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Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

reuters.com

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Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#31

Post by ZetaZero »

kd913 wrote: post #5

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 re…

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

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#33

Post by pwarner »

bserge wrote: post #7
kd913 wrote: post #5

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 re…

Can they create a water pipeline from elsewhere? Crazy, but not that far out. Oil and gas is transported this way.

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?

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#34

Post by FredPret »

phreeza wrote: post #26
baybal2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#35

Post by eCa »

bserge wrote: post #7
kd913 wrote: post #5

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 re…

Can they create a water pipeline from elsewhere? Crazy, but not that far out. Oil and gas is transported this way.

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

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#36

Post by wiz21c »

valine wrote: post #23
wiz21c wrote: post #18

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 ot…

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.

> 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.

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#37

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tyleo wrote: post #17
bserge wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can they create a water pipeline from elsewhere? Crazy, but not that far out. Oil and gas is transported this way.

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

> 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.

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#38

Post by ethanbond »

thehappypm wrote: post #8
kd913 wrote: post #5

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 re…

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.

… 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.

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#39

Post by uptown »

gitfan86 wrote: post #25
tyleo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

Reverse the flow?

Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

#40

Post by mschuster91 »

kd913 wrote: post #5

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 re…

> 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.

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