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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't you want to build a semiconductor fabrication factory somewhere cold?

Or is it because Arizona is dry?

(honest questions, I don't know what impacts the location of a fab)

Arizona is a place where, with enough investment (like the billions here) power can be extremely green and cheap, with solar. Needing a huge amount of air conditioning is not a problem when it coincides with the moment the sun is pouring huge amounts of energy into your solar array.

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.

this leaves out the issues with the large amounts of water needed for semiconductor fabrication, although another commenter noted that Arizona has pretty good water management (I guess this includes recycling?)

> Globally, Intel is on track to achieve net positive water use by 2030. Today, in Arizona, we’re already at 95%.

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2021/manufacturing/Intel...

This is PR.

Water needs are local, except where it is explicitly part of the same watershed/supply system. 'Net positive' here means 'we help retain a bunch of water over there... <points to other side of state where no one lives and the water isn't captured well>, and use it over here <points to middle of extreme desert with greater outflows than inflows of water into all sources>', and we're net positive!

Semiconductor manufacturing needs constant power aside from AC though, it presumably doesn't stop at night due to high automation and the capital involved.

Ideally you'd overprovision with solar and use batteries to store the excess energy, to be used at night

Arizona is literally one of the best places in the world for solar & storage, they have an unbelievably reliable number of sunny days.

Arizona has a few major things going for it:

- lack of seismic activity

- very cheap, flat, easily excavated land

- rich history of fab production (see: Motorola) which provides the necessary city infra, construction groups, supply distribution to build such fabs

- consistently dry climate that despite being hot, is easily controlled for humidity

- numerous tax and subsidy enticements to do business there

>rich history of fab production

I would rank this way higher. Clustering fabs together makes it much easier to hire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... Intel, Microchip, NXP, TSMC and Entrepix all have plants in Arizona.

As an antiexample, the Bay Area has every negative attribute you could hope to think of for basing a software company there, and yet everyone does it anyway, just for hiring.

Yeah, my points are in no particular order. Specifically avoided using numbered points for that reason. You’re right in that effective hiring is a major draw.

I think it's because it's dry. Facilities guy in the semi plant I used to work in told me that their highest energy usage was when it was humid, not when it's hot or cold. Said the energy cost to cool the humid air to pull out water and then heat it back up to the fab's target temp was pretty massive.

seems like you should be able to dump part of the waste heat back into the output air after the cooling stage.

Why should it be cold? This is necessary for data centers but for factories probably it’s much better to have your own solar powered energy

You don’t need a large constant source of water. It’s a bit like filling a very large swimming pool. They also already have plants down there and it works for them because AZ is surprisingly shielded from natural disasters. Also they can utilize solar power down there.

> AZ Natural Disasters

AZ suffers from heat waves, which are steadily getting worse over time. Last year in a heat wave Phoenix saw several days above 115F. A 115F heatwave is a natural disaster mitigated by air conditioning. Hopefully a heat wave doesn’t coincide with a 2020 Texas sized electrical blackout.

This isn’t a massive problem now, but imagine how bad AZ heat waves will be by the end of his factories life.

Sure but a chip fab is a giant flat building with lots of AC and plenty of solar panels.

At this point you really can't rule out 115F heatwave anywhere since the PNW just had one.

Where do you propose to build, then? Alaska? I live near the massive Intel campuses in Hillsboro, OR. We rarely get above 100F, but we experienced the same several days of 115F+ weather this last June just before summer officially hit. Almost 200 people died in Oregon/Washington directly from that heatwave and up to 500 in BC, Canada[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/pacific-nort...

I think in the vancouver news and investigation afterwards, a bit over 1k people died.

I don’t think heat is an issue. I remember a bunch of Middle Eastern countries considered building fabs in order to diversify away from oil about 20 years ago. Of course, they also realized they’d need to import labor as well due to low-skill and unwilling local labor.

Usually a heat wave isn't accompanied by thick cloud cover that shades your solar panels.

It can kill your (human) staff though.

As I understand it, you want inexpensive power and water. Bonus points for environmental stability over absolute temperature.

There were also a lot of Tax incentives for building in this location. The company I work for is doing the electrical work and all of our materials are tax free.

You already need extreme climate and dust control don't think the location will matter that much.

You want to build them where you can staff them, and these fabs are going up next door to Intel's existing fabs in Chandler.

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