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Comment by wibagusto | Hacker News Reader

2-4 million gallons per day is a lot of water to piss away for some chips that go out of fashion in 5 years.

Pretty much any facility capable of manufacturing semiconductor components has been very busy for the past few years -- Intel even had to resurrect 22nm chips at some time. Why do you assume that this will "go out of fashion in 5 years"? Historically this seems extremely unlikely. If anything, tens of millions of people going out of poverty every year are going to be consuming even more chips.

And every year 80+ million people come of age such that they become electronics consumers, buying smartphones, laptops and so on. A billion new electronics consumers every ~12 years. The world is going to need a lot more chip manufacturing capacity over the next few decades.

The water doesn’t disappear. It stays h2o

Just now in a place/form (underground or in the sky, and if underground usually contaminated) that makes it economically far less valuable - maybe even useless.

If the economics of water didn't matter, we'd be happy to build nuke power plants and run condensers all day to get it, but the reality is the marginal cost of water determines the feasibility of vast sections of economic activity, and that determines the fortunes (or not) of people and their leaders in concrete ways.

This is also true of other natural resources of course - oil, iron, coal, uranium, etc.

Intel recycles and stores the water. They even remineralize and put back into the city water system. they don't dump it into the dessert.

They don’t do that for a large portion of the water - they dance around that with weasel words (like ‘return to the environment’), aka evaporate. You can see they are constantly weaseling out of giving anything concrete that someone could accuse them of lying, or could use to point out the actual impacts, and stating ‘a lot’ can be reclaimed from evaporation for instance in the building - while ignoring cooling, which is evaporative at these scales [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/why...]

It’s pretty typical corporate green washing of a real problem that other folks will end up having in diffuse, hard to pin on them ways, that with some nudging on the right officials will never be pinned on them. In my experience, anyway.

And you posted that brilliant insight using what...?

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