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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

#281

Post by diskzero »

rland wrote: post #238
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…

Right, I think the gp comment is referring to fabs being impacted by water shortages, not fabs causing water shortages. Although if push comes to shove I guess all of this can be solved trivially by not growing ridiculous water intensive crops and not having golf courses and stuff in the middle of the desert.

Tucson resident here. I see acre after acre of alfalfa being grown, with most of that water then being exported to Saudi Arabia for cattle consumption. There is a geopolitical aspect to this, but I will gladly choose Arizona fabs over exporting cattle feed.

Tucson has been doing a very good job recharging our local aquifers and we also had a good monsoon. I was able to harvest 15,000 gallons of rainwater for irrigation on my land.

I view the construction of the fabs as critical infrastructure . Saudi cattle, not so much.

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

#282

Post by cma »

thehappypm wrote: post #10
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 is a place where, with enough investment (like the billions here) power can be extremely green and cheap, with solar. Needing a huge amount of air conditioning is not a problem when it coincides with the moment the sun is pouring huge amounts of energy into your solar array.

Semiconductor manufacturing needs constant power aside from AC though, it presumably doesn't stop at night due to high automation and the capital involved.

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

#283

Post by nealabq »

Aperocky wrote: post #275
rayiner wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not much. The average family of 4 in Arizona uses about 325,000 gallons a year. So a billion gallons is equivalent to 3,000 families, or a very small town.

Doesn't smell right, you're saying a family of 4 in Arizona uses ~900 gallons a day? That's 3500L or 3.5 tons of water every day. I mean you can flush the toilet every minute for the whole day and only use about that much water, and that's assume the toilet fills up as fast (it doesn't).

How to use a lot of water:

a) Water the lawn (in the summer)

b) Take a long shower

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

#284

Post by Jarwain »

cma wrote: post #282
thehappypm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arizona is a place where, with enough investment (like the billions here) power can be extremely green and cheap, with solar. Needing a huge amount of air conditioning is not a problem when it coincides with the moment the sun is pouring huge amounts of energy into your solar array.

Semiconductor manufacturing needs constant power aside from AC though, it presumably doesn't stop at night due to high automation and the capital involved.

Ideally you'd overprovision with solar and use batteries to store the excess energy, to be used at night

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

#285

Post by j_walter »

nealabq wrote: post #283
Aperocky wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't smell right, you're saying a family of 4 in Arizona uses ~900 gallons a day? That's 3500L or 3.5 tons of water every day. I mean you can flush the toilet every minute for the whole day and only use about that much water, and that's assume the toilet fills up as fast (it doesn't).

How to use a lot of water: a) Water the lawn (in the summer) b) Take a long shower

c) Drain and fill your pool

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

#286

Post by irjustin »

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…

Is it possible to do a closed cycle system? Or is that simply too expensive?

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

#287

Post by Karrot_Kream »

adminscoffee wrote: post #192
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…

I enjoy a lot of aspects of permaculture, but a lot of it is cargo-culting pseudoscience. There's very little understanding of _why_ the techniques that they espouse work except for vague principles. I really wish more engineers took the time to do permaculture and documented their designs, instead of hippie experimenters.

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

spaztastical wrote: post #247
UncleOxidant wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by tw04 »

paulmd wrote: post #272
j_walter wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely it's a strange choice. From a power perspective it can make sense since solar works very well, but from a water perspective it's a very strange choice. Cheap land is also a very big factor. TSMC purchased over a thousand acres. Where else in the US can you find a thousand acres so near a populous area and so easily accessible off a major freeway like that? Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state fo…

the west coast also has a pretty low incidence of natural disasters. The east coast regularly gets bad hurricanes, the northeast and midwest get really bad snowstorms, plains states regularly get tornadoes, etc, but on the west coast if you pick a region that's not geologically active then there aren't really a ton of huge natural disasters that occur regularly. of course I guess there's wildfires now too, but that's…

> the northeast and midwest get really bad snowstorms

I’m curious what the supposed issues around snowstorms are. In the Midwest at least you typically lose a day of “work” (not going into the office) a couple times per winter and that’s only because of school closures. The roads are rarely an issue for more than a couple hours unless it’s REALLY bad storm.

I don’t see why you couldn’t keep running the fabs through that.

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

#290

Post by jws »

nealabq wrote: post #239
j_walter wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An acre-foot is about 325K gallons, and an irrigated farm uses 1 or 2 acre-feet per acre per year. So the "inefficient" fab you work at uses less than 2 acre-feet/day, or maybe 700 per year. About what a 500-acre farm uses. Arizona has about 1.3 million acres under irrigation. So 2,500 similar fabs would use all the irrigation water. It's a lot of water, but maybe not a deal breaker?

The USDA says Arizona cotton farmers make 1,138lbs/acre/year (sorry world, not converting units this time). There are 165,500 acres growing cotton in Arizona, so the 500 we stop to get water for Intel is negligible.

So we are talking about agriculture forgoing 569,000 lbs of cotton per year. Farmers get about $0.60/lb for cotton. The impact on the agricultural industry is $341,000/year.

Buy out the worst cotton farmer in the state. Take his water. Move on.

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