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> Making chips takes an immense amount of water

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.

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That is not entirely accurate, as per the article:

> 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

Just for context, around 200 times that amount simply evaporates from the Lake Texoma’s surface every minute.

Would this be the calculation you used? https://g.co/gemini/share/0639e6364e50

Basically yes. I googled average lake evaporation rates, and did the same multiplications as Gemini.

You mean you sis the math yourself? Novel idea these days. /s

That is of course the ideal, however local economic conditions (low/subsidized water prices, etc.) may dictate a different path by incentivizing another way of doing things (open cooling systems, etc.).

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