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Comment by psd1 | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't fabs need plentiful water?

Why Arizona and Texas...?

Fabs need ultra pure water and it's cheaper to recycle the water they use than rely on city water supplies. So they need a ton of water initially but once they're up and running they don't need much water after that. Because of this, even a desert environment like Arizona is fine.

What about the vast energy required by fabs? Do you have a special tax to reinvest and maintain the grid or do they pay the same rates as a normal Arizona grocery store? Texas is hardly a paragon of a stable grid given the blackouts the past few years.

Despite the headlines, Texas has a fairly stable grid. They have work to do, but all grids do. In the end it doesn't matter too much as you cannot make a grid stable enough to rely on without backup power onsite and once you have that you can ride out most unstable events.

> Despite the headlines, Texas has a fairly stable grid.

Have the power generators applied any of the recommendations in the report commissioned by ERCOT after the 2021 blackouts? When the 2021 blackouts happened, they had not implemented any of the winterization updates recommended by the another report a decade earlier (2011). The outcome of the 2021 blackouts was the legislature allowing utility companies to claw back their "losses" from customers' bills over 10+ years - with no obligation to make changes or investing in equipment to ensure there same cascading failures won't happen again.

> State leaders had helped persuade the companies to open the facilities by offering big tax breaks and water and other infrastructure grants. > Intel soon announced a $20 billion expansion in Chandler, with two additional factories that would bring 3,000 new jobs to the state. Chandler also approved $30 million in water and road improvements for the new plants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/technology/arizona-chips-...

Basically just told them "Don't worry about it, we'll foot the bill for any infrastructure needed to get you your water"

Texas is quite large and only a small part of it, relatively, is desert.

Don't mean to alarm you but Texas is a coastal state

But Texas is also the size of the four states to its east. Georgia is a coastal state. If you pull from Brunswick, GA and send it to just outside St. Louis, that distance is covered within the single state of Texas.

That said, we don't pull sea water to supply water for industry - desalination is too costly.

Coastal states also get a lot of rain.

We aren't talking about building fabs way out in Abilene are we?

Georgia’s rain comes in from the west. Sometimes its southwest. The only time it comes from its coast is when a hurricane lands nearby.

Some other commenter was talking about building fabs in the desert. I think we’re certainly in hypothetical territory.

My point was that the “coastal state” comment doesn’t explain how that magically make clean water plentiful.

The populated areas of Texas have plenty of water.

There's enough water in Arizona that pecans and cotton are grown there, undoubtedly less $/H2O industries than semiconductors

Most likely, the fabs got competitive tax incentives from those states.

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