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Comment by xt00 | Hacker News Reader

So I wonder if anybody here could compare what Phoenix has vs Hsinchu in Taiwan. It seems like the closest the US has to what Taiwan has.. (Intel, new TSMC, various other fabs are there).. so making Phoenix the Mecca of semiconductor jobs in the US seems like a pretty smart goal .. while the federal govt loves to spread money around it seems wise to just say let’s be real folks, it’s way easier / efficient to pour gas on an existing fire than to build totally greenfield.. like pump tons of cash into the AZ universities for semiconductor work. But I wonder if people have some history / perspective on why people don’t say “oh you want to work in semi area? Go to Phoenix..”..

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Seems a bit strange that Phoenix would be a desirable place to build a fab, given how water-intensive most processes are. Yes, the water can and should be recycled... but it just seems weird to build a plant like that in one of the parts of the country that will probably never have enough fresh water, compared to other areas where they can't get it out of the way fast enough.

Is it the labor pool there that makes it attractive? Energy costs? Something about state/local subsidies?

The reason I heard is that Phoenix is seismically stabile, and weather stabile. Both of those things can cause power outages which are incredibly expensive at a fab.

Can power outages be more expensive than diesel?

Quakes and flooding can kill generators. You can be smart and build them on elevated earthworks, but if the event is severe enough something will fail.

Fabs require 10's of MW continuous load. Not feasible to backup with diesel generator.

Rather feasible with a set of natural gas turbine plants. Pipelines and local storage would be expensive but doable - depending on the economic damage of the plant going offline. Cost share it with a data centre facility to reduce the per megawatt cost even further.

Yes. But in layman's terms, wouldn't you just call that a "power plant"?

I mean, so too is a genset a powerplant. It's really just a question of scale and generation capacity. Imagine we're talking about a cell versus a battery. Same thing really.

Compared to Taiwan, land of earthquakes and typhoons. It's… amazing that things even work in Hsinchu?

And nuclear power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generatin...

The water involved is mostly recoverable and reusable

While there's cost involved, its shortage probably won't be a bottleneck?

I recall a video by asianometry stating that best case water re-use is about 70%. That will be rough in the desert.

Intel is funding a bunch of water projects in Arizona with the goal to be net postive in water use: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/environment/water-re...

Agriculture and municipal uses much more water than industry in AZ. Shockingly even with the population growth total state water use hasn’t increased due to conservation efforts. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...

Phoenix is geologically dead, no seismic disruptions to mess up any of the lithographic processes. Also the region is a desert (Arizona seems like a clever way to say the science fiction sounding “Arid Zone,” doesn’t it?) so it shouldn’t be prone to flooding, though lots of potential for static electricity, iirc, but I guess these companies have some way of easily preventing that?

Doesn't a fab need to consume tons of water? That whole southwest are of the US is entering longer and longer periods of drought. Seems like setting up shop further north into a water-rich area would be better.

"That whole southwest area" is too generalized, as Arizona, by necessity, has been expert at water use in contrast to what surrounds Arizona.

(can't find the citation that i want for that, though)

Ironically the new TSMC plant is being built down the street from a place that uses dynamite for its rock quarry. I live about the same distance from the quarry as TSMC is and I can sometimes feel/hear them when they use explosives. I wonder if they know yet, lol.

The value of a rock quarry is probably so small relative to a fab that this story ends in TSMC buying out and shutting down the quarry.

Isnt the intel fab across the street from the tsmc fab?

Motorola Semiconductor Product Sector division was in Phoenix for decades

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