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Comment by Nbox9 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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