[HN Gopher] Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. c...
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Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory
race heats up
Author : thunderbong
Score : 382 points
Date : 2021-09-28 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| robotnikman wrote:
| I pass by there every day on my way to work. Based on all the
| construction equipment I saw around the campus I figured the new
| fabs were going to start being built soon.
|
| It also still amazes me how huge the campus is
| kd913 wrote:
| Doesn't chip making a lot of water, most of it in Arizona is fed
| by Lake Mead?
|
| The same reservoir that is at 30% capacity, with acute water
| shortages and with 4 years of increased precipitation necessary
| for an adequate refill.
|
| We are adding a chip making facility which needs a lot of water
| here?
|
| This sounds like a recipe for disaster whenever there is a period
| of water stress which appears to be occurring in that region
| significantly more frequently.
|
| The more I think about it, the more US infra/urban planning makes
| absolutely 0 sense to me. Seems to more closely follow tax breaks
| and tax income than necessarily smart resource allocation.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The more I think about it, the more US infra/urban planning
| makes absolutely 0 sense to me. Seems to more closely follow
| tax breaks and tax income than necessarily smart resource
| allocation.
|
| An issue that doesn't just plague the US. Here in the EU, we
| have similar issues with governments from local city councils
| to federal governments doing anything they can to poach
| businesses. Tax breaks, subventions, lax law enforcement (e.g.
| Ireland vs GDPR)... it's madness. And the problem is, you can't
| simply go ahead and centralize that planning because you always
| have to be afraid of a political party taking over and
| completely abusing that power in the next legislative period.
| new_guy wrote:
| Probably a good time to remind people that this entire planet
| is 70% water. Water shortage shouldn't be a thing, but greed
| and short sightedness is.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Probably a good time to remind people that only 3% of that is
| fresh water. Fresh water shortage is definitely a thing.
| coldacid wrote:
| Desalinization is a thing, and one that's often overlooked
| because the people holding the purse strings are generally
| cheap-asses.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Desalinization is an extremely energy intensive process
| for the amount of water we use. Eventually we probably
| will produce so much energy that that's less of a
| concern, but at the moment we're having plenty of issues
| getting our fossil fuel usages lowered without adding
| Desalinization to our civilization's requirements.
| standardUser wrote:
| Desalination can be achieved using the cheapest energy
| source there is, solar.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Desalination requires high energy inputs. It also creates
| highly salted water as waste (some gets cleaned, other
| water gets i cleaned) that is difficult to deal with.
| Given cheap energy and somewhere to store the waste
| water, it could be viable.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Water shortage shouldn't be a thing, but greed and short
| sightedness is.
|
| Yup. We'll never ever run out of water. Whatever problems
| arise, there are solutions for them. People just don't want
| to pay. They want it cheap and convenient.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I don't want to be priced out of the water market the same
| way I got priced out of the housing market.
|
| But then again, sacrifices must be made to the profit gods,
| it is the way.
|
| Sigh.
| rmah wrote:
| That will only happen if you live in a region that is
| arid or semi-arid. Most of the US is literally
| overflowing with fresh water and almost all the expense
| for water is related to simply piping it to you or
| cleaning up the wastewater you create. For the vast
| majority of people in the USA, water is very cheap.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Water should be a basic human right. No human should ever
| be priced out. Whatever infrastructure is needed to bring
| potable water to people, the government should pay for
| it. The whole point of governments is to pay for basic
| infrastructure like this. Taxes ought to fund something
| other than politician corruption.
|
| Corporations on the other hand have no human rights at
| all. They can and should be priced out.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > The whole point of governments is to pay for basic
| infrastructure like this.
|
| That's a pretty steep oversimplification there.
| Governments usually exist to promote justice and rule-of-
| law, keep people safe from internal and external threats
| to their physical safety, and to protect individual
| freedoms and liberty.
|
| Paying for infrastructure is only a small part of all of
| that.
| brewdad wrote:
| Wouldn't ensuring a reliable supply of safe drinking
| water fall under keeping people safe from threats to
| their physical safety?
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Technically, no. But safe drinking water does fall under
| other categories of "promoting the general welfare", so
| that's not to say it shouldn't be under government's
| purview.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Everything you cited is part of the common good. So is
| infrastructure. Governments exist to pay for this stuff,
| _especially_ the unprofitable endeavors that benefit
| everyone.
|
| They essentially rob their population in order to do it.
| If a government isn't paying, it's corrupt.
| thrashh wrote:
| It's not greed and shortsightedness.
|
| It's logistics. Logistics is expensive af
| adminscoffee wrote:
| very good point about the water, side note for anyone reading
| this. we really ought to invest heavily in permaculture
| (restoring eco-systems). anyone who doesn't know exactly what i
| am talking about please check out the this "tech". it is a lot
| cooler than it sounds. the process can restore underground
| watersheds in the dessert and bring back forests. it's a
| science, but can be learned outside of a university on your own
| if you don't want to do more schooling, at first i thought it
| was some hippy dippy stuff but it has fangs
| hosh wrote:
| I live in Phoenix and have heard some of the local discourse
| about this.
|
| Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill
| it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational.
|
| Intel has invested in both recycling water as well as
| partnering with organizations on water conservation and ecology
| projects.
|
| Arizona does draw water from the Colorado River, but among the
| four states, Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights. We
| get what is left over after Colorado, California, and Utah get
| their legal share.
|
| The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial
| farmers. (The Hopi people practice dryland agriculture and so
| don't irrigate at all; most everyone else irrigates using
| inefficient and destructive land management practices).
| Aquifers here have been draining, and it has been a big issue.
| Farmers are already getting restricted on water use this year
| (despite an unusually wet monsoon season), and water
| restrictions has not hit residential users yet. It is on the
| radar for policymakers though.
|
| Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is
| seismically stable. They each had to invest an enormous amount
| in the more seismically active Taiwan and California, and it
| gets more sensitive the smaller the chips get.
|
| If we want to conserve more water, the most effective way is to
| change commercial farming practices. Fabs have already invested
| a lot to reducing ongoing water use.
|
| For an example of what I mean by better land management
| practices in regards to water: https://youtu.be/-8nqnOcoLqE
| j_walter wrote:
| >Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you
| fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay
| operational.
|
| This is just not true. The amount of cooling required for
| fabs is extremely significant and without major evaporative
| cooling you can't get it. With evaporative cooling comes
| water loss...and not a small amount of it, especially in the
| desert. You can do a lot to recycle water that is used in the
| process, but not the water loss using in cooling.
|
| This is also evident in the environmental goals set forth by
| Intel...they talk about returning 100% water to the
| environment. Well evaporation is back to the environment...
| spaztastical wrote:
| That is not how that works. Las vegas is full of pools and
| fountains... INDOORS. they retain the moisture in their
| enclosed ecosystems. We have ACs that pull water out of the
| air, and we also know how to make buildings.
| j_walter wrote:
| You can't just have AC when it comes to industrial
| cooling. You have to have chillers connected to cooling
| towers and those work on evaporative cooling. Feel free
| to debate all day on this though...I literally run the
| department in charge of it at a semiconductor
| manufacturing plant.
|
| Here is proof, it's just some of the cooling towers at
| Intel's current site in Chandler: https://www.google.com/
| maps/@33.2451403,-111.8923691,135m/da...
| tinco wrote:
| So is the problem then that you can't push enough heat
| into the air, so you need to evaporate water? Sounds like
| a nice input to a desalination plant. Does this mean you
| agree that Arizona is a strange choice?
|
| If they need so much water, does that mean you agree that
| j_walter wrote:
| Absolutely it's a strange choice. From a power
| perspective it can make sense since solar works very
| well, but from a water perspective it's a very strange
| choice. Cheap land is also a very big factor. TSMC
| purchased over a thousand acres. Where else in the US can
| you find a thousand acres so near a populous area and so
| easily accessible off a major freeway like that?
|
| Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state for the
| 2020 election had more to do with the choice than
| anything I think.
| paulmd wrote:
| the west coast also has a pretty low incidence of natural
| disasters. The east coast regularly gets bad hurricanes,
| the northeast and midwest get really bad snowstorms,
| plains states regularly get tornadoes, etc, but on the
| west coast if you pick a region that's not geologically
| active then there aren't really a ton of huge natural
| disasters that occur regularly.
|
| of course I guess there's wildfires now too, but that's
| not really an Arizona thing either.
|
| of course you're not wrong about companies often being
| lured by the particular states that are willing to offer
| them massive tax breaks, in some cases even to places
| like Texas that do get hurricanes on an occasional basis.
| And that doesn't always work out well in the end like
| with the Texas power outages that seem to be occurring
| more and more frequently, there are a LOT of fabs in
| Dallas/etc that are having to deal with widespread power
| outages multiple times a year.
|
| (you're the expert here but it seems like the generator
| capacity usually isn't sufficient to continue normal
| operation of the fab, it's more to maintain
| containment/purity of the feedstock and you still lose
| wafers that were in-process at the time? that's the
| impression I've gotten at least)
| softfalcon wrote:
| You're right, fabs need more water than a swimming pool,
| maybe a big swimming pool.
|
| The fabs in Arizona are likely not going to be the main
| cause of water shortages there. How do I know this? Cause
| when Motorola had its massive (and inefficient) fabs
| running there in the 90's-00's and there were water
| shortages, they kept running just fine off their on premise
| reserves.
|
| Modern fabs are even more efficient with water usage.
|
| I know this because I have visited the old fabs and they
| are quite good at re-using and capturing the water since
| it's inside an air controlled bunker. Modern (and older)
| fabs aren't open to air, so water loss is minimal.
| j_walter wrote:
| The latest 300mm fabs use 10-50X the power of what the
| old 8" fabs used (I know this for a fact...). That power
| gets turned into heat and that heat has to be removed. I
| work at an "inefficient" 200mm factory that has pretty
| good internal recycling (~65%)...we still use 600K
| gallons per day.
|
| A single state of the art EUV tool uses ~2MW of
| power...<0.1% of that gets to the wafer. Most of the rest
| of that is lost to heat...and that heat goes where?
| softfalcon wrote:
| Definitely not arguing that the heat doesn't need to go
| somewhere. You're absolutely right.
|
| All I remember is family saying they had effective means
| for recycling the water without losing it in these boiler
| chambers.
|
| I'm no expert, but they were saying significantly higher
| efficiency than 65%.
| nealabq wrote:
| An acre-foot is about 325K gallons, and an irrigated farm
| uses 1 or 2 acre-feet per acre per year. So the
| "inefficient" fab you work at uses less than 2 acre-
| feet/day, or maybe 700 per year. About what a 500-acre
| farm uses.
|
| Arizona has about 1.3 million acres under irrigation. So
| 2,500 similar fabs would use all the irrigation water.
|
| It's a lot of water, but maybe not a deal breaker?
| hosh wrote:
| Seeing those numbers, I wonder how much that affects the
| local microclimate, as that adds a lot of moisture and
| heat into the air. And if there are ways to add plant
| life in the surrounding areas that could benefit from it,
| and from which people can obtain a yield.
|
| I'm not so sure about the hotter months, but during the
| colder months, it can potentially be used for
| greenhouses, or for when temperature dips during
| nighttimes. Lots of tropical plants want hotter, moist
| air and will die from frost.
| rland wrote:
| Right, I think the gp comment is referring to fabs being
| impacted by water shortages, not fabs causing water
| shortages.
|
| Although if push comes to shove I guess all of this can
| be solved trivially by not growing ridiculous water
| intensive crops and not having golf courses and stuff in
| the middle of the desert.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| This is super interesting. Since you seem to have inside
| knowledge can you compare it to agriculture?
|
| For example: the google machine tells me that cotton
| production in AZ uses somewhere in the neighborhood of
| 2.5-3.5 acre ft. water per acre. Would a large fab consume
| a comparable amount of water?
|
| 1 acre = 43.5k sq ft 1 acre foot = 325k gallons
| j_walter wrote:
| In this case I can't compare it to agriculture. I don't
| think growing food in a desert is a good idea either.
|
| The Intel site in Portland, OR uses ~2 Billion gallons of
| water per year. They claim they are bringing enough
| recycle capacity to save about half that.
|
| https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-
| forest/2017/08/intel_wate...
| rayiner wrote:
| That's not much. The average family of 4 in Arizona uses
| about 325,000 gallons a year. So a billion gallons is
| equivalent to 3,000 families, or a very small town.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| If seismic stability was the primary concern, why not choose
| a state like Minnesota? (lowest seismic activity in the US)
| Is it tax / local governments + seismic stability?
| icemelt8 wrote:
| Excellent informative reply.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Interesting relevent article came out from Bloomberg
| yesterday about Arizona water authority helping boost new
| more efficient and cheaper drip tech:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-
| micro...
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is
| seismically stable
|
| There are a lot of places in the US that are at least as
| seismically stable and also have more abundant water. I
| suspect the choice of Arizona has more to do with tax
| incentives and the fact that fabs already exist there (and
| thus there is an experienced workforce).
| spaztastical wrote:
| and those places have hurricanes or tornadoes
| da_chicken wrote:
| > The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the
| commercial farmers.
|
| And farming has been booming in Arizona. I lived there about
| 10 years ago and even then there were a lot of complaints
| about all the tree farms (almonds, etc.) that were showing up
| in Arizona. Massive water consumption and virtually
| impossible to be sustainable in the desert.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| The irony is that with current incentives, it's a self-
| reinforcing cycle. Nuts have a huge return on investment,
| so nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water,
| so they plant more trees, etc etc.
| hosh wrote:
| What's also ironic is that people can grow nut trees in
| arid land at a smallholder scale. Folks in the
| permies.com forum talk about chucking nuts randomly, and
| the ones that survive to grow on their own are more
| drought-tolerant.
|
| If you are not trying to force greater yield in order to
| squeeze out profit, the nut trees can do well to yield
| enough for people to have their fair share.
|
| When done as part of a practice that involves
| diversifying crops, the entire smallhold is far more
| resilient to any number of external pressure, including
| climate, pests, market crashes, etc.
| jkestner wrote:
| Distributed nut farming is cool, and would solve my
| dilemma as a voracious nut eater. I cut out almonds for
| the amount of water they suck up in California, but
| probably every nut is problematic.
|
| Too bad resilience against future problems loses to
| maximizing profits, so all the resources are capital-
| efficiently extracted from one location before moving on.
| Even if I buy local, it's likely that it's farmed at a
| damaging scale. I'm guessing that sustainable farming,
| crop rotations, etc have fewer externalities.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| > nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water
|
| (x) doubt
|
| If they actually can pay for "very expensive water" i.e.
| water at the rates that residential/commercial users pay,
| then fair play to them. But from what I heard, they are
| only profitable by paying near-zero (orders of magnitudes
| less than other users).
| xxpor wrote:
| What's the rough residential rate in AZ? Here in Seattle
| (obviously a MUCH different situation wrt water
| availability) I pay $6.96 per CCF (748.052 US gal, 3400
| L). Even if every tree used an entire CCF over a season,
| that'd still be trivial compared to the amount of nuts
| you'd get (I assume)
| brewdad wrote:
| It's been almost 20 years but when I lived in Phoenix
| (and had a lawn) my water bill was about $25 a month. Now
| in the PNW, using a similar amount of water, my water
| bill is about $100 a month.
|
| Water is heavily subsidized in AZ. There is little
| incentive to conserve it.
| xxpor wrote:
| Are you actually spending that much on _water_ though? Or
| water and sewer? Sewer is _a lot_ (~$18 per CCF, iirc)
| more expensive. Farmers wouldn 't have to pay that. Don't
| disagree about water in the SW being stupidly subsidized
| of course.
| brewdad wrote:
| Yes sewer is a lot but I was paying for sewer in both
| places. Maybe Phoenix wasn't bothering to put any money
| away for future repairs.
| xxpor wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me. I also think Seattle's sewer fees
| are probably relatively high because of the upgrades
| they've had to do to the whole system to avoid dumping so
| much untreated waste straight into the sound.
| Jensson wrote:
| California farmers use 40 trillion litres of water per
| year. At your rate that would be roughly 80 billion
| dollars a year or so. California's entire agriculture
| sector is worth around 50 billion a year dollars. So just
| the cost of water would be way more than all their
| earnings. And then you have to pay for equipment, pay for
| workers etc.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think their water privileges are not going away.
|
| After Covid and all the disruption of international
| trade, self-sufficiency in food production will be
| considered more important than before.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| With privileges come responsibilities; like forgoing the
| profit motive for an activity that must be so heavily
| subsidized by gov't influence.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Almonds in California are reported to use about 2.6
| billion liters of water and the industry is worth about
| $5 billion. So still not viable at $6.96/CCF, but maybe
| more viable than the average for Californian crops.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Allow me to rephrase in a way that is more accurate but
| not substantially more insightful: "Nuts tend to be far
| more profitable than other crops, allowing nut farmers to
| expand their operations as escalating water prices
| squeeze out lower-margin water users."
| Galaxity wrote:
| I don't understand why people keep saying Lake Mead when
| referring to water use. Technically the CAP canal come from
| Lake Havasu. But it's all from the Colorado River.
|
| Regardless it's not the primary source of water. The majority
| of water for the Phoenix area comes from central Arizona
| rivers. The Salt river project, the Salt river and Verde, etc.
| You can see the big reservoirs to the east of Phoenix and from
| groundwater.
| NortySpock wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Dq04GpzRZ0g?t=472
|
| Asianometry did a breakdown on water usage of chip fabs in
| Taiwan and Arizona, including noting Arizona's state-wide water
| management plan, and pointing out that land-use wise, a chip
| plant makes more money per acre (gross revenue, and in property
| taxes) than other commercial or industrial or farming zones. A
| gallon of water makes more money in a chip plant than in an
| almond tree. (Especially since it can be cleaned and reused,
| rather than evaporated as in a tree.)
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Wouldn't it make just as much money in a spot with no water
| usage concerns?
| NortySpock wrote:
| Sure, but where else in the country has no hurricanes, no
| tornados, and no earthquakes? A dry desert on top of a
| continental plate is a relatively disaster-free zone.
|
| When insuring your multi-billion-dollar fab... apparently
| zero disasters is a plus.
| kd913 wrote:
| Do you really think there will be zero disasters in
| Arizona in the coming years?
|
| Sure the plant may survive a water crisis, how about it's
| power grid? How about the local communities and states
| who will run out of water?
|
| Over the next 20 years, I wouldn't rank Arizona highly
| for stability.
| ktistec wrote:
| The average golf course in Arizona uses 450,000 gallons a day
| according to [1]. According to [2], this means we're talking
| about 4-8 golf courses per day. There are over 200 golf courses
| near Phoenix, so your concern is legitimate the water usage
| here is marginal relative to the economic impact. As other
| commenters have pointed out, if you really want to impact water
| issues, there are far more efficient ways to tackle them.
|
| [1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-
| environme...
|
| [2] https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/25055/Ultrapure-water-
| sem...
| ckastner wrote:
| > _Doesn 't chip making a lot of water_
|
| Can anyone share an insight on why this is the case? (I'm
| assuming it is true because I've heard the claim quite often on
| HN.)
|
| It's not really obvious to me where water is consumed during
| the fabrication process. It doesn't end up in the chips, so
| where does it go? If it were just used for cooling, it would be
| returned somewhere.
| mwint wrote:
| There's a lot of chemistry as part of the chip making
| process. Water is often an ingredient mixed with concentrated
| nasty stuff to get less concentrated, but still nasty stuff.
| Then they do something with it (like wash a part), but you
| can't then effectively recover all the water.
|
| This is how it was explained to me by someone who works
| directly on the process; I could be butchering the
| explanation.
| deelowe wrote:
| This is my understanding as well. There's a lot of washing
| of components involved in the process. Cleanliness is
| crucial to chip manufacturing so wafers are constantly
| being washed. In newer lithographies, water is a crucial
| part of the the photo etching process itself (X-Ray IIRC).
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Re use of water in lithography: it became necessary at 90
| nm level (~2004), so it is not exactly new. Water is used
| to bend light. (Isn't it amazing?)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_lithography
|
| While this use requires extreme purity, it is not a big
| use in terms of volume.
| ksec wrote:
| As mentioned, they are used to clean / wash off chemicals
| from wafers. And not just any water, but Ultrapure Water [1],
| it is an actual terminology, not marketing speak.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrapure_water
| cletus wrote:
| The general perception of Arizona is that of a desert. But did
| you know that Arizona has ski resorts? The Rocky Mountains
| extend into Arizona and they get snow in the winter. >90% of
| Arizona's water comes from snow melt.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Intel isn't stupid; they will want a return on their
| investment. I would love to see the internal whitepaper or
| whatever that summarized the decision.
| wibagusto wrote:
| It's not about being stupid it's about their self-interests
| versus all the folks who live in Arizona and depend on the
| water supply.
|
| Remember intel's modus operandi is increasing profits for
| shareholders.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Thank you for informing hacker news that companies want to
| make a profit. Now. Do you have some evidence that intel is
| harming people? The water is almost completely recycled
| ZetaZero wrote:
| The "average" chip fab uses about as much water as 3 "average"
| irrigated center pivot farms. If the fab land was previously
| irrigated farm land, this will be a net savings of water.
|
| Math:
|
| 130 acres at 0.25 inches of water = 10 million gallons of
| water. Done once per week for 3 farms = 4.3m gallons per day.
|
| Average chip fab uses 2-4 million gallons per day
| wibagusto wrote:
| 2-4 million gallons per day is a lot of water to piss away
| for some chips that go out of fashion in 5 years.
| ryan93 wrote:
| The water doesn't disappear. It stays h2o
| lazide wrote:
| Just now in a place/form (underground or in the sky, and
| if underground usually contaminated) that makes it
| economically far less valuable - maybe even useless.
|
| If the economics of water didn't matter, we'd be happy to
| build nuke power plants and run condensers all day to get
| it, but the reality is the marginal cost of water
| determines the feasibility of vast sections of economic
| activity, and that determines the fortunes (or not) of
| people and their leaders in concrete ways.
|
| This is also true of other natural resources of course -
| oil, iron, coal, uranium, etc.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Intel recycles and stores the water. They even
| remineralize and put back into the city water system.
| they don't dump it into the dessert.
| lazide wrote:
| They don't do that for a large portion of the water -
| they dance around that with weasel words (like 'return to
| the environment'), aka evaporate. You can see they are
| constantly weaseling out of giving anything concrete that
| someone could accuse them of lying, or could use to point
| out the actual impacts, and stating 'a lot' can be
| reclaimed from evaporation for instance in the building -
| while ignoring cooling, which is evaporative at these
| scales [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/202
| 1/06/04/why...]
|
| It's pretty typical corporate green washing of a real
| problem that other folks will end up having in diffuse,
| hard to pin on them ways, that with some nudging on the
| right officials will never be pinned on them. In my
| experience, anyway.
| jhgb wrote:
| Pretty much any facility capable of manufacturing
| semiconductor components has been very busy for the past
| few years -- Intel even had to resurrect 22nm chips at some
| time. Why do you assume that this will "go out of fashion
| in 5 years"? Historically this seems extremely unlikely. If
| anything, tens of millions of people going out of poverty
| every year are going to be consuming even more chips.
| adventured wrote:
| And every year 80+ million people come of age such that
| they become electronics consumers, buying smartphones,
| laptops and so on. A billion new electronics consumers
| every ~12 years. The world is going to need a lot more
| chip manufacturing capacity over the next few decades.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Well, it's a market, so the corporations with cashflow stand at
| the front of the queue. There is no other way of organizing
| this in our late stage capitalist shitscape...
|
| It's unfortunate that poor people need to starve or freeze to
| death to keep billionaires "alive", but that's what our
| genocidal, fellow citizens have been voting for..
| ryan93 wrote:
| Please try and actually contribute to the discussion. In
| reality countries without many billionaires have way more
| issues with water supply and heating.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Like you, who didn't engage with what I actually said?
|
| Please don't waste people's time, thank you.
| jmartrican wrote:
| From what I understand they will try to recycle the water.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/why-intel-tsmc-are-building-...
| ovi256 wrote:
| > Seems to more closely follow tax breaks and tax income
|
| It follows feasibility, AFAIK. All new manufacturing is in
| Southern US states because they're the ones that allow new
| plants to be built. The others tie projects down in long,
| expensive, non-successful environmental studies.
|
| At this point, it's easier to bring water to the desert
| (Arizona) than get approval for a manufacturing facility in a
| non-desert.
| runako wrote:
| > All new manufacturing is in Southern US states because
| they're the ones that allow new plants to be built.
|
| New manufacturing is built in the South because that's where
| wages are low, worker protections are weaker, and there is
| less union activity. Companies will essentially tell you this
| in their PR about opening new plants.
| kesselvon wrote:
| It's the lack of unions and cheap wages. Southern states are
| famously lax on workers rights and business regulations.
| rendang wrote:
| Arizona is not a Southern state, and while it is a right-
| to-work state, the minimum wage there is higher than in
| most of the country.
| syshum wrote:
| There are many business friendly regions in the US with
| plenty of water. The mid-West for example. is pretty business
| friendly. KY, IN, TN, AR, MO, WV, and others all have plenty
| of water, and more business friendly laws than AZ
| IgorPartola wrote:
| A thousand years from now your last sentence will be a
| proverb if unknown origin.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Israel, UAE, and the Saudis have figured it out, you really
| think the US can't?
|
| Arizona is close to the ocean and has plenty of sunlight.
| Solar power + desalination will make this a non-issue in
| the next 40 years.
| lazide wrote:
| UAE and the Saudis are desperately diversifying their
| economies and the royal families of those countries are
| desperately extracting wealth from those nations because
| they know their current approaches are fundamentally
| economically unviable without very high margin oil - and
| the market value, margins, and quantity available of that
| oil long term is highly suspect.
|
| Israel is also investing heavily in knowledge work and
| other high margin industries, as well as investing
| outside the country, in an attempt to get high margin,
| high value income to offset the dangerous economic risks
| they have, in part due to limited and expensive water -
| and which for very strong and fundamental religious
| reasons still gives a very, very strong incentive for
| them to stay and stay functional. Israel in particular
| has a history of wars and armed conflict around the
| Jordan River (November 1964 to May 1967 and others).
|
| There is a saying in the West - Whiskey is for drinkin',
| water is for fightin' - and it is very apparent how true
| it is if you watch how things develop over time. Water is
| life in the desert.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. I am saying that tax
| incentives will always create artificial conditions such
| that it'll be cheaper to bring the mountain to Muhammad
| than Muhammad to the mountain (or ship a pair of sneakers
| half way a cross the world than to make them locally, or
| to build a water using plant in the desert than by the
| ocean).
|
| Globally centralized allocation of resources would solve
| this, but that's not feasible for a whole number of
| reasons, so instead it's every desert for themselves.
| enkid wrote:
| It's more about seismic stability from what I've read.
| Arizona has much less severe weather than basically anywhere
| in the US.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Intel has built fabs in Arizona for a long time, this isn't a
| new thing. They do this because of seismic stability and a
| lack of severe weather. Water isn't a huge concern because
| they can internally recycle most of it.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| vs. somewhere like Ohio? It is hard to believe moderate
| snowfall would override environmental externalities such as
| cooling costs and water use.
| bsder wrote:
| Salt is _BAD_.
|
| Sodium contamination messes up the threshold voltages of
| transistors.
|
| And the Northeast uses salt everywhere for snow and ice
| control and removal.
| brewdad wrote:
| A thunderstorm will wreak havoc on a fab. A single, power
| blip lasting less a second can ruin whatever chips were
| being processed. At a minimum there will need to be
| additional testing done to ensure there is no hidden
| damage.
|
| The thunderstorms that central AZ gets are extremely
| isolated and basically only happen for about 6 weeks a
| year.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Don't they have any backup power to cover short blips ?
| Sure their power draw is massive, but given the potential
| loses one would exect sufficiently beefy and expensive
| backups in place so that a burned out generator in a
| power plant or tree on a line does not cost you billions.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You would basically need to isolate yourself from the
| grid to be immune to any blips...it takes a while for a
| backup to come on line and even things out.
| avs733 wrote:
| And power from palos verde nuclear power plant
| sitkack wrote:
| Not challenging you, but I'd love to see some hard numbers
| on this. Like what is the total volume of water, recycle
| rate and. discharge rate and intake rate over a year.
|
| Is it low enough to truck the water in?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Here is what I can find off hand:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-
| shorta...
|
| > Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will
| restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It's
| nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it
| cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it
| used in 2020. It has its own water treatment plant at its
| Ocotillo campus in Chandler that's similar to a municipal
| plant. There's also a "brine reduction facility," a
| public-private partnership with the city of Chandler,
| that brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel's wastewater a
| day back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the
| treated water again, and the rest is sent to replenish
| groundwater sources or be used by surrounding
| communities.
|
| I'm not sure what 95% is based on, and it seems like they
| can't reuse it all, but other clients can (e.g. it isn't
| suitable for cleaning machines, but is ok to drink).
| sitkack wrote:
| Thanks, I appreciate it.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| I'd argue there are plenty of other places in the US that
| fit that bill, but Intel having built fabs in Arizona for a
| long time is an important point on its own. Because of
| local history that's where expertise for running a fab
| exists, so they'll have a better supply of workers if they
| keep building fabs in Arizona than trying it out somewhere
| new.
| bserge wrote:
| Can they create a water pipeline from elsewhere? Crazy, but not
| that far out. Oil and gas is transported this way.
| solarhoma wrote:
| Society pays significantly more for a gallon of oil than
| water. Water can cost less than a cent in some
| municipalities. Building a pipeline would increase that cost
| 100x easily
| pwarner wrote:
| you use a lot more water than oil, maybe 100x? I think 100
| gallons / person / day is not crazy for water, and I hope you
| don't use that much oil, maybe a gallon a day?
| eCa wrote:
| Not far out at all. The list of the world's longest
| tunnels[1] is filled with water tunnels.
|
| Added: They are of course short whem compared to pipelines,
| but still.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_tunnels
| tyleo wrote:
| Anecdotal but I have a friend who is an engineer in water
| treatment and he said pipelines aren't a silver bullet for
| two reasons:
|
| 1. They are leaky so you end up paying more for the same
| amount of water
|
| 2. Wherever you are buying the water from (the source of the
| pipeline) knows their water is valuable and can charge more
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Also future weather patterns are hard to predict. What if
| 20 years from now a place who needs water today is getting
| a ton of rain?
| uptown wrote:
| Reverse the flow?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Assuming your pipeline or canal is gravity driven, that
| could be hard.
| lazide wrote:
| It may also be economically unviable. Phoenix is around
| 1000 ft AGL, and much of the rest of Arizona that is
| populated is higher (Tucson 2300, Prescott ~5k, and
| Flagstaff almost 7k ft above sea level).
|
| Someone above was quoting CCF/HCF (Centrum Cubic Feet, or
| 100ft^3 of water or 748 gallons), which is a customary
| way to measure water volume in many utilities, and noting
| ~ $6.89 per CCF I believe. I did some random googling and
| ran across [https://www.tucsonaz.gov/water/residential-
| rates-and-monthly...], which shows a connection charge of
| ~ $12
|
| Which shows that the average Tucson resident seems to be
| paying less then $5/ccf right now - discounting
| connection fee- with 'high use' (~ 60 CCF, the top
| bracket they list), around $10/ccf.
|
| 1 ccf being 748 gallons, and each gallon weighing 8.34
| lbs means you're getting 6238 lbs of water for less than
| $5 if you're a typical Tucson resident, and for ~ $10 if
| you're a high use resident.
|
| Lifting water from ~ sea level to the 2300 ft AGL level
| takes energy (in a conservation of energy sense,
| regardless of efficiency). Specifically, approx 27,176
| joules per gallon (yeah sorry) to lift in this case, or
| 20,327,648 joules per CCF, or in 'American' raw energy
| terms 5.65kwh.
|
| Properly sized electric motors are around 90 percent
| efficient, with the best possible about 97%. Large
| centrifugal pumps, properly sized, can hit up to 93%.
|
| Combined, that means in theory we could pump water uphill
| at, at best, 90% efficiency, and assuming no losses to
| friction in the pipes (which would be notable over the
| distances we're talking about, but is too complex to
| guesstimate here, but feel free to check out
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction_loss),
|
| So, if we pump in energy at 90% efficiency, we need 7.38
| kwh of energy to get that water from sea level to Tucson
| - not counting cleaning or treating the water,
| infrastructure maintenance/piping, friction losses moving
| it over that distance, losses due to leaks, etc.
|
| Tucson has cheap electricity by California Standards (my
| typical price per kwh is ~ $.45, there are a lot of
| misleading numbers out there), and though I see .12/kwh,
| CA says .24 and that is blatantly false. Even so, if we
| use that number .12, it would add $1, literally if all we
| were doing was taking perfectly great water and just
| pumping it to Tucson, with no need for pipes, or any
| other infrastructure.
|
| That may not sound like much, but for a typical Tucson
| resident that would increase their bills by 20%. High
| users less as a percentage, but still over 10%.
|
| When you add in the major infrastructure building and
| maintenance costs (which probably swamp the energy
| costs), you're looking at 50% or more increase. If you
| add in acquisition of drinkable water from somewhere
| closer than Oregon (which bringing it up and over
| multiple mountain ranges is going to be fun), also even
| more of an increase.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| California electricity is generally cheap in the sense
| that you don't need to use much of it (the big metro
| areas with the most people have very mild climates). I
| imagine AC is important in a place like Tucson.
|
| The fact that pumping water uphill is so expensive is why
| most of the water in the mountain west comes from the
| Rockies (where it flows down hill), though the exhaustion
| of the rocky mountain glaciers (due to global warming or
| whatever one believes is the reason) means that all that
| water built up over millions of years is coming to an
| end.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup, should require only a few adjustments.
|
| Over here (NL) they're looking into repurposing the
| existing natural gas network to transport hydrogen
| instead. I mean we're years away from removing the use of
| natural gas entirely, but the idea is there.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Given how small hydrogen atoms are, causing all kinds of
| leaks even in purpose built equipment & that hydrogen
| fires are invisible in sunlight I'm skeptical.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Wherever you are buying the water from (the source of
| the pipeline) knows their water is valuable and can charge
| more_
|
| Less "knows their water is valuable" than "knows you have a
| massive, immovable infrastructure investment they have a
| natural monopoly with respect to." Pricing piped non-traded
| commodities are complicated negotiations.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| CME now offers water futures for some regions of
| California.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Arizona is famously good at water management. They require a
| 100 year plan and are basically completely non-dependent on the
| ever-shrinking Colorado River. If any state would have a plan
| for recycling and make sure this plan is done appropriately
| it's AZ.
| ethanbond wrote:
| ... what?
|
| The US southwest is entering its first ever Tier 1 water
| shortage next year, meaning Arizona will have reduced supply
| equivalent to 1.2MM people's annual consumption. No reason to
| believe we don't go straight from here to Tier 2, onto Tier
| 3, and so on. Nature doesn't provide enough water _in a
| desert_ to be running sprawling metropolises and even more
| massive farms and graze land - especially water-intensive
| cotton farms.
|
| https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/drought-water-
| shortage...
|
| > Already, water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two
| major reservoirs that store the Colorado River's water, are
| down to 34% of their capacity and may soon drop too low to
| spin the hydroelectric turbines in their dams. Some smaller
| reservoirs began emergency releases in summer 2021 to prop up
| water levels in these lakes.
|
| https://westernresourceadvocates.org/projects/arizona-
| colora...
|
| > The Tier 1 shortage will reduce water to the Central
| Arizona Project by 320,000 acre-feet (enough water to supply
| 1.2 million individuals for a year).
|
| Maybe Arizona is losing this battle as gracefully as anyone
| could, but they are very much losing this battle.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Contrary to common belief, cities do not really need
| gigantic amounts of water. You take a shower, water goes
| down the drain, you can reclaim most of it if you want to.
| Don't allow irrigated lawns, reclaim gray water, urban
| water needs drop to a trickle. AZ is a leader in this
| space.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Oh good, cities can be more water-efficient than people
| commonly believe.
|
| Guess it's solved!
|
| Pay no attention to the drying rivers, emptying
| reservoirs, and depleting aquifers. If cities are more
| efficient per capita than people commonly believe, we can
| probably just grow our cities arbitrarily and our cotton
| farms and golf courses even more so.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Industrial and urban use cases can be very water resource
| friendly. Sure, maybe we shouldn't grow almonds in the
| desert. But that's not what's being discussed here.
| ethanbond wrote:
| My point is that saying "Arizona is among the best at
| driving itself into water depletion" is not a
| satisfactory answer to "Arizona is driving itself into
| water depletion."
| skybrian wrote:
| Is gray water reuse happening at scale?
| adventured wrote:
| > Nature doesn't provide enough water in a desert to be
| running sprawling metropolises
|
| It sure does. Nature created us. We build desalination
| plants and pipelines. Humans are amazing.
|
| There's no reason Arizona can't work with California to
| fund a bunch of desalination plants along the coast near
| San Diego (which already has relevant expertise at it).
| It's something like 120 miles from the ocean to Arizona's
| border, a quite solvable problem if an arrangement can be
| made with California.
|
| Alternatively the Gulf of California is 50 miles away.
| Arizona can do a deal with Mexico. Mexico would agree to
| that instantly. See:
|
| May 2021 "ACCIONA will build and operate a desalination
| plant in the municipality of Los Cabos, in Baja California
| (Mexico). The project has an overall budget of EUR134.5
| million."
|
| https://www.acciona.com/updates/news/acciona-build-
| operate-c...
| thehappypm wrote:
| Nobody would ever pump water into Arizona from the coast.
| That's basically running hydro plants in reverse.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I believe the user is saying that AZ planned ahead to end
| the necessity of using too much CAP water, which would mean
| that the Colorado River declaration won't devastate their
| industry/ag. Reading some of the articles on its water
| authority website seems to bear this out, but certainly a
| lot depends on good management of their renewable sources
| and how strictly new construction like Intel's is held to
| water reclamation standards (Intel is claiming to be a net
| positive contributor to the water supply.)
| https://new.azwater.gov/
| kirjav wrote:
| I am not sure having a giant aqueduct diverting water from
| Colorado River counts as "completely non-dependent".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project
| dcchambers wrote:
| Wishful thinking, but would be nice if Intel could take over
| that Foxconn plant in Wisconsin that has been a complete
| failure. There's 1180 cubic miles (1299318214239334 gallons) of
| fresh water right there in Lake Michigan.
| nabla9 wrote:
| You are not wrong, but having access to people with right
| experience and companies that supply the products and services
| for chip manufacture chips is more important. Seismic stability
| is another benefit.
|
| They have to spend more on recycling and cleaning the water
| than in other places. In 2020 Intel cleaned up and returned 95
| percent of the freshwater it used in Arizona. They have their
| own water treatment plats and public-private partnerships for
| water purification that purify Intel's wastewater back to
| drinking standard.
|
| https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2021/manufacturing/Intel...
| subsubzero wrote:
| And yet you have the east coast(north east in my example) which
| is extremely lush and has 0 water issues and most companies are
| building these large sites in western water poor areas, intel -
| arizona phab, tesla - nevada gigafactory, facebook, datacenter
| southern new mexico.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The east coast gets hit by several hurricanes each year, some
| of which result in disasters and states of emergency being
| declared and cause billions of dollars worth of damage.
| willcipriano wrote:
| North east isn't that bad, that's mostly the south east.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are at least a few devastating storms in the
| Northeast each decade. Even the ones that aren't
| completely devastating can impact sensitive production
| equipment.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| Microchips are a more strategic resource than water.
|
| I would not be surprised if even using tanker caravans to bring
| water from Utah is an option for chip production.
| phreeza wrote:
| Surely water is more strategically important than chips? It's
| just that chips are scarcer and thus easier to deny an enemy.
| If an enemy had the choice to deny one of the two resources,
| water would be the better strategic choice.
| FredPret wrote:
| No way, if water gets really scarce, the price will go up,
| and two things will happen:
|
| 1. many frivolous uses will go away - swimming pools,
| spray-and-pray agricultural irrigation
|
| 2. new sources will become viable - like desalination
|
| Ultimately we live on a planet replete with water, it's
| just uneconomical to purify most of it for use at current
| rates. The same is not true of microchips.
| g_sch wrote:
| Markets aren't going to fix everything. You know what
| else desalination requires a lot of? Energy, which
| currently comes largely from nonrenewable carbon-
| intensive fuel sources. Can we simply spend more money to
| bring renewable energy sources online? It's unclear,
| because in addition to being pretty expensive, it raises
| questions of resource extraction (lithium for batteries,
| rare earth minerals for wind turbines) and land use (wind
| and solar farms take up a lot of space). And while we're
| spending all that money, we're presumably deciding not to
| spend it on other stuff, like other types of critical
| infrastructure or social programs.
|
| At some point it becomes simpler to address this problem
| at the starting point rather than assuming the market
| will automatically fix any downstream issues.
| lazide wrote:
| The problem is (and why market driven or markets as a
| major component countries do tend to do better over the
| long run, near as we can tell), is that there IS no
| 'starting point', and downstream/upstream is often
| oversimplifying.
|
| Everything interacts with everything else in a way far to
| complex to fully understand for any one person or
| organization. The most we can do is pick something and
| try to set it, and let the other knock on effects work
| themselves out (which markets help with), and then when
| THOSE cause undesirable problems, rinse and repeat.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Given that there's numerous cities and countries that are
| suffering from water shortages, you'd think that the
| price of water would go up already. But it hasn't,
| because there's interests at play to keep the price of
| water relatively low.
|
| Anyway you'd need different prices for different types of
| consumers, because it's a basic need for humans; you
| can't make water unaffordable for poorer people.
|
| I'm all for increasing the price of water and electricity
| for big consumers though, so that they will invest more
| R&D into reducing their consumption. Because when it's
| cheap, they'll just use more of it without thinking.
| That's also why coal power was (is?) a thing for so long.
| Sevii wrote:
| The price of water can't go up significantly because the
| marginal cost of water to farmers is lower than that to
| residential consumers. Its a lot easier to buy out a few
| farmers than to take the political hit on high
| residential water prices.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Given that there's numerous cities and countries that
| are suffering from water shortages, you'd think that the
| price of water would go up already. But it hasn't,
| because there's interests at play to keep the price of
| water relatively low.
|
| That just means the shortage is not sufficiently severe
| to cause prices to move.
|
| > Anyway you'd need different prices for different types
| of consumers, because it's a basic need for humans; you
| can't make water unaffordable for poorer people.
|
| The simpler way is to give poorer people money.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you 'd need different prices for different types of
| consumers_
|
| Water shortages are a policy choice in any country above
| middle income. A simple x gallons for free per person or
| residence and market pricing thereafter would solve the
| issue for 90% of the spectrum, with potentially
| agricultural subsidies filling the gap. Instead, we
| choose a regressive policy system where individuals
| subsidise almond farmers.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| That would be, what, several thousand trucks per day? I don't
| see how that would be any better.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yes, now calculate the fuel cost. Expensive, but not crazy
| expensive in comparison to other wafer costs
| vmh1928 wrote:
| Some statistics about Arizona's water sources and where it
| goes. 72% of the water is used by agriculture. 6% to industry
| 22% to municipal use
|
| http://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
|
| But yes, water usage is a big issue in AZ at the moment with
| Lake Mead and Powell at very low levels which has triggered and
| will trigger more cuts to the use of Colorado River water via
| the Central Arizona Project canal.
|
| Arizona has no law even measuring, much less restricting
| groundwater pumping which is a big problem getting bigger as
| cuts in Colorado River usage lead to more pumping.
| buryat wrote:
| I decided to check how much water a plant would use
|
| a plant used 4 million gallons of water a day (according to
| https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-
| shorta...) which is about 126000 metric tons a day
|
| arizona used 7 million acre-foot of water in 2017
| (https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-
| environme...) which is about 19000 acre-feet a day == 23014434
| metric ton a day (using http://www.conversion-
| website.com/volume/acre-foot-to-ton-wa...)
|
| so a chip plant would be responsible for about 0.55% of overall
| water usage
| rrss wrote:
| Why does this metric matter, when 95% of the water Intel uses
| is already returned to the water supply?
|
| From the same verge article as the 4 million gallons a day
| figure:
|
| > Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore
| and return more freshwater than it uses. It's nearing that
| benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and
| returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in 2020
| spiderice wrote:
| How is it possible to return more fresh water than you use?
| Where does the surplus come from?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Because water that isn't fresh can become fresh. We have
| the technology.
|
| They're already purifying a staggering amount of water,
| might as well purify a bit more while they're at it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That still doesn't explain where this unfresh water comes
| from.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| They're taking raw untreated river/lake/aquifer water,
| purifying it to an incredible degree for the fab. When
| they use the water it gets cleaned again.
|
| Now that water can either be returned to the
| river/lake/aquifer or if you clean it sufficiently well
| it can go straight into municipal drinking water
| supplies. That's how this fresh water comes out of
| nowhere.
| arcticfox wrote:
| That doesn't seem right. As far as I know,
| rivers/lakes/aquifers are pretty much the definition of
| fresh water.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Yes they are the definition of fresh water, not purified
| water.
|
| Running fresh water is relatively clean, but it doesn't
| mean there isn't giardia or other microbes / impurities.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Okay, but Intel promised to return more _freshwater_ than
| it used. So it can 't simply take freshwater, purify it,
| and return it at a surplus.
| caeril wrote:
| Maricopa and Pinal counties have lots of agricultural
| water that either comes directly off the Colorado river
| via canal, or is pumped from shallow alfalfa field runoff
| groundwater that is too full of nitrates to be even
| remotely potable.
|
| We also, unlike the CA Central Valley or the Midwest who
| are apparently cool with depleting their resources as
| fast as humanly possible, are acutely aware of our
| groundwater supply constraints, given that we live in a
| desert, and practice a lot of aquifer recharge and
| management.
|
| Intel cleans it, uses it, and dumps it into aquifer
| recharge, which cleans it even further.
| bluGill wrote:
| The midwest gets more than enough water via rain, so
| nobody worries about water. Farmers don't irrigate crops,
| they just accept lower profits in drought years. You
| might be thinking of the west where water is a problem.
| caeril wrote:
| I'm pressing 'X' to doubt, right now:
|
| https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-
| images/nation...
|
| edit: Maybe I should have said Great Plains, which
| overlaps, but is not precisely the same as, the Midwest.
| bluGill wrote:
| The great plains does have issues. The rest of the
| midwest doesn't.
| tedivm wrote:
| They can take wastewater (which is no longer fresh),
| clean it up for use, and return it back to the system.
|
| While Arizona is landlocked there's also not a ton of
| distance between it and the Gulf of California so they
| could do desalinization, although I imagine that's too
| costly to consider at the moment.
|
| > It has its own water treatment plant at its Ocotillo
| campus in Chandler that's similar to a municipal plant.
| There's also a "brine reduction facility," a public-
| private partnership with the city of Chandler, that
| brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel's wastewater a day
| back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the treated
| water again, and the rest is sent to replenish
| groundwater sources or be used by surrounding
| communities.
| lovemenot wrote:
| Thanks for doing a fact-check.
|
| Might there be other other downstream states in USA or Mexico
| that would push that 0.55% ratio higher?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Note that the Verge quote is
|
| > _It'll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day
| by some estimates_
| Buttons840 wrote:
| So one business / structure will use 1/200th of all water?
| That does sound like a lot.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| Not to mention that industry itself only accounts for 6% of
| Arizona's water usage [0] so we're talking about one single
| structure increasing the industrial usage by ~10%.
|
| [0]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Industry is a surprisingly small portion of water
| consumption in many places. In many states, household
| water use (including lawns) can handily exceed the water
| used by industry.
|
| Using this water for domestic chip making is arguably a
| very reasonable use of water. If we're going to start
| cutting water usage, let's start with things like golf
| courses in the desert instead of critical chip-making
| infrastructure.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I feel a bit of tension. I'm not a big fan of people
| using water to grow grass in the desert, but I'm also not
| a big fan of making tens or hundreds of thousands of
| people sacrifice so that one large corporation can
| profit.
|
| Yeah, I know that chip manufacturing helps everyone by
| improving our economic independence, and that's not a
| small thing, but we're already writing Intel a big check
| and they obviously benefit from the profits of the chips
| they will manufacture (assuming they manage it correctly
| and it doesn't just get left behind for cheaper foreign
| manufacturing the moment the market economics change).
|
| Maybe chip manufacture really benefits from being
| somewhere arid, and that's probably just pretty
| incompatible with water conservation?
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| Is it potentially a little narrow to frame "one large
| corporation... profit[ing]" as the main result of
| consuming the water?
|
| They're also:
|
| - producing useful things
|
| - employing people to do said production (and design the
| production process, and the thing that's getting
| produced)
|
| - paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful
| things getting produced
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that my framing was narrow. Corporations of
| course benefit society.
|
| > paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful
| things getting produced
|
| I suspect this is overstated considering how much of
| these parts likely come from abroad, especially from
| oppressive countries that subsidize their manufacturing
| via pollution and pseudo slave labor. But still there are
| certainly American wholesale and logistics jobs which are
| supported.
| ryan93 wrote:
| What sacrifice are people making when the water is
| recycled?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I was responding to the implication that people should
| reduce their water consumption for this facility.
| selectodude wrote:
| Chip manufacturing benefits from somewhere that has very
| predictable weather and low/no seismic activity.
| hosh wrote:
| I used to get so mad about people growing lawns here in
| Phoenix until I discovered that Burmuda grass will
| tenaciously grow with little irrigation, and that _some_
| kind of vegetation is better for water retention in soil
| than bare dirt.
|
| As I mentioned in my longer comment elsewhere, Arizona is
| seismically stable, and fabs don't need specialized
| structures when using advanced process nodes.
|
| The biggest misuse of water resources and poor land
| management comes from our conventional, commercial
| farming practice. Healthy, living soil can do a lot
| ecologically including water conservation, but we farm in
| a way to continually deplete soil.
|
| Changing how residential homeowners do landscaping can
| help as well.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It also helps with the heat island effect.
|
| But yeah, there's lots of different types of grasses that
| are OK to have in arid climates. But most lawns in my
| region (socal) aren't these special grasses. Subterranean
| irrigation can help too.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I switched out my whole yard to zoysia (which is one of
| those creeping vine grasses like Bermuda). I picked it
| over Bermuda because it grows in thicker. I went from
| watering at least once a week to maybe once or twice a
| year if at all. That is in a area with an ok amount of
| rain.
|
| I liked this type of grass as it grows relatively slowly
| which means about half the amount of mowing needed to be
| done. Low water (less than Bermuda), kills most weeds
| (less pesticides and weed killers), less mowing, those
| are the upsides. Downsides are turns yellow in October
| and does not turn green until the end of april (not HOA
| friendly), and like most creeping vine grasses is
| invasive and hard to get rid of if you do not like it, it
| also grows very poorly in shaded areas. Aggressive
| trimming is also needed when it reaches walkways,
| streets, driveways, and the side of your house.
|
| I also spent a good amount of time building up a decent
| bed for the grass to grow in with mulching and proper
| aeration. Another thing I did was to make sure I had a
| good mix of the correct type of insects, moss, worms, and
| transplanted from local areas potting soils for other
| bits in the soil, trying to keep area and the type of
| grass in mind. As the original builder had scraped off
| the good stuff, leaving me with clay and rocks and rye
| grass, then took it to another site before I bought the
| place. This helped tremendously with the soil. Though I
| could have done better on my homework with that.
|
| Depending on where you live, what sort of rain you get,
| and the soil types, this can be a 1 year job or a 10 year
| job. It really takes time to do.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its fucking lawn grass. Its one of the most worthless
| things in the world and a complete waste of resources. At
| least chips do something other than sit there wasting
| water.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree. But the idea of asking tens or hundreds of
| thousands to give up their frivolities so a single
| corporation can profit strikes a nerve in me, however
| irrational it may be. I'm not reflexively anti-
| corporation--corporations are economically necessary--but
| I guess I'm touchy about the question of whether people
| exist for corporations or corporations for people.
| ryan93 wrote:
| They can keep their lawn. She's should just have to pay
| more money since the water has more valuable uses
| elsewhere
| 8note wrote:
| Itel can also move somewhere else. It's bad coming into a
| community and telling everyone their water costs more now
| because you want a lot of it.
|
| If anything, Intel should pay them to get rid of their
| lawn
| ryan93 wrote:
| The article didnt say water prices are increasing. They
| get most of their water from recycling what they use.
| Regardless filling a pot of water for pasta would go from
| a fraction of a penny to a fraction of a penny even if
| intel increased their water use ten fold
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The simple answer is to set the water price so supply
| matches demand, and let everyone sort out what they
| prioritize.
|
| I don't expect this to happen.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Not exactly. Fabs use a lot of water to run, but it's
| mostly self-contained with very little loss. I can't
| remember the exact number, but the fabs Intel already have
| in Phoenix only lose around 4-5% of the water. The rest is
| reclaimed and recirculated. I believe the two breaking
| ground today will be even more efficient, possibly even net
| _producers_ once rain water and other sources are taken
| into account. It 's been a few months since I read into it,
| though, so I may be misremembering
| mistrial9 wrote:
| net producers of water? check this please
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Definitely sounds like a lot. Perhaps conservation efforts
| are in order, to reduce water waste by ~1% to allow for
| this strategically important, high value added industry to
| develop further. Thankfully, water waste is so rife in
| Arizona that it shouldn't be all that difficult to do so.
| Nbox9 wrote:
| Maybe, if there are important reasons why this factory
| should be in a desert state. I think everyone agrees that
| chips are vitally important now, but chip shortages
| aren't nearly as bad as a water shortage is.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| That's one metric for impact. Perhaps you can think of some
| other metrics to compare it to before influencing the
| reader's opinion?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Sorry, can't resist but you gotta love the units. Gallons,
| acre foot. Thank god the US isn't socialist metric where one
| unit can easily be converted to another :)
| tzs wrote:
| We can easily convert just fine in the US:
|
| > "Alexa, how much does 4 million gallons of water weigh in
| metric tons?"
|
| > "4 million gallons of water weighs about 15 thousand
| metric tons"
|
| :-)
|
| Not that this actually makes it easy to deal with unit
| conversion, because we still have to find the right gizmo
| to ask and phrase the question right. "Hey Google" for
| instance when I ask it the above question just tells me how
| much a million gallons of water weighs in pounds.
|
| Not being sure if Google was right on that, I asked Alexa
| how much 1 million gallons of water weighs in pounds. It
| told me that 5000 gallons of water weighs 41726.320547
| pounds. If I ask without saying I want the answer in pounds
| it then does tell me the answer for the requested 1 million
| gallons in pounds.
|
| But if we happen to ask the right gizmo, and happen to
| phrase it just right...unit conversion is no problem for
| Americans.
|
| (Of course I still had to do it by hand, because Alexa's
| answer disagreed with the answer at the top of this thread,
| and I am not confident that when Alexa disagrees with an HN
| commenter that Alexa is right).
| kiklion wrote:
| What is 'using water' in this context? Is it boiled off?
| Contaminated and needs to be cleaned?
| [deleted]
| brianbreslin wrote:
| In chip making they remove all the impurities making it
| PURE h20, which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back
| in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be
| dumped.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Sounds like an excellent candidate for re-use.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| If that's all that it needs, why would they not recycle
| it back into the water supply?
| rrss wrote:
| From the same verge article:
|
| > Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will
| restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It's
| nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it
| cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it
| used in 2020
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| It's unfortunate that alongside this incredibly important
| detail the article carries a bunch of highly judgemental
| wording that encourages people to incorrectly interpret
| "use" not as "cycle through" but as "remove from water
| supply and banish to a superfund site."
|
| The rest of the comment section is guilty of this too.
|
| I fully appreciate the need for independent verification,
| but assuming the worst is not that, and it actually leads
| to bad incentives in the same way as assuming the best
| (or refusing to think about it at all) leads to bad
| incentives.
| rrss wrote:
| yeah. If there is something I'm missing, hopefully
| someone can point out what it is, because I don't really
| understand why this matters.
| 8note wrote:
| Historically, companies have shown that they will do the
| worst imaginable.
|
| The bar needs to be set high on holding them too account,
| or else the shareholders will get their way and Arizona
| will gets new superfund site. Being charitable will be
| abused by companies
| jhpankow wrote:
| Clean, pure, delicious semiconductor wastewater.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| You do understand that literal sewage is treated and
| returned to the water supply just fine
| mentos wrote:
| "It's got what plants crave"
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| "It's got electrolytes!"
| sgc wrote:
| Probably better to just re-filter it back to pure H2O and
| reuse on site.
| bernawil wrote:
| > which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the
| ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be
| dumped
|
| how so? isn't rainwater also "pure H2O"?
| bluGill wrote:
| No, rainwater has dissolved air and dust in it.
| [deleted]
| smolder wrote:
| Good question. I assume rainwater picks up minerals
| naturally as it filters through dirt and whatnot, but
| then why couldn't that be the case for fab wastewater? It
| also makes me think about the sheer amount of polluted
| filth that must wash out of a city after it gets rained
| on.
| dralley wrote:
| One single factory using 0.55% of the entire state's water
| consumption is pretty massive.
| iamgopal wrote:
| On the other hand, there are very standard technologies for
| water recycling. UHF, RO, ZLD, MEE etc. Water is quite easy
| to recycle given intention to do it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tzs wrote:
| 4 million gallons X 3.785 kg/gallon X 1 metric ton / 1000 kg
| = 15140 metric tons, not 126000 metric tons. The calculation
| for Arizona is correct.
|
| That gives 0.066%, no 0.55%.
| buryat wrote:
| yeah, you're right, I accidentally used "US short ton" smh
| that one of the online calculators gave me, very
| embarrassing
| black_13 wrote:
| For years ive been reading these apologist news articles about
| how chips or laptops or phones or so on couldn't be made here but
| here we are.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| What kind of ramp-up time are we looking at here? This can't be a
| quick process to get chips out the door I imagine!
| wongarsu wrote:
| They are supposed to start production in 2024 (which sounds
| very quick, considering they just started construction). No
| idea how quickly they can ramp up production from there, but
| delays wouldn't be anything unusual for a new semiconductor
| plant.
| acoard wrote:
| I've heard that the general industry estimates for something
| like this are 5 (up to 10) years. However, both Intel and
| TSMC's USA are saying 2024. Potentially related is that 2024 is
| a presidential election year.
|
| It's like trees: a long-term investment, and you might as well
| start now.
| sneak wrote:
| I often wonder if Intel and Boeing are going to end up as
| effective branches of US government, too big/strategic to ever
| let actually fail (or even let be sufficiently battered by market
| realities).
|
| Boeing seems like it's already there, and Intel can't be far
| behind.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| There's already precedent with a fab in MN
| https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14416247
|
| And the US Govt props up other critical industry, not just for
| military but trade, gas, & food.
|
| Personally I support it.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Next time the communication department says "less is more", I'll
| explode. Do we really need to produce more IC's ? Can't we just
| limit the demand a bit ?
|
| Can't we make washing machines, cars, bikes, fridges, dish
| washers, coffee machines,... without IC's ? My Core2 Duo is 12
| years old and I still use it 8 hours a day, do I really need a
| new generation CPU ?
|
| I understand that global economy (and thus employment and other
| important stuff) rely on the trade of IC's but do we really need
| so much more ?
|
| (kiddo's have been waiting their PS5 for 9 months now, but is
| that a insurmountable problem?)
|
| Not to say that IC's are bad (I'm CS :-)) but just asking if the
| current IC shortage may be a good time to think about the
| sustainability of our appetite, or if it's the good time to think
| about living in a world with actual limits...
| Nbox9 wrote:
| How is raising the information processing capabilities of
| humanity anything but a net good thing?
| Dah00n wrote:
| If it is to scan milk inside a refrigerator? Most can do
| without "smart" functionality.
| valine wrote:
| How exactly do you expect to build an EV without ICs? We've
| already tried cars without ICs, they're noisy polluters. You
| talk about sustainability like we weren't pumping carbon into
| the atmosphere before computers.
|
| Also maybe your job is such that you can get by with and old
| power hungry cpu like the core 2 duo, most people can't.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Most newer CPU power is geared towards AI and telemetry (IoT,
| web advertising), which essentially feed the surveillance
| economy. Desktop CPUs have been powerful enough for non-ad
| driven web browsing and office applications for at least a
| decade.
| wiz21c wrote:
| > old power hungry cpu
|
| note that global CO2 has risen since the birth of my CPU. So
| I doubt the next gen leads us to make less CO2... I know, the
| current CPU's consume less energy, but globally, because of
| the fall in price, I'm pretty confident that the energy saved
| on the CPU is completely offset by the number of CPU sold.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Plus the total consumption of a CPU doesn't actually go
| down, they just do more with it. They look at thermal
| limits more than power consumption, like, how much work can
| we make it do within these temperature ranges.
|
| Mobile chips are a bit different, but to a point it's the
| same story there. If you put the chips of today in the
| smartphones of a decade ago they would probably last a week
| on a battery charge.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Power hungry is not a term I'd use to describe a Core 2 Duo.
|
| Or do CPUs need more power to run as they get older? That
| would be news to me.
| kcb wrote:
| It surely needs a lot more power to do the same work as a
| modern CPU. Like if you were encoding a video on it where
| against a modern CPU that may use the same power but finish
| many times sooner.
| Dah00n wrote:
| The new CPU has another carbon footprint added, plus the
| RAM and motherboard, etc. to overcome before it is
| comparable. I doubt a new CPU is effective enough to
| offset that anytime soon on an average use PC.
| mcphage wrote:
| > Do we really need to produce more IC's ?
|
| In this case, it's not so much about _more_ ICs (although we do
| need more right now), but it 's _who 's making the ICs_. The US
| is trying to ramp up their internal production capability,
| rather than depending on Taiwan as heavily.
| seanw444 wrote:
| And then when (if*) we become independent, and China finally
| gets the balls to scoop up Taiwan, our administration will be
| nowhere to be found.
| CivBase wrote:
| As romantic as the US gallantly defending Taiwan from the
| Chinese invaders sounds, let's be honest. The US could do
| little more than buy the Taiwanese some time to escape.
|
| If the CCP ever decides it's time to take control of Taiwan
| by force, they could. It's the economic backlash from the
| rest of the world they are currently worried about, not
| military resistance. Although I'm not sure just how much
| they even have to be worried about economically considering
| how the world has handled recent CCP atrocities.
| dsq wrote:
| Crossing a wide span of water (wider than the English
| Channel) against a determined defender is really hard.
| Taiwan is bristling with anti ship missiles and are very
| much against being taken over by the PRC.
| Dah00n wrote:
| That doesn't change that fact that Taiwan doesn't stand a
| snowballs chance in hell. At most it adds a few days from
| start to end. It is extremely unrealistic to have Taiwan
| not become part of PRC if war breaks out. The US only
| have one way to win and that's all-out invasion after
| nuking mainland China - but then no-one wins.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| A lack of Taiwan dependency may well avoid a world war.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I'd rather have another world war than for China to slowly
| but "peacefully" conquer the world.
| beebeepka wrote:
| That's how I know you imagine yourself to be on the
| winning side of this world war. Good luck with that. Not
| really, though
| josephcsible wrote:
| I do think we would win in the end, but even if we
| didn't, I'd rather go down fighting than graciously
| accept our new CCP overlords.
| Dah00n wrote:
| The US is looking more and more like ancient Rome. In
| 10-15 years it likely neither can win a war against China
| but it will also likely not have many allies on its side
| if it tries.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| I might have thought so some years ago.
|
| In an era when 1/2 of the Western world hates Western
| civilization, I'm not sure that it matters anymore.
|
| Of course, in the long run, it's all just fodder for a
| history book. The further out you go, the less the
| details matter.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Without ICs, these devices have to rely on mechanical
| controllers, which are much larger, more expensive, less
| reliable, less efficient, louder, and really worse in ever
| metric.
|
| I think your sentiment is not to produce wifi-powered, ad-
| driven refrigerators, and yeah, I can agree with that point.
| But the core ICs in these devices have been there for decades
| and do provide substantial, tangible benefits.
|
| I can't speak for every device, but I've replaced the circuit
| board on a few appliances over the years and they are mostly
| generic boards with really cheap, ancient chips produced by
| brands most people have never heard of and sell in bulk for a
| quarter each. These are definitely not cutting the cutting edge
| designs that Intel will be building here. So let's not throw
| the baby out with the bathwater.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't you want to build a
| semiconductor fabrication factory somewhere cold?
|
| Or is it because Arizona is dry?
|
| (honest questions, I don't know what impacts the location of a
| fab)
| newacct583 wrote:
| You want to build them where you can staff them, and these fabs
| are going up next door to Intel's existing fabs in Chandler.
| user568439 wrote:
| Why should it be cold? This is necessary for data centers but
| for factories probably it's much better to have your own solar
| powered energy
| josaka wrote:
| I think it's because it's dry. Facilities guy in the semi plant
| I used to work in told me that their highest energy usage was
| when it was humid, not when it's hot or cold. Said the energy
| cost to cool the humid air to pull out water and then heat it
| back up to the fab's target temp was pretty massive.
| dv_dt wrote:
| seems like you should be able to dump part of the waste heat
| back into the output air after the cooling stage.
| jdshupe wrote:
| There were also a lot of Tax incentives for building in this
| location. The company I work for is doing the electrical work
| and all of our materials are tax free.
| lvl100 wrote:
| You don't need a large constant source of water. It's a bit
| like filling a very large swimming pool. They also already have
| plants down there and it works for them because AZ is
| surprisingly shielded from natural disasters. Also they can
| utilize solar power down there.
| Nbox9 wrote:
| > AZ Natural Disasters
|
| AZ suffers from heat waves, which are steadily getting worse
| over time. Last year in a heat wave Phoenix saw several days
| above 115F. A 115F heatwave is a natural disaster mitigated
| by air conditioning. Hopefully a heat wave doesn't coincide
| with a 2020 Texas sized electrical blackout.
|
| This isn't a massive problem now, but imagine how bad AZ heat
| waves will be by the end of his factories life.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Sure but a chip fab is a giant flat building with lots of
| AC and plenty of solar panels.
|
| At this point you really can't rule out 115F heatwave
| anywhere since the PNW just had one.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Usually a heat wave isn't accompanied by thick cloud cover
| that shades your solar panels.
| pm90 wrote:
| It can kill your (human) staff though.
| [deleted]
| cronix wrote:
| Where do you propose to build, then? Alaska? I live near
| the massive Intel campuses in Hillsboro, OR. We rarely get
| above 100F, but we experienced the same several days of
| 115F+ weather this last June just before summer officially
| hit. Almost 200 people died in Oregon/Washington directly
| from that heatwave and up to 500 in BC, Canada[1].
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2021/jul/08/pacific-nort...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| I think in the vancouver news and investigation
| afterwards, a bit over 1k people died.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I don't think heat is an issue. I remember a bunch of
| Middle Eastern countries considered building fabs in order
| to diversify away from oil about 20 years ago. Of course,
| they also realized they'd need to import labor as well due
| to low-skill and unwilling local labor.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Arizona is a place where, with enough investment (like the
| billions here) power can be extremely green and cheap, with
| solar. Needing a huge amount of air conditioning is not a
| problem when it coincides with the moment the sun is pouring
| huge amounts of energy into your solar array.
| raverbashing wrote:
| If you can manage to build your solar as to shade your
| building, your AC costs will greatly diminish as well.
| conductr wrote:
| This is the first time I've heard this from someone besides
| me :) I am involved with an effort to plant arbors to shade
| homes in low income areas of my city so that residents can
| afford the A/C costs. A typical home we work on has no
| central HVAC and has 3 or 4 window units running non-stop
| 6+ months of the year (Texas). Vines are fast growing and
| shade makes a huge impact!
| zwirbl wrote:
| this leaves out the issues with the large amounts of water
| needed for semiconductor fabrication, although another
| commenter noted that Arizona has pretty good water management
| (I guess this includes recycling?)
| minhazm wrote:
| > Globally, Intel is on track to achieve net positive water
| use by 2030. Today, in Arizona, we're already at 95%.
|
| https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2021/manufacturing/Inte
| l...
| lazide wrote:
| This is PR.
|
| Water needs are local, except where it is explicitly part
| of the same watershed/supply system. 'Net positive' here
| means 'we help retain a bunch of water over there...
| <points to other side of state where no one lives and the
| water isn't captured well>, and use it over here <points
| to middle of extreme desert with greater outflows than
| inflows of water into all sources>', and we're net
| positive!
| dragonelite wrote:
| You already need extreme climate and dust control don't think
| the location will matter that much.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| As I understand it, you want inexpensive power and water. Bonus
| points for environmental stability over absolute temperature.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Arizona has a few major things going for it:
|
| - lack of seismic activity
|
| - very cheap, flat, easily excavated land
|
| - rich history of fab production (see: Motorola) which provides
| the necessary city infra, construction groups, supply
| distribution to build such fabs
|
| - consistently dry climate that despite being hot, is easily
| controlled for humidity
|
| - numerous tax and subsidy enticements to do business there
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >rich history of fab production
|
| I would rank this way higher. Clustering fabs together makes
| it much easier to hire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat.
| .. Intel, Microchip, NXP, TSMC and Entrepix all have plants
| in Arizona.
|
| As an antiexample, the Bay Area has every negative attribute
| you could hope to think of for basing a software company
| there, and yet everyone does it anyway, just for hiring.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Yeah, my points are in no particular order. Specifically
| avoided using numbered points for that reason. You're right
| in that effective hiring is a major draw.
| jmpman wrote:
| Is there any evidence that Intel has fixed its process problems?
| Otherwise aren't they building a $20B liability?
| acomjean wrote:
| I think they're doing ok. I don't follow too closely, but 11th
| gen intel mobile is behind AMD. The good new for intel is
| they're not so far behind this generation that no one will buy
| their chips.
|
| Intel have new management and some optimism and by the time the
| plant is finished in 2-3 years they'll have their ducks in a
| row, but who knows what the market will be like then. In a bad
| scenario they could be a end up a bulk supplier to other
| companies of close to state-of-the-art chips, which might be an
| ok place to be.
| thehappypm wrote:
| If you look at many applications that are absolutely guzzling
| chips -- automotive, appliances, IoT -- you don't need
| cutting edge chips. Cheap and fast enough is a great market
| niche. Especially when "fast enough" is state-of-the-art from
| 5 years ago.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| So many of the AMD laptops I see are geared towards gaming.
| Makes sense in that they're powerful, but I wish there were
| more options for general purpose lightweight laptops.
| phkahler wrote:
| Has Intel mastered EVU lithography yet? They've been close for a
| long time now.
| htrp wrote:
| Nope... still getting pretty bad yields.
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