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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

#41

Post by new_guy »

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…

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.

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

#42

Post by newacct583 »

bloopernova wrote: post #2

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)

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.

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

#43

Post by ckastner »

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…

> 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.

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

#44

Post by Cthulhu_ »

new_guy wrote: post #41
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…

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.

Probably a good time to remind people that only 3% of that is fresh water. Fresh water shortage is definitely a thing.

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

#45

Post by wibagusto »

ZetaZero wrote: post #31
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

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.

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

#46

Post by Cthulhu_ »

uptown wrote: post #39
gitfan86 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#47

Post by lovemenot »

buryat wrote: post #22
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…

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.…

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?

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

#48

Post by wibagusto »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #29
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…

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.

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.

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

#49

Post by mwint »

ckastner wrote: post #43
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…

> 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.

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.

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

#50

Post by Cthulhu_ »

FredPret wrote: post #34
phreeza wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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