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

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

#81

Post by g_sch »

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.

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.

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

#82

Post by avs733 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #74
ovi256 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

And power from palos verde nuclear power plant

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

#83

Post by adventured »

ethanbond wrote: post #38
thehappypm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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 €134.5 million."

https://www.acciona.com/updates/news/acciona-build-operate-c...

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

#84

Post by deelowe »

mwint wrote: post #49
ckastner wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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).

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

#85

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #50
FredPret wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 increasin…

> 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.

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

#86

Post by BurningFrog »

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.…

Note that the Verge quote is

> It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates

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

#87

Post by kspacewalk2 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #51
buryat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

So one business / structure will use 1/200th of all water? That does sound like a lot.

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.

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

#88

Post by sitkack »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #74
ovi256 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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?

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

#89

Post by matheusmoreira »

pope_meat wrote: post #79
matheusmoreira wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

#90

Post by spaetzleesser »

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.…

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