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Comment by throwaway82028 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway82028

Where in Arizona specifically? Have they even decided? Did the government decide to pay for the factory and enroll their for-profit prisoners to work for $0.10/per hour, and divert the remaining water supply to the factory? Arizona seems like a terrible choice for a chip factory, unless they've selected an area that gets natural water... and there aren't many.

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Hmm, my understanding was that fabs needed an initial supply of water, but then could cycle that same water for a long time.

A quick Google[0] suggests that they've only started doing this heavily pretty recently, but I'm guessing new fabs in Arizona will implement state of the art water-recycling.

That said, the numbers in this article suggest that 98% recycling would drop usage to the equivalent of ~6000 homes, which still feels significant.

Low seismic activity is the benefit of Arizona that I've seen cited in the past, which I'd guess outweighs the water sourcing issues.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/fabs-cut-back-water-use

If they built the factory on what used to be farmland they’re probably at break even for water usage.

That article is somewhat wrong. 10 million gallons of water is not enough for 300k households. It's maybe enough for 300k people. 10 million divided by 300k is 33 gallons. The average use per person even in urban areas is around 40 gallons per day - so that's generally ignoring outdoor irrigation. It's more like enough water for 200k-250k people.

So 2% of that is maybe around enough water for 5k people. Arizona has 7 million people. And residential doesn't even use most of Arizona's water.

It's fine.

Arizona is actually a good choice. It is geologically stable, doesn't suffer from natural disasters, is somewhat close to Silicon Valley, and has a large enough talent pool to staff TSMC's facilities.

Surely somewhere in the midwest would be more geologically stable and have plenty of access to water. Not sure the proximity to Silicon Valley makes any difference. It's not like factory workers are going to commute from California to Arizona.

Phoenix has long been a hub for semiconductor manufacturing, so it makes sense from the perspective of there is an existing skilled worker pool and supplier base. Motorola had large sites there, and Intel has a bunch of fabs and is building more in the area.

I believe the primary reason was tax-related, but the secondary reason is that there is already substantial personnel in the area who are experts in chip design and fabrication (Intel), with a strong pipeline for new talent from local universities for those skills.

Surprisingly, the area is also one of the largest Taiwanese communities in the U.S., which is a bonus for the engineers and their families who will be relocated from the "mothership".

Also, it's actually quite common for high-level Intel staff to fly back and forth from Portland and Phoenix. I am not sure if the same would be said about Taiwan and Arizona, but if they have staff in SV it wouldn't be too far-fetched.

Access to talent is a huge factor. One of the biggest obstacles of creating a US fab was the lack of access to cheap talent (in contrast to Taiwanese engineers that work long hours for relatively cheap money and are widely available - of course comparing to the US, in Taiwan they are among the highest earners).

Prison slave labor doesn't seem ideal for building 4nm chips.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/TSMC,+Fab+21/@33.7709731,-...

They have been building it for about a year now. Other than the possible water use, other's have stated why it is here.

Intel has tons of fabs in phoenix so TSMC can steal some of their employees. I think intel chose arizona because of the lack of natural disasters and tax incentives. The water is mostly reused so not really that big of a deal.

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