gain confidence to bid on the next round of seabed leases. It also means TSMC is increasingly setting the tempo of Taiwan's energy transition, not just consuming its output.
The competitive frame is straightforward. TSMC's 2030 share of Taiwan's electricity, projected near 25%, would put a single private company in a position no utility regulator anywhere has comfortably accommodated. Samsung and Intel face nothing comparable on their home grids, partly because South Korea and the United States are larger systems and partly because neither competitor is concentrated in one country the way TSMC is in Taiwan.
There are real caveats. Offshore wind projects in the Taiwan Strait have faced delays from typhoons, supply-chain bottlenecks for foundation steel, and grid-interconnection queues. Hai Long's 2027 full-operation date assumes execution holds; the energy that TSMC has contracted does not exist on the grid in full yet. And renewable intermittency does not match the 24/7 load profile of an EUV fab without significant storage or firm backup, which Taiwan still buys mostly as imported gas.
TSMC's wind buildout is best read as the AI supply chain quietly internalizing its own energy risk. The chipmaker cannot meaningfully grow capacity to meet AI demand from Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and the hyperscalers without securing power that is both abundant and politically defensible at home. Signing 30-year offtake on Taiwanese wind solves both problems at once, and it tells the rest of the industry that the bottleneck on AI compute over the next decade may not be silicon — it may be the megawatts behind it.
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