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