Intel's $20B Ohio factory could become world's largest chip plant
reuters.com
reuters.com
International airport, large rail depot, extremely low cost of living and a city/region that has more good restaurants and activities than might be expected. Ohio State University is in the city and is a huge school that is rapidly growing in academic standing. Road transit in the area is also very good allowing access to any part of the city from any other part in rapid fashion. Good schools, relatively low crime, etc. Probably the only drawback, from a lifestyle point of view, would be the winter and that's not even that bad, compared to other winter regions.
Source: I grew up in central Ohio. Public schools made it a point to practice tornado drills. In addition, there was an old Cold War-era air raid siren a block from the house I grew up in that had been repurposed and tested for tornado warnings. One of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9rRSY0dRIU
Edit: read about Xenia, Ohio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia,_Ohio
> Xenia has a history of severe storm activity. According to local legend, the Shawnee referred to the area as "the place of the devil wind" or "the land of the crazy winds" (depending upon the translation).
> On April 3, 1974, a tornado rated F5 on the Fujita scale cut a path directly through the middle of Xenia during the 1974 Super Outbreak
> Xenia was struck by an F2 tornado on April 25, 1989, and again by an F4 tornado on September 20, 2000.
The probability of a large, damaging tornado at a particular spot in Ohio is quite small compared with the risk of damaging earthquakes in other locations. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-will-o...
Interesting. I'm unfamiliar with building code provisions that are designed to mitigate the effects of tornadoes, which are arguably the most destructive force on Earth apart from an erupting volcano or a nuclear attack, on a semiconductor fab, which is arguably among the most sensitive and easily-disrupted facilities ever built. Any good sources for further reading?
I have an old Soviet invasion map of central Ohio, marking all potential airfields etc.
Soviets had a concrete plan to invade Ohio? Wow. How were the troops supposed to cross the ocean?
The invaders would cross the ocean from an orbital path streaking in as multiple units launched from submersed platforms or silos in the Motherland raining down from heaven. Those invaders would not need to put a single boot on the ground.
In the wake of the George Floyd protests family talked about their concern that out of state “Antifa looters” were spotted driving down the interstate headed right for them.
I don’t mean to call you a liar, Im sure there indeed are some obscure targets, and your home might be one.
I do think it’s a fascinating phenomenon- this idea of small town obsession with their own destruction.
A quote from Terrence Malick’s BadLands goes something like:
> and if the reds ever do drop the bomb, well I hope they drop it right here in Rapid City (South Dakota).
Wright Patt definitely has some high level stuff stored, I have a few friends who work engineering there.
Can you please post this? That sounds so interesting.
Also I submitted that link as a fresh thread [1], because this admittedly fun rabbit hole has little to do with Intel and Columbus' sprawl.
Tiny Waverly would have definitely been wiped off the map because of its fuel refining facility. There's a non-zero chance I keep my EMP-proof diesel truck running due to growing up in those times.
[1] https://www.jumpjet.info/Emergency-Preparedness/Hazard-Maps/...
Looks to be a 1:500,000 topo map of the Ohio/Kentucky/WV border. You can see Columbus and I think Dayton at the top. Google translate via camera is a real charm here.
Apologies in advance for Imgur, but two other services I tried simply didn't work /sigh.
I don't think there's a city in the United States that isn't an active target of at least one of the 6,000 current Russian nuclear weapons.
https://www.abortionislegalinohio.com/
You can say that it's not technically illegal now, but it's unquestionably under assault in a way that it's not and won't ever be in California.
Also plenty of people here want to ban abortion too. Tons of small counties have managed to prevent any kind of reproductive health clinics from opening or defacto forced them to close.
My prediction is state governments will make a big difference in quality of life for many people.
California does. CA also has other protections beyond federal ones for breastfeeding and other pregnancy related accommodations, and gives employees the right to sit at work if they do not need to stand.
I would not raise my kids in a state outside of CA to WA and NJ to MA and IL just for this reason.
How is this a "personal liberty" thing? This in turn is probably violating the freedom of association that employers have...
>breastfeeding and other pregnancy related accommodations, and gives employees the right to sit at work if they do not need to stand
All of these trade one liberty for the other.
So you can either worry about the small picture and employers losing a little freedom about who they have to employ. Or you can look at the big picture and realize that for women to maintain financial independence and still be incentivized to have kids, society needs to offer them something.
1. Caltech
2. Stanford
3. Cal
4. UCLA
5. Harvey Mudd
6. USC
7. UCSD
8. UCD
9. UCSB
10. CPSLO
11. UCI
12. CPP
13. UCSC
14. UCR
Oh I know plenty of Californian cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Google.
The other ones are good schools, but in a distinctly second tier to that group.
What on earth do you mean by second tier?
For example, when it comes to hardware & electrical engineering, UCSD alone is as productive as say Purdue & Illinois combined. And it’s a young university too.
California has 840 miles of coast line. Absolutely no shortage of water.
Desalination and PV technology keep improving, too.
1. Northwestern
2. Notre Dame
3. Wisconsin Madison
4. Ohio State
5. Minnesota Twin Cities
6. Carnegie Mellon
7. University of Chicago
8. Purdue
9. Penn St
10. Washington University St. Louis
11. UIUC
12. Case Western
13. Michigan
So there are plenty of world class educational institutions in the Midwest. Frankly I’d take this list over your list and that’s not including other brand name universities like Indiana, Pitt, Michigan State, Nebraska, or Iowa, some of which do “non-sexy” research in agricultural science and other fields. Ohio State has the only undergraduate wedding engineering program in North America even. It really is an absolute powerhouse of a region with far more national brand name recognition and reputation and monster enrollment numbers.
California has all that stuff because it’s literally further from SF to LA than it is from Columbus to DC.
I was just going off of the “Midwest” versus distance.
> California has all that stuff because it’s literally further from SF to LA than it is from Columbus to DC.
Yea it’s a big state. I’d love to go off of distance though so we can include lots of other fantastic universities just to further drive home my point.
No, Davis, Berkeley, and Stanford are all 350+ miles from LA.
One night while struggling with a problem for work I took a walk and wandered by where I calculated the IBM 650 must have been located back in the day, hoping for some kind of inspiration, or something. It was a good distraction but it did not work at all.
Took a violin course; the teacher, one on one, was FAR too good for what I needed and later played the Brahms concerto in Toronto! According to the rules, at the end had to play for the violin faculty, including the former concert master of the Cleveland Symphony -- poor guy! Eventually I made it through much of the Bach E Major Partita and the Chaconne! Great fun! Met my wife.
The math department had some good mathematicians. The weekly seminar flew in some of the best mathematicians in the world. Later where I got my Ph.D., at a much more famous school, the seminars were nowhere near as good.
As a grad student, since I was teaching ugrad courses, I got paid, enough actually to live nicely, e.g., eat all my meals in restaurants, and save some money!
But I didn't fit into their program: (1) My first semester they put me in their abstract algebra course. Okay: I'd done well in a similar course in ugrad school, and my ugrad honors paper was on group representations. So that I wouldn't have to waste time in the course, the prof and I had an unspoken agreement: At the end he gave me a little oral exam in his office -- I went through some Galois theory! (2) They put me in a topology course, from the famous book by Kelley. In the first class, the prof said that the homework was to work all the exercises! HA! Some of the exercises were notoriously difficult! I wondered if HE could work all the exercises! Besides, in ugrad school I'd taken a reading course from that book -- once a week gave a lecture to a prof, chapter by chapter, one week on the theorems and the next week on the exercises. For the material on Moore-Smith convergence, a second prof showed up -- maybe he wanted to learn some about that topic! I wrote out solutions to about 1/3rd of the exercises (to be honest not the same ~1/3rd I'd done in ugrad), turned them in at the end, and did show for the final exam. (3) They put me in a real analysis course. On the first test, with just one exercise, in set theory, the prof wanted to "see me after class". He had marked my test paper as wrong. Gee, I doubt that many students got that exercise. Since the previous summer I'd had a course in axiomatic set theory, the test was easy for me. When I explained to the prof that my notation, I didn't have time on the test to define, was standard, he saw that (A) my solution was correct and (B), as we both noticed and he confessed, was one step shorter than his. I didn't know that prof, had never had any interaction with him, but concluded he was for whatever reason on my case. My victory over him on that test was enough for me -- I never saw him again. No biggie loss: The book he was using was awful, e.g., was just some typed notes -- Royden, one of the best math texts ever, was MUCH better!
So, net, I did my teaching, used some of the money I was getting, more than I needed, to have fun while saving some money, did my teaching, met my wife, and started violin -- I liked it!
Since that was Indiana, that is, out in the Midwest flat farming country, a lot of the other grad math students were pretty good athletes. So one afternoon I showed up at the volley ball game those students held. Soon I was very much not wanted! I was the last to be chosen! And soon even the other team would make sure I never got to touch the ball! Those guys took athletics VERY seriously, much more seriously than the math!
But in the ugrad teaching, nearly all the girls tried hard to look pretty and be sweet! One course I taught was some math for elementary education majors. There were maybe 30 students in the class. There was one boy there, maybe looking to meet the girls! So, all the rest were girls. And they had their career direction decided, no doubt, high determination -- they'd get a teaching certificate, a husband, a home, and some babies. NO DOUBT! And they were just AWFUL at that math, and soon just terrified of it! Due to the influence of computing, I had to teach them about base 2 and base 16 -- that was more painful for them than having their teeth pulled! I also taught calculus, trigonometry, etc., and in those courses the girls did fine, no angst! So, there was something about elementary education majors!!!
The money: I lived with low rent, in a dorm that had the option of no meals in a university cafeteria. Since I was teaching, I paid no tuition and, as I remember, paid no fees. My teaching was a bargain for the university, i.e., I was no doubt MUCH cheaper per course taught than a prof. They had me teaching a wide variety of courses and, one semester, two courses. That wasn't fair to me, but I didn't mind.
It was an old dorm, REALLY nice. And it was next to the music school and, still, not far from the math department or lots of places to eat.
When was this? Nowadays the grad students are constantly complaining that they don't get paid enough to live and mandatory fees are too high.
The problem was the author of the book had no idea why they were doing this, or what the purpose of this was. It provided the curriculum, but had already lost the inherent reason behind it.
As for getting in-depth information on topics, you don't need a university for that anymore. Library Genesis and sci-hub has more in-depth information on topics than you could ever possibly absorb, assuming it's legal in your country. What universities uniquely offer is community, financial support, and research: without universities, sci-hub would be a pretty empty place.
There were 1800 engineers in my graduating class (1995).
As for computer architecture, OSU is not heavily into computer architecture. It's much more focused on custom accelerators and ASICs as well as semiconductor research. And it is recognized as one of the best ECE programs in the world with one of the main problems with it being that the CS department is comparatively weak.
My graduating class, in a December, was still over 1,000 engineers. Spring graduation typically had 2.5-3.5K/yr.
I'd make a stronger statement than "You're not going to learn electrical and computer engineering by reading stuff on Sci-Hub." You aren't going to learn by reading. You have to actually do stuff in order to construct the knowledge inside your own mind, and as you say, that's hard. But the information is available, even if it isn't academically published; in electrical engineering, in addition to sci-hub stuff, you have Bob Pease columns, appnotes (especially the ones from Analog and Linear), The Art of Electronics, EEVblog, allaboutcircuits, Hackaday, Marco Reps, Camenzind's book, Jeri Ellsworth's Short Circuits, Don Lancaster's website, Forrest Mims's books, patents, Adafruit, etc. LTSpice is proprietary but gratis, while QUCS, ngSpice, and WR-SPICE are free software, and now you can get stuff mostly automatically fabbed by JLCPCB for ridiculously low prices. And with the rise of iceSTORM it's becoming practical to design gateware without signing a support contract with Xilinx. Just like the undergraduate EECE curriculum, a lot of this stuff is aimed at beginners (you can learn a lot by fiddling with Falstad's circuit.js even if it doesn't do Monte Carlo simulation), so it doesn't go very deep, but some of it is very much not.
(Still, there is a lot of information that isn't publicly available at all, because it's a trade secret of TSMC or Lam Research or Intel. But the professors aren't walking undergraduates through that stuff either.)
The huge thing about custom accelerators and ASICs and semiconductor research, though, is that you can't really do it in your basement. MPW/shuttle programs like MOSIS and CMP go a long way to making chip design accessible, but it's going to be tough to even run DRCs on your designs without proprietary software, and then it still costs you US$10k to get back 10 chips that don't work. Going to a university for EECE, even for undergrad, might give you the chance to go through that painful cycle enough times to actually get something working, and the mentorship you need to find out what you don't know.
IU is a great liberal arts school - but doesn't compete in engineering by design.
Ohio is a great place for this kind of corporate gentrification. As a CMU grad, I know there was a collective desire to get students to stick around, but there was better lifestyle, more money, etc.. leaving after school and a fairly large number of us weren't from the area to begin with. Something like this can be a game changer for the region, plus, there will be dozens of additional companies that set up camp and start up there for support.
If it really works and the region supports it and leans in, all of the schools anywhere near by will step up their engineering programs.
As I have come to realize, when a mistake or delay costs $XX million, it often makes sense to hire with high educational background. I have also come to realize that your bog standard MS or Phd isn't as talented as you might think.
University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne was the pre-eminent school for Computer Science. It’s still a fantastic school but most don’t seem to want to live in a cornfield.
Between this, Ohio's shameful anti-LGBTQ laws, and the truly awful racism, it's really like the state is trying to drive people away. I moved to CA 7 years ago and couldn't imagine moving back after talking to friends who are still there.
A bunch of victimhood to excuse their bad actions (and change the subject). So they are sacrificing assets and essential services to the American people for political revenge? They won't provide public goods to Democrats?
They lament some social issues on campus from a populist perspective but sometimes I think it's not always without merit, or at least a discussion.
The political issue is at the elementary and high school level, and it's more about supporting families than it is the schools, where 'teacher quality' is a huge and ridiculous distraction. If every kid got a chance to attend school while living what most of us would call 'Normal Middle Class Circumstances' (i.e. decent parents, stable home, economic stability, no gangs or crime) there would be progress.
This investment is such a hugely important announcement, the number of really high quality jobs ... and the secondary economic factors will be even bigger.
The US Midwest has long been under utilized.
If US leadership could do anything, it would be to convince some of the big SV operators to invest decisively and aggressively in 2cnd and 3rd tier places which are frankly very prepared for it. Ohio, Miami, Raleigh, Michigan, Chicago etc..
Concentration in specific areas has been going on too long and is at least a decade past it's benefit.
The assertion wasn’t that Republicans are too stupid to know the value; but that knowing the value, they still want to make it difficult for more people to achieve it.
Rich people recognize the value of money while at the same time denying money to others.
The US spends more on education as a % of GDP than anywhere in the world. And - it has a very high GDP/capita as a starting point. And sends more people on to post-secondary education than most places, more than in most countries were post-secondary is socialized.
Germany, with fully socialized University has to ration it - the end up 'streaming' kids by age 15, and those slots are disproportionately allocated to rich kids, moreover, the number of post-secondary students (in College programs, not internships) is lower than in the US, kind of exacerbating the inequality problem.
To boot, the US has a massive problem with post-secondary debt.
University education itself is not the only key to success, rather, it was historically a status marker of the elite. Since it is not just that anymore, we have to be more practical about who we send to school.
I would argue we have too many liberal arts graduates, and not nearly enough trade programs and internships. While Liberal Arts programs absolutely embellish students with higher order thinking, and it would be nice if everyone could attend ... it's frankly the purview of the people who can afford to pay for it without having that cost related to a job on the other end.
And, given that in the US that basic literacy is still a serious problem for many of those in High School ... do we really think that the quantity of post-secondary students really the problem?
Probably not.
The US does a pretty good job at getting people into post-secondary programs, even when they generally would not be qualified, and it's arguably inefficient.
If this were 1970, then it would be an easy argument of 'getting more people into College'.
But conditions have changed and it's a much more difficult situation.
Keep the bars high and objective instead of trying to send everyone to College by virtue of magical thinking.
Maybe we can graduate everyone from highschool as a matter of social equality, but providing kids with projects they can sink their effort into and especially develop the middle-tier apprenticeship programs (i.e. Germany) would be probably a better approach.
I'll bet $1000 that these Intel Chip Fabs require just as many 'trained specialists' as they do College Grad designers.
I'd also bet $1000 that 'Republicans' (at least practically and ideologically) would back that kind of approach.
We could start by breaking 'Doctor' and 'Nurse' into more categories. By making college only 2 or 3 years + 2 years teachers college instead of requiring a 4 year degree. By defining and regulating some types of skilled trades, possibly even software. Etc.
And of course, probably by raising minimum wage, supporting automation and happily moving out non-productive jobs to Mexico and Vietnam where the net surpluses are greater anyhow.
In 2021, it's reasonable for people to take the position that fudging more people through college is just not the most productive or even equitable approach we should approach.
Which ones specifically? I’d like to learn more and this is something that I’ll pester my representative about. For Columbus specifically in day-to-day life I’m curious what effect these laws have. We have gay clubs and actually a reputation as a “gay mecca”. In Columbus we also have the doo-dah parade, a gigantic, corporate sponsored gay pride parade, and lots of drag events like during our big Halloween party.
> and the truly awful racism
Eh you can find racism in all 50 states, California included. People say this but it’s just the news talking that’s coloring your opinion.
They also have laws that allow medical providers to refuse treatment to LGBTQ.
This is just from a few moments on Google; there's a wiki article with more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Ohio
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphori...
Regardless of your political stance on the matter, this is off topic. You should ask yourself why you feel compelled to thrust this subject here.
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that football leagues are used to categorize engineering institutions?
1- Big 10 is not an “engineering school conference”.
2- In what world is Pitt a prominent engineering school? You have no idea what you’re talking about.
In Aerospace, within both U.S. government and industry, midwest engineering schools are widely seen as producing more undegrad-level engineers who actually want to be engineers than places like Stanford.
Stanford, in particular, seems to attract proportionally way more engineering majors that want to use engineering credentials as a gateway out of engineering (high finance, startup executives, management, etc.). A colleague of mine in Big Aerospace says there's a pretty consistent pattern of not being able to hang on to many Stanford or MIT grads for very long. Granted Big Aerospace can be a miserable place to work in a number of ways, but if you want to hone your craft in a number of aerospace disciplines, you'll need some level of exposure to that kind of knowledge/experience-base. You're not going to get that at the next delivery drone or flying taxi startup.
Not sure the NM sizes being made at these sites off hand.
I doubt socks are tasty, but please let us know.
In Ohio for residential, which is a good bit more expensive than commercial/utility scale solar, the payback period is about 12 years[4], well within the margin of getting your money back and then some.
0: https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/mayor/news/cincinnati-to-const... 1: https://newmarketsolar.com/ 2: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018... 3: https://solargis.com/file?url=download/Germany/Germany_PVOUT... 4: https://www.energysage.com/local-data/solar-panel-cost/oh/
Pretty sure Germany is more know for poor green energy planning, burning more coal, and instance on non optimal strategies for power generation (killing nuclear).
[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=20.797201,-46.494141,3&s...
I've only ever seen billboards for "clean coal" in SE Ohio, SW PA, and West Virginia.
Ohio produces 1/20th the coal of WV - which is a much more economically poor state - and coal isn't even really that important to WV's economy. Ohio's economy is much more similar to PA - and PA produces 10x more coal: https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/weekly/
Coal is all politics.
I mean, it is still used for a lot of energy production - almost everywhere in the US - Ohio definitely: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=OH.
I'm sure power plants don't want to shut down overnight because someone bans coal completely - and they shouldn't. But it's just not economical in most places - the plants are phasing out naturally almost everywhere.
The less scale there is with coal - the less viable it becomes. It's a vicious cycle.
Power plants naturally phasing out because coal isn't economical will have almost 0 impact on Ohio.
Places like WV - that's a different story. WV sells coal! Ohio doesn't.
Coal also doesn't employ people like it used to. It employs 3,000 people in Ohio: https://www.ohiocoal.com/information-library/history-coal-mi.... That's out of a ~5.4M labor force: https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.oh.htm. That's ~0.05% of the workforce... Even WV is only ~0.15%...
It's really only important to a few barons who want coal to stick around long after it's economically viable (the governor of WV).
Surely TSMC advanced the process itself, but Samsung and Intel are not that far behind. But all of 3 use ASML technology and it is not allowed to be exported to China or Russia for that matter. Attacking Taiwan will make a prospect of getting that for China even more unlikely.
Here is a tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El8-Kqv6vLE
ASML also has a huge R&D campus in San Diego doing cutting edge lithography research. I applied for a job there a couple of years ago.
It's why people view the ability to ignore politics as a privilege having the resources to just avoid whatever they happen to do gives you a massive degree of freedom.
Also aren't these progressive policies supposed to have helped people on the lower end of the economic scale rather then forced them out?
Its not a long term strategy when the majority suffer. Thats why the blue side have shifted towards pushing European style Democratic Socialism policies and the Red has shifted into authoritarian right style policies.
>Also aren't these progressive policies supposed to have helped people on the lower end of the economic scale rather then forced them out?
What progressive policies? There is no real progressive party in the US. California(and the rest of the states (save for a few districts here and there) has been extremely hostile to real progressives. What we have now on the "left" is a combination of neo-liberal right leaning centrists mixed in with fake leftist social populism.
That's what people said about Salt Lake City and Boise... until about 5 years ago. Cost of living has skyrocketed since 2017, housing alone has doubled in price. It doesn't take long for a low cost of living region to become high cost of living.
Yes, because it's the only major city that's growing. Cleveland, Cincinatti, Toledo, and Dayton are all losing population year-over-year while Columbus's grows.
https://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/apa/d/los-angeles-stud...
Apartments.com says theres like hundreds of studios available at this price range across LA:
All that being said, I have every intention on trying to work for Intel or at the tech hub itself, make my money/deal with it until retirement age, then get the heck out of here and find a place far far away where I can get something that looks and feels like this place once was.
The biggest expense is typically housing. And if you bought the house, it means the biggest expense is... building equity into an asset you can sell afterward.
Keep in mind the engineer who purchased a 2 million house in Palo Alto can sell it for two million, and then move to Ohio to a much cheaper house purchased in cash. The reverse isn't true.
Main issue in Palo Alto (and to a large extent the rest of the bay area) is that there's massive population growth in the bay area, but very little housing is allowed to be built. This creates artificial scarcity and the people that bought houses 30yrs ago accrue massive wealth because of it at the expense of new people (and the new people that manage to buy at exorbitant rates also end up paying the majority share of taxes too).
This is the natural incentive made worse by things like locked property taxes and rent control. You really need legislation that allows the market to build (easier said than done).
The rules created by existing residents where designed to push up rent and home prices, and they have succeeded.
Remember that even when you aren't hampered by lack of space and/or zoning, most build starts are still 'investments'. I knew a whole lot of folks who did homebuilding in the first decade of the century. Housing starts were all over the place, partially because the investors were sure that with prices rising, it was a sure thing, right?
But then the market glut happened. Housing starts stopped. All of those folks left homebuilding and few if any ever went back to it.
I think nowadays Investors are back to preferring smaller buildouts, potentially in more phases. The supply/labor issues from covid haven't helped things lately though.
There was actually enough programmers, but they had to compete with automotive wages which are typically above 6 figures.
Ohio doesn't have that industry, so it might be a way to get cheap educated labor that would otherwise move out of state.
There are a ton of good big10 engineering schools, and columbus should be able to draw from the east coast as well, since it's a LOT less expensive (currently).
As for location, in terms of shipping, they're probably about on par to each other. Not sure how stable it is regarding weather conditions, or natural disaster risk in Ohio vs Arizona though.
In either case, it's good to see some uptick in distributed manufacturing. Concentrating most high technology infrastructure into a relatively small region has proven a disaster when problems inevitably happen.
This is provably false. The US population is fleeing the areas with the most natural greenery, migrating south and west. The south western US is primarily dry desert.
"As of the 2010 Census, Nevada was the fastest-growing state in the United States, with an increase of 35.1% in the last ten years. Additionally, Arizona (24.6%), Utah (23.8%), Texas (20.6%), and Colorado (16.9%) were all in the top ten fastest-growing states as well" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_United_States#Cit...
Greenery is nice. Warm weather is also nice. Lack of things like ice storms, fog, black ice, trees falling on power lines, etc., is nice, too.
It is literally across street from one of the Ohio East-2 availability zones. If they were making rack-mounted server boards, they could just walk them across the street and plug them into the cloud.
i bet it would be fun to chat and talk shop with engineers at the bath and body works lab during a lunch.
Consumers demand low cost. Many times they just buy the cheaper widget, because most people are not even capable of distinguishing the differences in performance or quality between two different widgets. But the difference in price is obvious to everyone and so most people just use that. The pressure of reducing every single penny out of the cost or semiconductors is enormous.
Top 10 OSAT (outsourced assembly and test) companies: https://evertiq.com/news/51003
The used market for CPU's is already amazing every time AWS dumps a ton due to a hardware refresh cycle - in a few years it is gonna be amazing!
Getting in on THAT would likely be a very good deal!
Are you sure? TSMC definitely does packaging. And it seems like it would be crazy to ship a delicate unpackaged die to a different factory when you could just keep it in a clean room and do everything in one place. I think it would be mad for Intel not to do packaging there.
> needs to be mounted on a complete PCB
Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.
True, the very advanced packaging techniques, such as TSMC CoWoS or Intel EMIB, are done at the fabs by those companies. These packages are for very high performance multi-chip interconnects. In both cases, the "package" itself actually is partially constructed from silicon, so we are kind of blurring the lines between what is "chip" and what is "package". The vast majority of chips do not use packages anywhere near this advanced and are not done at fabs.
Also, it's not crazy to ship finished wafers (i.e. "unpackaged die"); it's standard practice. Once the final process steps are complete in the fab, the chip is not as sensitive to fine particles any more. The wafers get loaded into cassettes then vacuum-sealed in anti-static bags. They ship out to the backend assembly sites just fine. In fact, globally, there are probably ~100,000 wafers shipped like this every day.
> Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.
True. But if you are buying an LGA socketed Intel CPU, the silicon die had to first be mounted on a substrate and the heatspreader attached. That wasn't done at fab, it was done at backend assembly. Ever notice that Intel CPU's often say something about "assembled in Malaysia" on top? That's because it was assembled in Malaysia. Intel does not have any semiconductor fabs in Malaysia, meaning, they fabbed it in one place and assembled it in another.
If you are a company like Dell or HP and you are buying the laptop BGA CPUs, Intel still had to assemble those into the BGA package before shipping to Dell/HP. And the BGA package assembly also is not done at fab.
And if you include their (expected) expansion in EUR, Intel is layering the foundation for Foundry Services. Compared to its half assed Custom Foundry in 2012/2013 with little to zero CapEx increase. Foundry Services 2.0 is very real.
Note: Investor Notes from ASML are also interesting, suggesting Intel may be ahead in terms of High-NA EUV orders. Initial shipment expected in 2023.
Game theory between US states playing to get the most gov’t assistance?
Finite pool of talent? Our plants are in rural areas and everyone is struggling to hire, from auto to bakeries.
These could be reasons.
Point being, Ohio has very few long-term drought concerns.
It's not necessarily aligned with any specific jurisdictions either, I believe it's largely based on the boundaries of the watersheds. Or at least where the boundary was ascertained to be at some point.
So yes it's very different, regardless of the semantics(?).
I remember some moonshot proposal to pipe the water to the Southwest, which is wild.
Wrong. Columbus gets most of its water from the Scioto River, part of the Ohio/Mississippi River watershed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scioto_River
You might be thinking about Cleveland instead, but I don't think anyone dares drink from the Cuyahoga River, since its had a history of catching fire.
https://www.akronohio.gov/cms/Water/Watershed_Cuyahoga/index...
It's on the shore of Lake Erie. If it were any closer to Lake Erie it would be underwater!
Lake Erie is not so far from Columbus: When I was a prof at Ohio State, my wife and I would go to Lake Erie just for a pleasant Saturday afternoon. So we'd go to Cleveland, ..., Sandusky, etc.
Seems extremely stupid from a long term perspective, but what do I know. I'm just a software guy.
Which is coming a lot quicker than anyone expected. It's why all of the cities and water authorities hooked up to Powell and the other Colorado River reservoirs are in panic mode these days.
Just a few weeks ago, the various states came to an agreement about cutting water use. Lake Mead is at historic lows. There are mandatory federal restrictions either in effect, or about to start.
You do get operational efficiency from having Fabs all located within one place. And that is a quote from TSMC's ex-CEO Morris Chang. That is why I wonder if there is something missing. Or is it the simplest explanation Not to put all eggs in one basket.
I think this is important part. If something happens to one site (problem with electricity, etc) other will work.
Also, it maybe easier to find workforce that way.
Also it will be good for development for that regions.
It seems that cost maybe around $300 million each: https://whbl.com/2022/01/19/intel-orders-asml-machine-still-...
You can more easily get numerous Senators to go to bat for you and your various causes (Arizona is a growth state, Ohio still has a lot of clout (not as much as CA, TX, FL obviously)).
If the current administration's support of the transition to electric vehicles doesn't falter, that's going to drive an increasing need for microprocessors in vehicles. Intel locating themselves in central Ohio puts their production facilities on an interstate highway hub that puts them within a 6-12 hour drive of nearly every major auto manufacturing facility in the US, which is an enormous incentive for the auto manufacturers to source from them. Additionally, Columbus has the Rickenbacker International Airport which is a dedicated air freight airport that lets them get their product global faster.
This announcement of two facilities makes me think that Phoenix is going to be a smaller facility handling the more advanced, smaller run chip designs, but host the R&D and design offices (To take advantage of the city's concentration of tech talent) while Columbus is going to be the primary production facility.
The Bollinger takes this route of minimalism. Ironically, an EV has less reliance on processing than a modern ICE vehicle.
Tesla is partially going the integration route but they still have many separate processors in the car.
If I'm not mistaken, microprocessors aren't the only semiconductor components that have been in short supply recently. Things like shaft position sensors are also solid-state devices.
There isn’t an EV in the world that is less complex than it’s ICE counterpart. GP is very mistaken. I wrote a longer explanation above.
The EV drivetrain might have more or less computers than an ICE drivetrain, but really managing batteries and a motor isn't inherently all that complicated. On the ICE side of things you have a lot more moving parts and the necessity of keeping everything properly tuned so it can pass emissions checks.
Braking and traction control I could see being fairly complicated, but it's a similar problem whether it's an ICE engine or an electric motor.
Self-driving is hugely complicated, but that's not complexity that's inherent to EVs specifically, it's just a feature that's usually only implemented on EVs for some reason.
All the other stuff: infotainment, tire pressure sensors, back up cameras, and so on are just modern car complexity.
Trust me - it's not simpler. I know you think we just apply power to the motor and go, but that is not the case. There are facets of "soft start" and it ties in to traction control, there are efficiency processes, etc. Instead of map tables for rpm and injection, you have battery heating and cooling targets with current sensed feedbacks and torque targets, and bla bla bla. Stop making me bring work home with me! ;)
EVs are not simpler. It's literally impossible in automotive to ever get simpler. At least since the 1970s. I think we're hitting a point of unsustainability and the people in charge think OTA firmware is going to fix that, I think it'll make it much worse.
EDIT: fwiw, I wish I could go back to a time when backup camera was even mention worthy of "things I consider complex in a vehicle". It's just a couple shielded wires and plugs into the radio/telamatics. I can tell you without a doubt that the starter in most vehicle is now far more complicated, to the point it too has it's own microcontroller and data bus (typically LIN, not sure I've seen a CAN yet).
Where regen gets kind of complicated is that you generally need to turn regen off when someone slams on the brakes. Unless the traction control / antilock braking system knows how regen figures into its calculations and can apply the proper braking force to each wheel taking it into account. I don't know what OEM EVs typically do in that situation, but for conversions you usually just have a brake switch so that regen can be automatically disabled when you're actually braking.
I would imagine that the people working on parts for the conversion market have a somewhat different development process than a regular auto manufacturer, in part because they're making things in low volume and in part because they just have to design generic reusable parts that do one thing properly. If you're building a whole car, you have to make sure everything works together as a cohesive whole. In some ways that would be easier because you know exactly what parts are being used together.
I would hope that most of the safety-critical real-time software that controls a car's basic functions like braking and traction control and so on would be relatively simple and straightforward, but maybe that's too much to expect. My understanding of the way the auto industry works these days is that the major manufacturers are increasing dependent on a complicated network of 3rd-party parts suppliers, and I'd expect that to influence the character of the software stack somewhat.
> the only thing an ev actually needs chips for is charge controllers which can be old fab tech, and motor controllers
I wish I had the time to explain how this could not be more wrong.
Quickly, I’ll mention that the vehicle I’m working on has 8 separate modules for the driver’s seat. Inside these modules are a combined total of 10 processors with as many bootloaders and flash procedures and validation records and crypto and peripheral drivers, 17 CAN-FD modules, 6 system basis chips, 9 switching power supplies with a number of accessory LDO supplies, at least 40 more “chips” of various functions and capacities… for just the driver’s seat alone
The steering wheel buttons for radio left and right side and the cruise control comprise 3 modules and power supplies and etc etc.
>The Bollinger takes this route of minimalism. Ironically, an EV has less reliance on processing than a modern ICE vehicle.
I know what you are trying to say, but it is largely incorrect. The EVs still have “engine” control modules and powertrain systems. Instead of figuring out injector pulse widths, they’re calculating deliverable torque. The ABS/brake controllers are more complex, the battery heating and cooling systems require modules and processing, the HVAC, the transmission, steering systems, everything is more complex compared to ICE with an old ample supply of hydraulics and coolants and a simple fuel that is stable and usable at all storage temps fed into a mechanical device.
I’m not trying to be confrontational, but you couldn’t be more wrong about automotive electronics.
You mentioned the transmission is more complex compared to an ICE, but that does not make much sense to me at all. To my knowledge most EVs are essentially fixed gear ratio gearboxes, so you're either in drive, reverse, or neutral. Meanwhile ICE transmissions are becoming more and more like computer-controlled manual transmissions what with the rise in popularity of dual-clutch automatic transmissions. To me it seems a ton more complicated keeping track of operating that DCT than just "the dial is in D, change transmission to the forward mode."
Growing up there I had no idea. My dad loved to talk up MMM, Honeywell, Monsanto and a bunch of other legacy companies in MN that still play huge roles that I have overlooked.
Just one article at top of search I found even talks about the public-private partnerships (tax & other incentives)
https://www.aroundosceola.com/news/skywater-seeks-dod-approv...
Taiwan was (is still?) in a drought and semiconductor manufacturing requires so much fresh water that TSMC was bringing in huge tanks on ships from the mainland.
Large corporations love to hold cities and states hostage and make them bid against each other. AMZN is a great example with their campus 2 bidding war. I am glad NY had the cajones to stand up to them.
Most cities and states even have dedicated EcoDevo staff to actively seek out these companies.
Cities and states compete to give the largest tax benefits, usually something like you don't have to pay ___ taxes for __ years (like 10, worth tens of millions). Plus they'll spend on infrastructure and give preferential zoning, city regs, etc.
Sure having more jobs probably creates more incoming/housing taxes for the city.
But states like Texas win this race to the bottom (TSLA and Musk personally) and in my opinion the costs of these corporate incentives (imho handouts) are just passed along to citizens in the cost of less societal services and needs, less school funding, less everything. Just a funnel up.
Yes other tech companies are also moving to Austin and I think that is more a sign of some millennials and other young professionals opting to leave California for a lower cost reasonably sane area. Its still does not seem like massive California sized numbers though. We just have to wait and see. I'm still long California though.
This is a solved problem isn't it? Just pay people more and treat them with dignity and respect. The pandemic has given a lot of people the opportunity to realize that they do not have to settle for poorly paid jobs that treat people poorly. You should have realized and adjusted by now. If you cannot accommodate to these requirements, then you have no place in this market anymore. Just close up shop and move on.
https://hbr.org/2020/09/global-supply-chains-in-a-post-pande...
"The obvious way to address heavy dependence on one medium-risk or high-risk source (a single factory, supplier, or region) is to add more sources in locations not vulnerable to the same risks."
https://www.supplychainbrain.com/articles/32482-the-world-is...
Yes like I said there is the "in group". Is that "a lot" of people, I wouldn't say so. Namely the people who are employed or benefit financially from these orgs. If you are paying for the bloat via the government which is the customer of these defense orgs, it is effectively a tax on everyone else.
That said, for a non startup technology job, yes, no reason to be in the Bay. That work can be done from anywhere.
Maybe water?
I've read a bunch of newspaper articles from that region recently about how people in Arizona and New Mexico are getting very pissy about water going to new industries. And from what I read on HN, chip manufacturing needs lots of water.
One thing Ohio seems to have plenty of is water. At least compared to places like Arizona.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17221/intel-announces-ohio-fa...
I'd imagine most people would want a pretty significant pay raise to move to somewhere like Ohio, but they are nearby Ohio State University, so maybe they'll get local talent.
The bigger question is why none of these $34k a year PhDs did move to USA before. I bet, even a floor sweeper at an Intel fab gets more.
A floor sweeper delivering max 1 particle per m^2.
Cost of living is low relative to the west coast and high relative to a lot of places in Asia, so it really depends on who you're talking about.
I’ve travelled to enough cities that it is basically an amusing part of my checklist to hear why Area Man is mad about housing prices going up.
I could procedurally generate possible scapegoats at this point.
Nevertheless, Tokyo is a metro of 40 million people, with national importance that's equivalent to slamming NYC, LA, and SF together into one region. That its rent has managed to stay this low is a result of zoning that's practically the opposite of the US: density by default, rather than density as exception.
I hope this spurs a nice tech ecosystem for Ohio--it's been dominated by insurance and medicine for a long time.
Yeah. The region isn't known to attract or retain tech talent.
> Depending on where they're moving from, they might take a pay cut.. Ohio is very cheap to live in
The thing with Cost of Living is that the biggest expense is typically housing. And if you bought the house, it means the biggest expense is... building equity into an asset you can sell afterward.
Keep in mind the engineer who purchased a 2 million house in Palo Alto can sell it for two million, and then move to Ohio to a much cheaper house purchased in cash. The reverse isn't true.
It might not be the well known bay/NYC/Austin but it has a vibrant scene for the population.
This is all stuff I've been doing or using constantly even with the pandemic. Some stuff like taking advantage of public amenities like hiking trails have become an even stronger habit of mine, thanks to the pandemic. I'm one to opt to walk to the local store, feel a product in my hands and decide to buy it, vs ordering from Amazon, something you can only do if you live somewhere dense enough to sustain these local stores. Even getting an uber to come out to a Columbus suburb is going to be a process; they are probably going to just deny your ride if you aren't doing an easy couple mile bar hop around OSU or the Short North/downtown area or going to the airport.
Having a big university in a more urban setting is very nice (posting from the Twin Cities with the University of Minnesota centrally located).
" “The Ohio factories are designed for the ‘Angstrom era,’ with support for Intel’s most advanced process technologies, including Intel 18A."
This[1] doesn't give a transistor density for 18A, but the 20A transistor density is greater than the TMSC 3nm, fwiw.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-... [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16823/intel-accelerated-offen...
You should not interpret node names as meaning anything more than a point on the semiconductor roadmap. Nodes that share the same names across foundries will not have the same performance characteristics, but are usually roughly comparable (especially since Intel's new naming scheme).
I agree they're not necessarily related to any particular transistor dimension but are you sure it's entirely unrelated to any physical dimensions? If so, here is a question I have. 28nm, 22nm, 20nm, 14nm, 10nm, 7nm, 5nm, 3nm. What progression is that? Why skip 6nm and 4nm?
So 28 -> 20 is a "full node" decrease (ie: twice the transistors).
---------
We can see the full-node step from 14nm -> 10nm as well: 14 x 14 == ~200, 10x10 == 100. So its a full node step. The next full-node is 7 x 7 == ~50, which is half of 100. After 7 comes 5, because 25 is half of 50.
The next full node is sqrt(12.5) or 3.5, smack dab between 3 and 4, so not really easy to round.
---------
The steps in between are "half-node" decrements, where you didn't quite achieve a full 1/2 area reduction. An incremental technology that represents something in between the full node step progression.
x^2 is 1, 4, 9, 16, 25.
2^x is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Cleveland
Edit: On second thought, Arizona doesn't have port access either so I guess it's not really a significant consideration.
My guess would be access to talent and costs. Columbus is more than 2x bigger than Cleveland. Building cars is also an international affair and we see those plants all over the place.
However, it could still have a talent advantage. Having OSU nearby is helpful, and maybe it is easier to attract talent to move to a city with a big university.
I moved from the Bay Area to Columbus Ohio and, funny enough, there’s a Honda factory about 30 minutes outside of downtown and 45 from the airport.
On a side note, counties here a little bit wonky. I live in Dublin which is about 20 minutes out of Marysville.
If you live in Dublin you could be living in one of THREE counties
For the Bay Area readers the distance from Cleveland to Columbus is roughly the same as San Francisco to Sacramento
One thing I noticed is that the freeways in, say, Cleveland, are all 5 lanes wide or so in each direction, serving a population of 400k in the city and 1.2m in the county. You go to LA and what do you see? The same size freeways as Cleveland, 5 lanes wide or so, only its serving a city of 4 million and a county of 15 million. It's like, of course there is no congestion in Cleveland and tons of congestion in LA, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see an issue with capacity. There's literally an order of magnitude more people using the same capacity of infrastructure.
Having done this, I would recommend it only in urgency
I would guess that raw materials can be transported by road or rail. Access to a waterway is sometimes needed for very heavy indivisible parts (not sure if this is commons for fabs) but that is unlikely to be a regular occurrence. Just drive it down the interstate with a police escort at 2am.
"The current generation of EUV machines are already, to put it bluntly, kind of bonkers. Each one is roughly the size of a bus and costs $150 million. It contains 100,000 parts and 2 kilometers of cabling. Shipping the components requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks."
[1] https://technical-news.net/euv-lithography-asml-delivers-100... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-lithogr...
Fascinating
It is not common. Semiconductor equipment is generally designed to be sent via air freight and assembled on site.
Some of the supporting operations (water and air purification plants, on-site chemical production, LN2 production, etc) may require some large parts but that's a case-by-case basis and probably avoidable.
I can’t speak well to why not Cleveland but I can say that the actual city that they chose (New Albany, OH, 25 min to downtown and 15-20 to the airport) was built by Les Wexner, founder of L brands/Victoria’s Secret, is now home to data centers for Facebook, Google, and an AWS data center (there are two more within 30 minutes), and the general metro is one of the fastest growing regions in the US.
There is also a ton of available land on the fringes of the Columbus region and the sheer scope of acreage needed is bonkers.
Didn't Epstein have some sort of exclusive investor relationship with Wexner? I seem to recall that was where he got his start.
I grew up near there. I guess I wouldn't quibble with the idea that Wexner "built" New Albany -- since it definitely isn't the same anymore -- but it was a town before he came along (two roads and a farm supply store, basically).
I used to go to summer camp at the old New Albany HS, and got my pickup truck stuck in the mud there many, many times while doing some odd job or another.
Columbus Ohio is one of the fastest growing city in the USA and MidWest. Population growth is high too. A lot of people from other Ohio cities are moving to Columbus Ohio. https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus-among-fastest...
Ohio State University is very close to this site.
Huge immigration population with a science degree.
Columbus is within 600 miles of 60 percent of American population.
A lot of cheap farm land outside of Columbus area.
> Cleveland Ohio where one has port access with an existing route to Europe
Port is less than 2 hrs from this site.
Don't most chips travel internationally by air?
> Edit: On second thought, Arizona doesn't have port access either so I guess it's not really a significant consideration.
From a pure logistics perspective, I'd say that Arizona beats Ohio. BNSF connects Arizona with both the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. (Not to mention Lake Michigan.) It's impossible to drive Route 66 from California to Texas without rolling alongside extensive trains hauling cargo through the desert.
For me, the trains are one of the most scenic aspects of that drive.
LAX is the eighth-busiest air cargo terminal in the world, and it has plenty of cargo flights to Asia where computer devices are often assembled. PHX is also one of the busiest cargo airports in the United States, albeit much less so than LAX or CVG.
Fabs have massive physical plant inputs (eg. lithography machines), substantial commoditized manufacturing inputs (eg. boules/wafers, freshwater, industrial gas), and core outputs with small size and high value (ie. chips). The former two can be pipelined without knowing the exact product-by-product breakdown of customer demand, and the latter cannot.
Infrastructure and labor concerns might also tip the scales one way or another. Water supply, wastewater management, energy cost, grid resiliency, labor supply, access to institutions for professional training, and other considerations can differ wildly between the two regions.
Presumably this plant will be trucking containers to Baltimore's port or sending air freight out of the cargo-only airport nearby.
chip fab isn’t nearly as bad of work. Americans don’t want crappy jobs which is why foxcon had issues.
> Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) faces challenges managing employees at its new fab in Arizona who are unaccustomed to the long work hours and management culture that in Taiwan have helped make the company the world’s largest chip foundry.
> Different positions may have different requirements, so work hours vary, according to the principal engineer. “An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week. On a production line, the equipment must be maintained.
> “If you are a process engineer, it will be more stable. Maybe you can start work at 8:30 a.m.and leave before 7:30 p.m. If there are some urgent matters, you may have to stay later.”
At Intel, process engineers had to attend a daily meeting at 7:40am (mandatory), and would rarely leave before 6pm (meetings scheduled at 5 or 6pm were common). I sometimes would wander around in that part of the building at 7pm and a significant fraction of cubicles would be filled.
Almost all Intel process engineers have PhDs.
But it's a little more nuanced than pay for two reasons.
1) Intel is a little like proto-Amazon. There is a preference for hiring people directly out of grad school and inducting them into the cult while they are still naive, so that's just what they come to expect for work-life balance.
2) The whole semiconductor industry is like this, and particularly so for production fabs. If you have domain expertise, you have no alternative work-life balance choice short of a career change.
Heh. I once interviewed for an internal SW position that dealt with fab automation. I openly told them in the interview that I knew about their work culture and that was of great concern to me.
Interviewer: I know what you mean, and I promise the org has been working to improve the conditions. It's not as bad as it was.
Me: Great! However, for me the comparison isn't the "old you" but the rest of Intel.
<Back and forth>
Interviewer: Look, you're not going to get a 40 hour/week job anywhere in the SW industry!
Me: Umm... All my SW engineer roles at Intel were 40 hour/week jobs. I haven't worked on weekends in years. <Proceed to list friends at big name SW companies who also don't work more than 40 hours/week>
Interviewer: OK. We normally interview people straight out of college who don't know any better.
Needless to say, I didn't take that job.
I suppose some people didn't like their status in a HW company.
What Americans don't want are jobs that pay less and don't offer 1.5x overtime. Unlike shipping, foxconn jobs can be done in a place with a cheaper cost of living. America isn't competitive in low margin businesses because poor people need to pay rent which is just higher in the US.
chip fab/manufacturing process probably doesn't generate as many jobs as the auto industry (the process is automated heavily from what I have seen) at its peak but at least they will be very high paying.
Why? At the end of the day it's a capacity shortage. The only way to prevent that is to have surplus capacity prior to the pandemic. Considering how companies don't like to spend money on expensive fabs that end up getting underutilized, I'm skeptical that having more domestic chip plants would lead to that.
"Capacity" in a fab means throughput. Contrary to the breathlessness that I hear when people describe modern semiconductor manufacturing, fabs are nowhere near optimal. There's plenty of dumb shit that happens in an ordinary day at a semiconductor fab—and consequently, lots of room for (easy) improvements. Fabs have lower than optimal capacity because they go heavy on hiring for things like a background in physics and chemistry, or tangential degrees like aerospace[1], but they don't treat IT concerns or the day-to-day processes that workers are engaged in like engineering problems. This gets you things like routine showstoppers that take 20+ minutes to resolve because that's how long it takes to go turn off the Caps Lock on a given workstation before being able to resume work. So much room for improvement.
1. and proficiency in Microsoft Office https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30021528
Until supply chain got choked.
What is it that makes Ohio such a key and ideal place for such a massive investment? I assume there must be an abundance of energy + work force + land available that makes this possible, as well as a foundation built up by the Rust Belt.
Could the Rust Belt go Silicon?
I'm originally from neighboring Indiana. The midwest should have figured this out long ago, but political corruption, the coal lobby, and a lack of imagination has really blinkered the long-term planning there.
This plant is being built in a rural community right outside of Columbus.
Props for sticking to the original spelling
UIUC, Northwestern, UChicago, UMichigan, Purdue, Notre Dame, UIndiana, Argonne National Lab, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_universities
I wasn't familiar with with this requirement but how close is close? I don't think the new semiconductor plants in Texas & Arizona are that close to a city center.
And how expensive is too expensive? At least compared to cities of similar size & stature, Chicago itself is not that expensive and can get much cheaper as you move slightly away from it (in the right direction).
...which has nothing to do with running a fab, if we're being honest about it.
I really do suspect they'll have some jobs for the ECE graduates from OSU, but I guess time will tell.
Also this is a great move in my eyes. Intel's HQ is on the West Coast and I imagine that they lose out on at least some portion of East Coast talent as a result. Hopefully this allows them to have the best of both worlds.
I don't think there are two worlds, either, unless you think that LA, SF and Seattle also constitute worlds unto themselves.
[0]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/South-K... [1]: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/01/14/heres-what-yo...
This is a good book that goes through how economies develop and the role of State Owned/sponsored Enterprises are helpful in developing a nation's technology competencies. The author uses South Korea as a few of his examples, too.
Many investors would rather see a $20B share buyback instead of a $20B greenfield project.
All assets do not get priced at NAV by the market, even if the NAV is known. In this case, we don't know the future value of a major fab. We have no way of knowing future utilization and yield for the fab, so it'd be impossible to determine the timeframe for computing the present value of its earnings.
It will be interesting to see how the market digests this news story in the coming weeks. The price of INTC could move markedly; earnings are coming up next week and there's an Investor Meeting scheduled for the middle of February.
Is that still true? I thought they cut a lot of corners in the pre-Superfund era, but are watched more closely now.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/intel-says-ohio-...
I.e. some operational "dev-ops" style engineers who can fix and troubleshoot highly automated lines, keep the thing running. People to supervise the systems, some workers to handle raw materials, etc. and then the packaging on the output side. But in general, quite sparse for a million square foot property, compared to other industries occupying a building of that size?
I wonder partly because the favorable tax / labor jurisdictions aren't exactly where you tend to find extremely skilled silicon engineers. But an operational plant is maybe not where those folks are needed.
1) pre-existing long term plans
2) more recent supply chain bottlenecks
3) Some combination of 1 & 2
Bonus: How China may figure into the equation
Alder Lake
Sky Lake
Kaby Lake
Mistake Lake
I grew up just north of there. An Intel factory nearby would be good news for anyone in the rust belt. I hope this doesn't fizzle out like Wisconsin's Foxconn plant.
I’m also optimistic that this will inspire other companies (ie Apple) to double down on their CSR commitments and invest more into domestic manufacturing.
How are water, electricity, sewage, road condition, utilities situation? Any reasons why a work from home worker might not want to live there?
Utilities are solid and seem much less suspect to outages compared to Seattle, a city I have a lot of experience living in. It's as though having more extreme weather more often ensures that the infrastructure is up to a certain rigor.
Roads are important here, and are well-maintained and addressed (e.g. expect trucks to be salting roads in anticipation for snow storms). Roads are also incredibly well-laid out in an inner/outer belt system that I miss when driving in other cities.
No issues with utilities. Suburbs are better at handling snow removal/road maintenance than Columbus proper.
1. Family in general plays a large role.
2. I'm able to make stronger financial moves. Property is appreciating relatively quickly in the Columbus area, and purchase-cost-to-rent ratios are better here, from the investor PoV.
3. Full remote means that I'm still able to visit Seattle for the larger mountaineering trips, etc. that I like to take part in while being based out of a lower-CoL area. After several years, I was going to have to start taking flights to new destinations, anyway.
4. Opportunity to give back to the communities that gave me my start.
And some other factors come in, too. Covid definitely reduced my perceived benefit of living in Seattle. Nothing's forever though. It's a two-way door.
Be careful going too cheap, as the rural parts have utterly terrible Internet service. A buddy of mine can't even play Deep Rock Galactic with us and his Discord calls sound robotic.
But then you added "stuff to do within a reasonable driving distance," and I think that tips the scales in favor of Cleveland.
And if you want to leave the car at home, you can take Amtrak from Cleveland to New York, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C.
I still love Cincinnati, but until international flying gets back in order, it's not an ideal starting point for adventure.
Cincinnati has fairly mild winters compared with the rest of Ohio. A meteorologist there explained it to me once. I think something about being in a valley, and the rivers (Ohio and Little Miami) moderate things a bit.
He said in weather circles, it's sometimes called "the banana belt of Ohio."
1. Vehicle safety inspections are not required
2. It's very flat, but their flag is the only non-rectangular state flag
3. Due to an oversight (congress never voted -- oops!), Ohio was not officially admitted to the union until 1953.
In Pennsylvania, I have to have my car tested each year. They make sure that tire tread depth, remaining brake pads, exterior lamps, and windshield wipers are all functional / within tolerance. There's other stuff that you can be failed for, such as excessive rust, etc.
That's one other thing to know about Ohio. Your car will rust. It's a cancer that will slowly eat your car, even if you do an undercarriage wash.
Move to Columbus and look into the various suburban communities. A fantastic one that is up and coming (though it's really getting quite far along that arc) is called Grandview. Leafy, compact, cute, cool shops, bike paths and restaurants and only 10 minutes from downtown, even in traffic. There are many more so do dig in and look around. I live in the greater Cleveland area and it's also good... just not Columbus good. If you want space look to the northern suburbs. There are a number that are extremely nice.
Kendall's average household income is $73,612 while Dublin's is $137,867. If I picked a neighborhood with an equivalent household income the price difference would be even more stark.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rootinsurance
CoverMyMeds another
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/covermymeds-com
At least for a Midwest city, investment does seem to be picking up
https://news.yahoo.com/columbus-startup-funding-skyrocketing...
- Greater Boston area (outside of Boston, the high tech companies are pretty scattered)
- Chicago (and the North/West suburbs)
- Virginia (Tysons, Alexandria)
- North Carolina (Research Triangle)
- Portland
- Austin
The obvious ones: Bay Area, LA, NYC, Seattle area
If you're into specific industries, then there are areas that are more focused than others.
But, yes, the computer industry in Massachusetts always tended to be in Metrowest and the defense contractors were/are out in the suburbs as well.
But if you're moving from Canada to escape the cold, Minnesota is not the place to stop. It's a bit warmer than Winnepeg, but colder than Toronto and the rest of Eastern Canada by quite a bit.
Don’t know the area terribly well, but it seemed like a place that we wanted to “get to know” better.
My family also really liked Pittsburgh.
There are several Superfund sites where chips were once made.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silic...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/manufacturing-jobs-are-...
> Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.
An Intel fab in the City of Cleveland proper is something to contemplate, but I doubt very much that it was ever a possibility. You'd probably want to locate such a thing further out in the county.
People in Ohio are excited about this and all of the negativity, frankly, is just unwelcome.
Think the Midwest and Ohio suck because there aren’t mountains or an ocean? What good is any of that from behind your keyboard with the A/C on or sitting on your couch watching the same Netflix special as everyone else? Meanwhile in 5 hours I can be on your beach and enjoying all the best parts of where you live with 0 downside.
Think Ohio State sucks? Right because Stanford has always been a top 5 university from day one and everything is static forever.
Intel employs “low skill people and they’re not startup software engineering jobs” ok? What actual value does your privacy-evading ad tech addiction company add over honest people who just want a job making actual things? I guess Tesla employs low skill people in Austin at the Gigafactory too?
Don’t like Ohio? Good we don’t care. You don’t have to live here and we have never needed to care about your opinion. You don’t have a monopoly on talent or anything else except maybe people who think that because their license plate says something different that somehow they’re better than us. Seriously grow up.
-edit-
It’s not just comments here. Here’s one out in the wild: https://twitter.com/terronk/status/1484599015828176898?s=21
Piss off.
And you know what? For all those comments “blah blah there’s only family to move there for” like yea. Exactly. Maybe you should too. I don’t have to get my social life from doomscrolling on Facebook and making myself depressed. I actually have friends and family that I see everyday and can count on. We cook meals together and help each other. We play board games, celebrate birthdays, and like being near each other. These social media apps are filling a void that you created for yourself. I like visiting California and can live there if I want to. I choose my family and friends. Maybe you should too and get off your holier-than-thou attitude.
The reality is Ohio State is actually a good university and there's really solid talent out there too. You also have Chicago not all that far away that's a big talent hub.
Which is especially ironic, considered how much of a shithole San Francisco has become
Speaking as an elitist left-wing hippie-business-geek-bro-demon in the Bay Area...
Kudos to the Columbus Area! Ohio, build it up!
We had our time. It was great. Now a new era starts.
Competing with labor, in terms of willingness to work for a low wage, against Asia is next to impossible for these fabs.
The state is claiming the average salary for the fab workers is going to be $135k. Maybe I'm missing something, but that's a very comfortable life in this part of the country.
We should race to the bottom, and employ the poorest people possible!
After seeing your comment I dug through the comments and found a single negative comment that is clearly written by someone from and in Ohio.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30029310
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30027858
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30026358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30029732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30026680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30029025 (as if that's some metric that we need to really care about)>unwarranted cynicism
The vast majority are questioning Ohio not because of negativity or cynicism but curiosity. Why Ohio, why not other state? Are there important strategic reasons? Some of them are calling out Tax Break, that is a fair point, but aren't there Tax Break elsewhere? I did a quick glance in the first 300 comments on this page, barely any negativity.
No offence but your comments seems to be the most negative in this thread. But then I am not American. So may be I am not as sensitive.
And a smattering of negative comments is hardly unique. Anti-valley rhetoric is nonstop on HN (as an aside, I suspect >85% of HN contributors are not in or near the valley). The theft gangs, homeless people, drug overdoes, etc.
But none of it is really relevant at all for an automated facility. Like a data center, it really doesn't make a big impact in an area outside of the initial construction . The real beneficiary will be ASML in all probability. Regardless, it's good to have more advanced fabs distributed around the globe.
I feel like doubling down on the criticism of the place I live (Oakland) just so that we don't set an example of how to manage cities.
Some of the others, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30026680, you clearly misinterpreted. That comment isn't dissing Ohio, it's dissing a headline the commenter didn't like. Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30034705 also - the 'potato' thing was an unrelated joke that had nothing to do with Ohio.
Hilariously, there isn't much in the way of fabs left in Silicon Valley. Those aren't suitable for any production. The last high volume fab to close was the Linear Technologies fab out in Milpitas.
There's a Raytheon fab in Lompoc CA, a few defense related fabs down in Santa Barbara and LA, but that's about it.
The major semiconductor manufacturing states in the US right now are Arizona, Texas, Oregon and NY. It's nice to see Ohio joining the list. Hopefully other companies will follow Intel's lead here.
I see maybe one or two negative comments of substance about Ohio on this post. Meanwhile you've written a rant about the bay area that implies everyone out there has sold their relationships and souls for some kind of elitism.
The midwest is great, but it's not some utopia (the same way the bay area isn't some kind of homeless wasteland). Please stop making the rest of us look ridiculous.
> It’s so depressing to read about Andy Grove’s brilliant and expert pivot of Intel from memory to processing and then see the same company miss RISC when they had checks watch 50 years to prepare.
Which is a pretty relatable point?
I mostly agree with what you said, its a comment about other HNers.
This tells me all i ever needed to know about Nohio. A worthy state for a tech hub doesn't say this. Instead try:
Don’t like Ohio? What can we do to help? Are you a startup? Can you help us better understand the concern? You don’t have to live here but were sorry we couldnt have done better. We value your opinion.
>we couldnt have done better. We value your opinion.
This sounds a lot like every silicon valley company.
We're seeing a very promising dispersion of future focused Jobs in the US (btw, I'm not American). While software has been predominantly west coast, and finance in the north east. Don't forget that TI is based in Texas. I believe much of Bio-tech is in San Diego and Boston, the list goes on and on. With giga & Tesla in Texas, will that bring more manufacturing and power technology to the area?
This is very positive in bringing employment and opportunities to these regions. I'm also hopeful that along with the tax credits that were likely given to the companies, there is a portion that is set-aside, or another allocation to improve access to the higher education needed to fill the jobs, and that the education will be provided to the local community, not just dragged in from other areas, displacing the local community and gentrifying it.
Everyone in the USA should be utterly ecstatic that Intel is building a large domestic chip plant and not outsourcing even more overseas. This is fantastic news.
The continental US has a good amount of domestic production capacity. The "problem" is that TSMC and Samsung got a node advantage on Intel, drawing a lot of the performance part manufacturing (including Intel contract work). Will this Ohio plant be competitive on the edge? I haven't seen information indicating that, and the two Arizona fabs Intel is building (operating in 2024) are targeting 7nm.
Samsung (3nm) and TSMC (5nm) are both building fabs in the US as well. A pretty healthy subsidy by the government and various levels of government lubricated the choice. It's good for the sanity and economic stability of the world if everything wasn't concentrated in Taiwan.
Such investment runs quite counter to the general trends I've witnessed in other manufacturing industries that continue to shrink every year.
Columbus isn't exactly "low cost of living" except by Silicon Valley standards, either.
It's about the United States -- we're all on the same team.
I'd be more than happy to go deeper but again, that's likely to go nowhere so there's no point. I wish them well, m'kay?
Florida native. Every person on the Internet loves to poo-poo Florida.
1000 people move to Florida a day. Every. Day.
Most of my native-born friends hate it.
Don't move to Florida, we're begging you.
- 0 tech scene, besides a couple of wannabe startups , ans a few outliers.
- Compensation is bad, taking into account the raising real state prices.
- Most companies are on the services, tourism, insurance, medicine sector.
- Racism is rampant, very ironix as SoFlo workforce is mostly south american immigrants.
- High level of organized crime, shitty schools for kids (including mass shootings), very few things to do(besides the beach), and so on...
Btw this is arguably the best part of Florida, don't even mention central/north Florida. People moving there are chasing tax breaks( I will still take Texas any day). SoFlo is great to party, and that type of things, but as long term move, for a techie , is going to be rough. But to each their own, I met people there that really love it.
Idaho has always been half Californians. Now we just have Californians who moved there 50 years ago complaining about Californians who moved there 5 years ago. It is like that in most western states.
I'm sure Pat Gelsinger knows a thing or two I don't about Intel's chances to prosper in Ohio. But Intel's chances to prosper are not individuals' chances to prosper.
The people claiming Intel's employees are "low skill" have no idea what they're talking about.
OSU is apparently pretty good though, and there's apparently a decent startup scene in Columbus now.
But I'm still going to share my experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028203) so other people can take it into account when they're deciding whether to move there or not. I did piss off, thank God.
But what does your comment even mean? "Texas" is your benchmark for how racist places are? Where in Texas? It's about as large as the average country. If you lived in Austin, or in the city of Houston, or in Dallas, you lived in a place with substantially more Black folks than San Francisco.
Dayton, for what it's worth, is a weird benchmark for the state of Ohio. It's a declining city with a troubled economy.
The Intel factory is apparently being sited on the outskirts of Columbus. Columbus is not Dayton, any more than Ann Arbor, MI is Livonia or Cadillac.
> Don’t like Ohio? Good we don’t care.
Lol. Sure. You spent 400 words showing how much you don't care.
I’m assuming most people bitching about have never been there.
If a state is in the news implying it’s getting something good, people are going to shit on it. You need to grow thicker skin. Otherwise you just end up reinforcing the idea that Ohio residents are delicate and care what the coasts think.
P.s. the tweet you linked to is not about the location
Every time I've looked in this thread, the comments I saw referencing Ohio were overwhelmingly positive ("brilliant location", etc.). In fact, after skimming this thread, I couldn't find a single comment that matched your description. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they must be a tiny minority of what got posted here. (Edit: I saw your list at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031374 - the comments you were reacting to were not representative in the slightest, and you misinterpreted several of them.)
There's a strong tendency to fall prey to the bias of noticing, or putting a greater weight on, the ones that felt negative to you (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This is a function of your own pre-existing condition (I don't mean you personally—this is true of all of us), of being ready to flare up at the first thing that feels like a trigger. In that sense, what we're all actually encountering when we get triggered on the internet are our own pre-existing feelings. No wonder people find it hard to talk to each other about inflammatory topics.
The comments you've "quoted" in your first paragraph, for example, simply don't exist. The only occurrence of "Ohio sucks" in the entire HN dataset (I just checked) is the one in your own post. That's how that cognitive bias works, and that's how we get flamewars like this. People here (you, me, and everyone else) need to manage our own inflammation a little differently so we don't end up with complete derails like this, which are not in the spirit of this site nor in the interest of anyone in the community.
I'm going to mark this flamewar off topic now.
I do attach my exact name and LinkedIn profile to my comments so I hope that it’s clear that I’m not just trolling or have specific bad intentions. Just frustrated a little bit today with those comments I did see, so I ranted. My apologies. Again you’re 100% right.
Cheers!
The greater problem is actually caused by the upvotes that such a post attracts, but we can't moderate those very easily.
We'll believe it when it happens.
1. The semiconductor companies on one side of the table are very different: Taiwanese company mostly employing in China versus a US company. National cultures around commitments and deals vary.
2. The politicians on the other side of the table are very different. Scott Walker and Donald Trump with the Wisconsin deal and Mike DeWine in Ohio.
Here's the Time article: https://time.com/6140476/intel-building-factory-ohio/
You might be able to pay us to live there, but it would have to be 'retire after a year' kind of money. It has all the charm of a strip mall.