We have a lot of water in the area, and foundries are very water intensive. That was a smart long term play of Micron. Very happy to hear about this.
> “Conventional treatment of wastewater at semiconductor plants had recycled anywhere from 40 percent to 70 percent of water used in their processes,” explains Govindan. “Some manufacturers still only recycle 40 percent of the water they use.”
> However, over the past two years Gradiant has been working with semiconductor plants, improving their water reuse so that they're able to recycle 98 percent of the water they use. So, instead of bringing in 10 million gallons of freshwater a day from outside, these new recycling technologies mean they need to draw only 200,000 gallons of water from outside the plant to operate.
FTFY
Similar phenomenon occurs in England, where "the north" and "the south" always begin to the north/south of whoever is being asked. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENeCYwms-Cc>
Like everything south of 175th Street in Chicagoland is Downstate Illinois. Indianapolis is in the center of Indiana, so they call everything outside the inner ring of suburbs {first half of city name}-tucky, as in a pejorative reference to Kentucky.
"And as much as I would like to attend, l haven't been above 72nd Street in over a decade." —Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_of_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Beach_Bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bay_Veterans_Memorial_Br...
Unfortunately while the physical infrastructure was resilient, the business didn’t survive the university president’s conviction for bid rigging. Iirc like $150M of equipment was written off and sold as scrap.
That sounds like a lot. It's like 20 Olympic swimming pools - 30 acre feet of water... That's about how much 7500 acres of farmland uses per day - a decent portion of which is actually just rain...
Is there an easy way to understand why they need THAT much water?
IIUC, there's about ~600 chips per wafer (depends on chip and wafer size), and a plant produces ~30,000 wafers per month. That's ~18M chips per month, or ~600,000 per day.
So each chip needs ~17 gallons of water?! These chips are TINY - like not even a cubic inch. Volumetrically, that's like 5000x as much water.
Why??
Most of the rest of the area, outside the city limits (and a few surrounding towns that are connected with the Syracuse water system for legacy reasons), gets its water from Lake Ontario, which is where this plant’s water would be coming from as well.
If anyone is curious, I am happy to ramble on for quite a while about the municipal water systems of the greater Syracuse area (occupational hazard of a couple decades as a firefighter in the area).
When the area was first colonized by Europeans, the major hubs in the area were actually south of Syracuse, along the Seneca and Cherry Valley Turnpikes, which were the original east/west routes through the state, prior to the construction of the Erie Canal (the canal is a significant contributing reason Syracuse became the major settlement and the southern towns are just suburbs now). Due to those earlier settlements though, there were a number of water districts that predate the Syracuse city water district in the southern part of Onondaga County.
Those districts have now all been rolled into the county water authority, which coordinates with the Syracuse Department of Water to deliver water to the surrounding area.
Of interest to firefighting though, this patchwork of water districts that combined over time has resulted in a variety of different threads on fire hydrants, with "Syracuse Standard" and "National Standard" hydrants often being found within the same fire districts. Pretty much every fire truck/engine in the area carries adapters to convert from one to the other.