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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

#191

Post by j_walter »

hosh wrote: post #112
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 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 bo…

>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...

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

#192

Post by adminscoffee »

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…

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

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

#193

Post by 8note »

ryan93 wrote: post #165
throwaway894345 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They can keep their lawn. She’s should just have to pay more money since the water has more valuable uses elsewhere

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

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

#194

Post by jkestner »

hosh wrote: post #162
MengerSponge wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

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.

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

#195

Post by sanxiyn »

deelowe wrote: post #84
mwint wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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

#196

Post by cronix »

Nbox9 wrote: post #101
lvl100 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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...

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

#197

Post by 8note »

jjoonathan wrote: post #119
rrss wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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,…

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

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

#198

Post by brewdad »

xxpor wrote: post #181
MagnumOpus wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

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)

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.

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

#199

Post by inglor_cz »

Jensson wrote: post #185
xxpor wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

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.

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

#200

Post by bernawil »

brianbreslin wrote: post #92
kiklion wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is ‘using water’ in this context? Is it boiled off? Contaminated and needs to be cleaned?

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.

> 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"?

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