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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

#321

Post by dandotway »

KirillPanov wrote: post #320
dandotway wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, you can't exactly relocate a campus with 5,000-10,000 employees to another state 'on a whim', but yeah, your point still stands that it's a lot easier than moving a factory that builds physical things.

I recall IBM and other tech companies being called out for occasionally deliberately moving campuses to other states because this creates an excuse to sever certain employees who can't otherwise be lawfully fired.

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

#322

Post by Cheyana »

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…

The current fab here in Chandler, Arizona recycles all of its water now.

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

#323

Post by rdsnsca »

inglor_cz wrote: post #199
Jensson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a normal year 40 % of the food the US grows ends up in the garbage, Canada is even higher at 50 %.

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

#324

Post by no-s »

diskzero wrote: post #281
rland wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irrigati…

> 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.

(also Tucsonian) Whats really sad is we still have to search far and wide for decent quality hay to feed to our horses...

The fab investments also create a nexus of interesting jobs related to construction and fab operations. I really enjoy working in the latter sector.

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

#325

Post by j_walter »

tw04 wrote: post #317
j_walter wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just having underground lines doesn't stop everything...and no one has underground lines for extremely high voltage.

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

#326

Post by paulmd »

j_walter wrote: post #277
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…

No semiconductor site has enough backup generators to run continuously and you can only have so much diesel onsite to run those generators (a few hours or maybe a full day if you are lucky). They are there for basic safety systems, air handling and lighting. For example Samsung was down for many weeks after the February storm that caused power outages and fuel delivery issues. They literally ran out of diesel to run…

Your comments in this thread have been really interesting to read and I thank you for taking the time to respond to us all!
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