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Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

The water used by a chip factory is almost 100% recycled

Do you mind providing a source for that claim?

I've seen several articles[1] mentioning that the current Taiwanese semiconductor shortage has a lot to do with water rationing due to drought. Do semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan not recycle water like semiconductor manufacturers in Phoenix?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-is-bad-taiwan...

Semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan are mostly around the Hsinchu area. They paid a premium to truck water from other areas and the government limited agricultural activities in Hsinchu as well. They almost got affected, but then there was a heavy rain in late May and the water rationing was lifted for Hsinchu.

Currently COVID poses a larger threat to semiconductor production as multiple COVID clusters are detected in packaging/testing plants.

Pretty sure the OP is right, not sure about Taiwan

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/why-intel-tsmc-are -building-water-dependent-chip-plants-in-arizona.html

It says page not found.

You should notice that the text after the URL still looks like a URL, so there must've been an extra space in the middle of it...

Feel free to burn this comment to the ground, but is this really the level of HN reader nowadays? Can't even notice a spurious space...

So they would be OK paying a 10x price premium? at least that would be the easiest way to determine if the claim is true.

At least in Taiwan earlier this spring was facing a drought which came close to impacting semiconductor production.

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