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Comment by Kadin | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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