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 the process, but not the water loss using in cooling.
This is also evident in the environmental goals set forth by Intel...they talk about returning 100% water to the environment. Well evaporation is back to the environment...
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 usage.
I know this because I have visited the old fabs and they are quite good at re-using and capturing the water since it’s inside an air controlled bunker. Modern (and older) fabs aren’t open to air, so water loss is minimal.
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?
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?
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.
I'm not so sure about the hotter months, but during the colder months, it can potentially be used for greenhouses, or for when temperature dips during nighttimes. Lots of tropical plants want hotter, moist air and will die from frost.
We have some evaporation loss, but in the Phoenix climate it would be a lot more.
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%.
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 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.
(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.
Here is proof, it's just some of the cooling towers at Intel's current site in Chandler: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.2451403,-111.8923691,135m/da...
If they need so much water, does that mean you agree that
Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state for the 2020 election had more to do with the choice than anything I think.
of course I guess there's wildfires now too, but that's not really an Arizona thing either.
of course you're not wrong about companies often being lured by the particular states that are willing to offer them massive tax breaks, in some cases even to places like Texas that do get hurricanes on an occasional basis. And that doesn't always work out well in the end like with the Texas power outages that seem to be occurring more and more frequently, there are a LOT of fabs in Dallas/etc that are having to deal with widespread power outages multiple times a year.
(you're the expert here but it seems like the generator capacity usually isn't sufficient to continue normal operation of the fab, it's more to maintain containment/purity of the feedstock and you still lose wafers that were in-process at the time? that's the impression I've gotten at least)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-reopens-austin-chip-pl...
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.
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.
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.
For example: the google machine tells me that cotton production in AZ uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5-3.5 acre ft. water per acre. Would a large fab consume a comparable amount of water?
1 acre = 43.5k sq ft 1 acre foot = 325k gallons
The Intel site in Portland, OR uses ~2 Billion gallons of water per year. They claim they are bringing enough recycle capacity to save about half that.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2017/08/intel_wate...
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).
a) Water the lawn (in the summer)
b) Take a long shower
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.
Sounds like it would be multiples more expensive to get that to work though.
In a residential setting, it is typically a single-use where water purified to drinking water standards are used to flush toilets and water the lawn.
The idea here is to make better use of inputs and outputs. The folks in the Earthship projects just outside of Taos, NM build residences that cycle water 3-4 times before it goes out through a septic field, which feeds vegetation.
In none of those cycles, are the water re-used for the same purpose. You don’t try to purify grey water from bathing to reuse for bathing or washing, and instead, it is treated onsite through plants to reuse for things like flushing toilets. Water transports things, so what you look at is what is the waste being carried and how can that “waste” be used as an input for something else.
In the case of the fab, it sounds as if the major waste being carried is heat, via evaporative cooling. As I have mentioned in a different comment, that likely changes the microclimate near the fabs. So one area to look at are what kind of yields we can get with that changed microclimate? It depends upon the design of the cooling towers, and weather the water carrying the waste heat was still liquid when it got to the tower. Maybe there is another use for heated water, not specifically in the fab process itself, but something that could benefit humans and the ecology in a different way. For example, diverting some of that water to areas where zone 10 (tropical) plants are put into cultivation.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4292388
So I would assume Intel is also doing similar.
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).
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've lost by separating design from fabrication.
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". It's not about taxes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And farming has been booming in Arizona. I lived there about 10 years ago and even then there were a lot of complaints about all the tree farms (almonds, etc.) that were showing up in Arizona. Massive water consumption and virtually impossible to be sustainable in the desert.
If you are not trying to force greater yield in order to squeeze out profit, the nut trees can do well to yield enough for people to have their fair share.
When done as part of a practice that involves diversifying crops, the entire smallhold is far more resilient to any number of external pressure, including climate, pests, market crashes, etc.
Too bad resilience against future problems loses to maximizing profits, so all the resources are capital-efficiently extracted from one location before moving on. Even if I buy local, it’s likely that it’s farmed at a damaging scale. I’m guessing that sustainable farming, crop rotations, etc have fewer externalities.
(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).
The issue isn't the cost of water, it's that "free" water drives everything else (or imported water - the United States major export often seems to be exporting it's water in the form of crops, food, etc...)
After Covid and all the disruption of international trade, self-sufficiency in food production will be considered more important than before.
Water is heavily subsidized in AZ. There is little incentive to conserve it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-micro...
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 bottom of the water rights. We get what is left over after Colorado, California, and Utah get their legal share.
The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial farmers. (The Hopi people practice dryland agriculture and so don’t irrigate at all; most everyone else irrigates using inefficient and destructive land management practices). Aquifers here have been draining, and it has been a big issue. Farmers are already getting restricted on water use this year (despite an unusually wet monsoon season), and water restrictions has not hit residential users yet. It is on the radar for policymakers though.
Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable. They each had to invest an enormous amount in the more seismically active Taiwan and California, and it gets more sensitive the smaller the chips get.
If we want to conserve more water, the most effective way is to change commercial farming practices. Fabs have already invested a lot to reducing ongoing water use.
For an example of what I mean by better land management practices in regards to water: https://youtu.be/-8nqnOcoLqE