Looks like the fab requires about 40,000 acre-ft/yr of water. If they really do start running out of water, adding desal of AZ's brackish aquifers would cost the fab about $20m/year. Not really worth it for farming, but completely fine for a fab.
... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?
In other words, the fab requires about 20,000 swimming pools of water every year... or equivalently, 1 swimming pool every 27 minutes.
> The acre-foot is a non-SI unit of volume equal to about 1,233 m3 commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water,[1] and river flows.
Seems to be.
So, it's the unit that gets used when discussing irrigation. Or water usage that competes with irrigation. :P
We measure our land in acres and water is the limiting resource for using it. Water requirements for crops are expressed in feet/year (or inches/day). Combine the two and you get acre-feet.
m^3 would be a less useful unit in terms of calculating water needs out here, the metric equivalent would be hectare-meters (10,000 m^3).