[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.
[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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Don't most chips travel internationally by air?
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