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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

#211

Post by lazide »

ryan93 wrote: post #148
wibagusto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The water doesn’t disappear. It stays h2o

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.

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

#212

Post by IgorPartola »

dntrkv wrote: post #106
IgorPartola wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand years from now your last sentence will be a proverb if unknown origin.

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.

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.

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

#213

Post by sbierwagen »

softfalcon wrote: post #205
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)

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

>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.

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

#214

Post by j_walter »

softfalcon wrote: post #203
j_walter wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

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…

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?

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

#215

Post by dsq »

CivBase wrote: post #93
seanw444 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#216

Post by standardUser »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #108
coldacid wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desalinization is a thing, and one that's often overlooked because the people holding the purse strings are generally cheap-asses.

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.

Desalination can be achieved using the cheapest energy source there is, solar.

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

#217

Post by m4rtink »

brewdad wrote: post #204
1234letshaveatw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vs. somewhere like Ohio? It is hard to believe moderate snowfall would override environmental externalities such as cooling costs and water use.

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.

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.

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

#218

Post by ryan93 »

lazide wrote: post #211
ryan93 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water doesn’t disappear. It stays h2o

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 for…

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.

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

#219

Post by m4rtink »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #46
uptown wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#220

Post by ryan93 »

8note wrote: post #193
ryan93 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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
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