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  • Leeea - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    Beautiful.
  • Threska - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    Nice. Hope they get the water they need.
  • meacupla - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    Unlikely. Idaho, Nevada, Arizona are all changing to a dryer climate with less rain fall each year.
  • lazarpandar - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    Yes we behind keyboards know better than the experts who do this for a living.
  • Threska - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    We know quite a bit about it.

    https://youtu.be/C3RzODSR3gk
  • RealBeast - Thursday, September 15, 2022 - link

    Hey thanks, very informative video.
  • LM Hess - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    The "experts" are often employed or paid by the companies who are doing things that they shouldn't be doing. And sometimes, the "experts" are just wrong.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, September 15, 2022 - link

    The other impact probably not included is what the human labor will do to a region when a business moves into an area. Fabs aren't people-heavy operations, but to bring in the staffing needed to support the operation - staff that will live in potentially water inefficient housing, drive arms race sized SUVs to and from work, generate various forms of waste, and spit out more children to further burden the world - there is an impact to things like water supply due to that which is obviously not going to land on an environmental impact study for a given facility, but most certainly will come at a cost to the area around said new facility.
  • Threska - Thursday, September 15, 2022 - link

    Maybe they don't want to work in semiconductor manufacturing.

    https://youtu.be/jlAWx_X5opA
  • webdoctors - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    Look at the stock market this year. Everyone knew inflation started last year, the gov would be raising rates and QT would be incurring. However, the Billionaires and experts didn't imagine the huge drop in stock prices, and markets. Look at Twitter and how over valued it was, why not just wait for a few months for it to drop billions.

    Tons of stuff the "experts" seem to get wrong, even with billions at stake. Especially when it comes to timings and time spans.
  • Samus - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    Not everyone has a Delorean to know the future.

    As far as water and fabs go, they don't need much water. No more than any other industrial complex that size. They recycle almost everything they use, inherent by design due to the strict filtering requirements. They rarely start with naturally sourced water from a river, etc, like a NPP would. TSMC recycles 99% of their fab water for reuse. Basically what they start with during a wafer cycle is what they will use again after purification on the next cycle.
  • quorm - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    It's not quite that high. Tsmc is closer to high 80's % process water recycling. This is in Taiwan, though, and I'm not sure if the specialized water recycling facilities will be built in the US.
  • Samus - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    The following PR backs up your "high 80's" comment with results of 86.7% in 2019. However, they opened the Tainan Science Park Reclaimed Water Plant last year which at the moment recycles "over 90% of water to industrial purity" and "the plant's total water demand of 118,000m 3/d will be fully supplied by reclaimed water by 2028" or in other words, 100% reclaimed water and 0% dependent on municipal water supply in the next 5 years.

    It can only be assumed (and hoped for) that plants being built now, from scratch, with the momentum of climate change, will have similar facilities. After all, TSMC retrofitted a 2 decade-old site with this capability - it would be embarrassing for brand new kit to lack similar function.

    https://esg.tsmc.com/en/focus/greenManufacturing/w...
  • quorm - Thursday, September 15, 2022 - link

    That's going to depend on the economics. TW is different from the us in terms of functioning govt and climate. The climate is much, much drier at most of these new US sites (vs. normal Taiwan weather), so it would make sense to conserve water, but if they got a guarantee of water rights/priority from the local gov., they may just save money and skip conservation.
  • FreckledTrout - Friday, September 16, 2022 - link

    I have not seen any mandates from the US on water recycling albeit I bet that will follow along once enough fab capacity is rolled out.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, September 16, 2022 - link

    Do they heat the water that goes into the rivers or other bodies? That is one of the issues related to factories and water use. It's not just the amount of water that disappears; it's also how much it is heated and thus makes habitats unlivable for various parts of the food chain.

    I am not, at all, an expert in fabs' water use. This is just a question.
  • Papaspud - Friday, September 16, 2022 - link

    The factory will be using groundwater, it isn't close to any body of open water- I used to drive by there every day- that place is already huge.
  • quorm - Saturday, September 17, 2022 - link

    Well, if they have their own wells, it's much harder to track how much they are using.

    According to Micron's PR, they recycle about 70% of their water. I doubt that they will increase that % to tsmc levels.
  • Samus - Wednesday, September 21, 2022 - link

    Oxford, afaik the waste water from these facilities is ambient temp, and likely cleaner than it came in. It just has different minerals\components that the incoming water might not have, such as too many oxygen molecules that are more time consuming to filter out than incoming water that is less oxygenated but has other components that filter easier.

    The ejected water may have chemical trace elements that need to be processed out before legally disposing of it. This is actually why plants recycle water as much as possible: its cheaper than cleaning the water to refuse regulations.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, September 16, 2022 - link

    Getting things wrong for the public-facing messaging is part of the business.
  • meacupla - Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - link

    The most likely reason for Micron building in Idaho, Intel in Arizona, and Samsung in Texas, is because they already have a supply chain running there. Each of those three companies have existing fabs near each of these new $15B fabs.

    It's very likely that it is cheaper to expand capacity, than to build a whole new supply chain where clean water can be secured, and where there is reliable energy.

    Although clean water and reliable energy are important, there is a third, highly time sensitive, and very difficult to manufacture compound. Etching gas for EUV, or extremely pure Hydrogen Fluoride.
    Building a plant that can manufacture HF, in the purity needed for EUV, is costly, and takes just as much time as building the chip fab itself.

    Ask Samsung how much it cost them to build a HF chemical factory after Japan embargoed HF shipments to Korea in 2019.
  • Anymoore - Thursday, September 15, 2022 - link

    Just a DRAM fab without a NAND fab seems like a mistake, especially since Samsung is expanding in both, as well as foundry.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, September 15, 2022 - link

    Architecture CGI for the facility looks really nice! There are even shadows cast by the trees and, a bus, and some nice little cars in the parking lots. It'd be nice to see that come to fruition in the real world as depicted.

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