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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

#241

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lazide wrote: post #226
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming your pipeline or canal is gravity driven, that could be hard.

It may also be economically unviable. Phoenix is around 1000 ft AGL, and much of the rest of Arizona that is populated is higher (Tucson 2300, Prescott ~5k, and Flagstaff almost 7k ft above sea level). Someone above was quoting CCF/HCF (Centrum Cubic Feet, or 100ft^3 of water or 748 gallons), which is a customary way to measure water volume in many utilities, and noting ~ $6.89 per CCF I believe. I did some random go…

California electricity is generally cheap in the sense that you don't need to use much of it (the big metro areas with the most people have very mild climates). I imagine AC is important in a place like Tucson.

The fact that pumping water uphill is so expensive is why most of the water in the mountain west comes from the Rockies (where it flows down hill), though the exhaustion of the rocky mountain glaciers (due to global warming or whatever one believes is the reason) means that all that water built up over millions of years is coming to an end.

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

#242

Post by seanmcdirmid »

m4rtink wrote: post #217
brewdad wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would basically need to isolate yourself from the grid to be immune to any blips...it takes a while for a backup to come on line and even things out.

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

#243

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sitkack wrote: post #88
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here is what I can find off hand:

https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shorta...

> 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. It has its own water treatment plant at its Ocotillo campus in Chandler that’s similar to a municipal plant. There’s also a “brine reduction facility,” a public-private partnership with the city of Chandler, that brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel’s wastewater a day back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the treated water again, and the rest is sent to replenish groundwater sources or be used by surrounding communities.

I'm not sure what 95% is based on, and it seems like they can't reuse it all, but other clients can (e.g. it isn't suitable for cleaning machines, but is ok to drink).

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

#244

Post by kd913 »

NortySpock wrote: post #140
1234letshaveatw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it make just as much money in a spot with no water usage concerns?

Sure, but where else in the country has no hurricanes, no tornados, and no earthquakes? A dry desert on top of a continental plate is a relatively disaster-free zone. When insuring your multi-billion-dollar fab... apparently zero disasters is a plus.

Do you really think there will be zero disasters in Arizona in the coming years?

Sure the plant may survive a water crisis, how about it's power grid? How about the local communities and states who will run out of water?

Over the next 20 years, I wouldn't rank Arizona highly for stability.

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

#245

Post by lazide »

ryan93 wrote: post #218
lazide wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t do that for a large portion of the water - they dance around that with weasel words (like ‘return to the environment’), aka evaporate. You can see they are constantly weaseling out of giving anything concrete that someone could accuse them of lying, or could use to point out the actual impacts, and stating ‘a lot’ can be reclaimed from evaporation for instance in the building - while ignoring cooling, which is evaporative at these scales [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/why...]

It’s pretty typical corporate green washing of a real problem that other folks will end up having in diffuse, hard to pin on them ways, that with some nudging on the right officials will never be pinned on them. In my experience, anyway.

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

#246

Post by spaztastical »

j_walter wrote: post #191
hosh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That is not how that works. Las vegas is full of pools and fountains... INDOORS. they retain the moisture in their enclosed ecosystems. We have ACs that pull water out of the air, and we also know how to make buildings.

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

#247

Post by spaztastical »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #234
hosh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable There are a lot of places in the US that are at least as seismically stable and also have more abundant water. I suspect the choice of Arizona has more to do with tax incentives and the fact that fabs already exist there (and thus there is an experienced workforce).

and those places have hurricanes or tornadoes

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

#248

Post by MengerSponge »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #177
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.

> 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).

Allow me to rephrase in a way that is more accurate but not substantially more insightful: "Nuts tend to be far more profitable than other crops, allowing nut farmers to expand their operations as escalating water prices squeeze out lower-margin water users."

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

#249

Post by reissbaker »

hunterb123 wrote: post #176
arcticfox wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem right. As far as I know, rivers/lakes/aquifers are pretty much the definition of fresh water.

Yes they are the definition of fresh water, not purified water. Running fresh water is relatively clean, but it doesn't mean there isn't giardia or other microbes / impurities.

Okay, but Intel promised to return more freshwater than it used. So it can't simply take freshwater, purify it, and return it at a surplus.

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

#250

Post by softfalcon »

j_walter wrote: post #214
softfalcon wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hea…

Definitely not arguing that the heat doesn’t need to go somewhere. You’re absolutely right.

All I remember is family saying they had effective means for recycling the water without losing it in these boiler chambers.

I’m no expert, but they were saying significantly higher efficiency than 65%.

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