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

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

#311

Post by hosh » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

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…

It looks like evaporative cooling is not the only thing Intel does. Recharging the aquifer at the Phoenix site is another: https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/region9/waterinfr...

Depending upon how they do this and how much they are adding back into the aquifer, that can have a positive impact on the local ecology.

According to those slides, those were not the only strategies Intel used at the Phoenix site. It also added that there are already many water reductions strategies in use (which I agree with), so it doesn’t require groundbreaking research to develop.

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

#312

Post by dandotway » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

KirillPanov wrote: post #303

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).

Not tax incentives. Predictable regulators. Central Washington is ideal for chip fabs: tons of cheap electricity and excellent infrastructure, massive existing water supply, as/more geologically stable than Arizona, zero hurricanes/tornadoes. Three hours from Seattle is not commuting range, but it's close enough that the chip designers could easily do monthly fab visits. People underestimate how much idea exchange we…

> Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing"

Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, etc., have a strong WA presence and what has WA done to them that is 'unpredictable'? WA has no state income tax and is very billionaire and business friendly. You are perhaps thinking of Seattle politics, but Seattle!=WA. WA votes very blue during elections but it's for the pro-wealthy billionaire-friendly blues. WA doesn't elect the AOC squad type blues.

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

#313

Post by j_walter » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

stevenwoo wrote: post #308

paulmd wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

re: West coast - one of the big wild fires got within five miles of Cupertino two years ago, local friends got evacuation notices before the fire was stopped, and all homes and I imagine even manufacturing buildings have to be built to withstand an earthquake all along the coast.

Everything is built for seismic safety, but that doesn't mean you won't have to scrap a ton of wafers or have any damage if there is an earthquake.

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

#314

Post by j_walter » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #302

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…

Assuming that those 600kgal start out ice cold and all end up evaporated at the boiling point, that’s 146MW of cooling. LCoE for plain solar power is about $31/MWh. Assuming you could discharge heat without evaporation at a COP of 4, that’s about $26k/day to buy power. Not at all cheap, but not insane. Interestingly, that is a lot more than the cost to buy that much water wholesale, even in Arizona, so I guess this i…

600k gallons for us is not all evaporated, thats just what we take in from the city and discharge back to them. There are temperature requirements for discharge as well so you can't just discharge 200 degree water. That doesn't really work anyway since our process cooling water has to stay at ~70 degrees.

We have some evaporation loss, but in the Phoenix climate it would be a lot more.

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

#315

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #229

raverbashing wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can manage to build your solar as to shade your building, your AC costs will greatly diminish as well.

This is the first time I've heard this from someone besides me :) I am involved with an effort to plant arbors to shade homes in low income areas of my city so that residents can afford the A/C costs. A typical home we work on has no central HVAC and has 3 or 4 window units running non-stop 6+ months of the year (Texas). Vines are fast growing and shade makes a huge impact!

Awnings are friendly as well.

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

#316

Post by sheepybloke » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

One thing I don't see discussed in the comments is the trade off of resources. While water is an important resource, a quick Google show that a "Large semiconductor fabs use as much as 100 megawatt-hours of power each hour, which is more than many automotive plants or oil refineries do." [1] If you look at a cost analysis, I'm sure the price of energy far outweighs the total price of getting their water for the plant. By building in AZ, which has the ability to get a lot of solar and cheaper energy, they can reduce that cost dramatically, so the economics can still seem viable. My company is also energy constrained and we went through a similar analysis recently. It's hard to say no when you can cut your energy costs literally by a third. [1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv....

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

#317

Post by tw04 » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

j_walter wrote: post #300

tw04 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Power bumps are a major issue and even with redundant power you get them. Even a bump that loses 15-20% of voltage on a single phase for 3-6 cycles (of 60Hz, so like 0.05-0.1s) is a huge impact to fab production tools. I've seen impacts from cars hitting telephone poles 20 miles away that have been enough to impact the fab, let alone tree branches snapping from snow and ice.

I guess I don't know why this would be an issue - you just pick an area that uses buried power lines, and there are plenty of them. And ignoring that - if you're Intel building a fab, you setup shop near one of the major transmission lines that run well above the treeline. Or build your fab just down the street from the power plant...

St. Cloud, MN. Palo, IA. Brownville, NE. Burlington, KS. - nuclear plants.

I'm sure they all have plenty of cheap land to put fabs up on and if you take one of the norther states you'll cut your cooling bill to less than zero for several months out of the year without any evaporation.

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

#318

Post by UncleOxidant » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

KirillPanov wrote: post #303

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).

Not tax incentives. Predictable regulators. Central Washington is ideal for chip fabs: tons of cheap electricity and excellent infrastructure, massive existing water supply, as/more geologically stable than Arizona, zero hurricanes/tornadoes. Three hours from Seattle is not commuting range, but it's close enough that the chip designers could easily do monthly fab visits. People underestimate how much idea exchange we…

Ok, so why not Idaho, then? There are already Micron fabs there.

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

#319

Post by KirillPanov » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #318

KirillPanov wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not tax incentives. Predictable regulators. Central Washington is ideal for chip fabs: tons of cheap electricity and excellent infrastructure, massive existing water supply, as/more geologically stable than Arizona, zero hurricanes/tornadoes. Three hours from Seattle is not commuting range, but it's close enough that the chip designers could easily do monthly fab visits. People underestimate how much idea exchange we…

Ok, so why not Idaho, then? There are already Micron fabs there.

The part of Idaho where you can build cheaply (Snake River Valley, flat-ish land) is a pretty long way from the major hydro dams on the Columbia. The Snake River dams generate almost zero electricity; they exist in order to allow barge transit for farm goods. So the "cheap power" benefit is out.

Micron is a giant in memory device manufacturing, but they don't do logic chips. Memory and logic manufacturing are pretty different, and get more and more different as you get to more and more bleeding-edge processes. Proximity to Micron is nice but not a huge benefit for a foundry.

Lastly, Idaho is gorgeous and the skiing is awesome, but it doesn't check the box for hipsters who want a coastal city. Don't blame me, I don't think this way. But a lot of people do. Anyways Idaho is definitely way beyond driving distance from Seattle.

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

#320

Post by KirillPanov » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

dandotway wrote: post #312

KirillPanov wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not tax incentives. Predictable regulators. Central Washington is ideal for chip fabs: tons of cheap electricity and excellent infrastructure, massive existing water supply, as/more geologically stable than Arizona, zero hurricanes/tornadoes. Three hours from Seattle is not commuting range, but it's close enough that the chip designers could easily do monthly fab visits. People underestimate how much idea exchange we…

> Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing" Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, etc., have a strong WA presence and what has WA done to them that is 'unpredictable'? WA has no state income tax and is very billionaire and business friendly. You are perhaps thinking of Seattle politics, but Seattle!=WA. WA…

Microsoft and Amazon are software/cloud companies; they can pick up and move on a whim and Olympia knows it.

Manufacturing is much more vulnerable, over much longer timescales.

King County runs the state and everybody knows it. I don't like it, but I don't delude myself either.