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

Fluorinated compounds, commonly known as forever chemicals, play a critical role in semiconductor fabrication steps such as lithography, etching, and chamber cleaning. They exhibit global warming potentials thousands of times higher than carbon dioxide and persist in the atmosphere for millennia. Yet, sustainability efforts in computer systems have primarily focused on carbon emissions alone. We introduce ForgetMeNot, a modeling tool that quantifies fluorinated compound emissions across different steps of the semiconductor manufacturing pipeline. We validate its accuracy using real-world fab data and demonstrate its utility for emission-aware hardware design. ForgetMeNot reveals how different chip characteristics affect fluorinated compound emissions, and helps datacenter operators select low-emission hardware configurations. By integrating fluorinated compound emissions into hardware manufacturing decisions, ForgetMeNot presents a more complete sustainability framework for computing systems.