> Unlike the costly bleeding edge 2 and 3 nanometer chips made by giants like TSMC, TI’s chips are made on cheaper, legacy nodes: 45 to 130 nanometers.
What's worse:
> Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought. Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.
Indeed lucky for TI, but probably not so for area residents.
Lake Texoma has been hovering by the “full” mark pretty consistently for over 55 years. Recently, its water level has significantly declined to—wait for it—100% full!
If you monitor water maps, the east half of Texas’s water supplies don’t often get far outside of “full”.
More data: https://www.waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/individual/texo...
Assuming the municipality recycles their wastewater, which they would do in any drought prone region, this water will become clean water again.
It’s essentially a closed system.
Source? Especially the claim that they are using external municipal wastewater treatment seems highly implausible, they are using nasty chemicals.
Are there PFAS chemicals in the semiconductor photoresist and then in the water?
Do municipal wastewater standards require removal of PFAS?
Similarly, they're all okay with dumping water used to wash out coal plants into the rivers: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+10%25+coal+plant+wash+...
Also you seem to be unaware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting
This is misleading, modern chip fabs recycle their water basically 100%. It's not being evaporated for cooling like in some data center deployments, it's just part of the process.
> TI will use about 1,700 gallons of water per minute when the new Sherman fab is complete, with plans to recycle at least 50% of that
Aren’t there plenty of areas where water is ample and land prices relatively cheap.
They already have fabs nearby, and so, fab suppliers/services in the area.
They have a large employee pool in the vicinity, with modest salary expectations.
The southern US mostly doesn't have blizzards and ice that regularly knocks out electric supply lines, and/or makes it impossible for employees to get to/from work for days/weeks at a time.
Water is about the cheapest resource around. Even in water-stressed areas (while it may cost several times what it would in wetter parts of the US) it's still an insignificant expense for any industry that doesn't need an absolutely obscene continual supply.
Roof-top PV solar power works out a lot better in the southern US than further north.
Except for when they do, then they are literally paralyzed until it melts. This may only happen once per decade, bot wow it sucks. One ice storm in Birmingham was so bad kids were stuck at school for 3-4 nights.