4 ms·

2-4 million gallons per day is a lot of water to piss away for some chips that go out of fashion in 5 years.

jhgb 5y ago
Pretty much any facility capable of manufacturing semiconductor components has been very busy for the past few years -- Intel even had to resurrect 22nm chips at some time. Why do you assume that this will "go out of fashion in 5 years"? Historically this seems extremely unlikely. If anything, tens of millions of people going out of poverty every year are going to be consuming even more chips.
- adventured 5y ago
  And every year 80+ million people come of age such that they become electronics consumers, buying smartphones, laptops and so on. A billion new electronics consumers every ~12 years. The world is going to need a lot more chip manufacturing capacity over the next few decades.
ryan93 5y ago
The water doesn’t disappear. It stays h2o
- lazide 5y ago
  Just now in a place/form (underground or in the sky, and if underground usually contaminated) that makes it economically far less valuable - maybe even useless. If the economics of water didn't matter, we'd be happy to build nuke power plants and run condensers all day to get it, but the reality is the marginal cost of water determines the feasibility of vast sections of economic activity, and that determines the fortunes (or not) of people and their leaders in concrete ways. This is also true of other natural resources of course - oil, iron, coal, uranium, etc.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    Intel recycles and stores the water. They even remineralize and put back into the city water system. they don't dump it into the dessert.
    - lazide 5y ago
      They don’t do that for a large portion of the water - they dance around that with weasel words (like ‘return to the environment’), aka evaporate. You can see they are constantly weaseling out of giving anything concrete that someone could accuse them of lying, or could use to point out the actual impacts, and stating ‘a lot’ can be reclaimed from evaporation for instance in the building - while ignoring cooling, which is evaporative at these scales [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/why-intel-tsmc-are-building-water-dependent-chip-plants-in-arizona.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/why...] It’s pretty typical corporate green washing of a real problem that other folks will end up having in diffuse, hard to pin on them ways, that with some nudging on the right officials will never be pinned on them. In my experience, anyway.
CamperBob2 5y ago
And you posted that brilliant insight using what...?

jhgb 5y ago

Pretty much any facility capable of manufacturing semiconductor components has been very busy for the past few years -- Intel even had to resurrect 22nm chips at some time. Why do you assume that this will "go out of fashion in 5 years"? Historically this seems extremely unlikely. If anything, tens of millions of people going out of poverty every year are going to be consuming even more chips.

adventured 5y ago
And every year 80+ million people come of age such that they become electronics consumers, buying smartphones, laptops and so on. A billion new electronics consumers every ~12 years. The world is going to need a lot more chip manufacturing capacity over the next few decades.

ryan93 5y ago

The water doesn’t disappear. It stays h2o

lazide 5y ago
Just now in a place/form (underground or in the sky, and if underground usually contaminated) that makes it economically far less valuable - maybe even useless. If the economics of water didn't matter, we'd be happy to build nuke power plants and run condensers all day to get it, but the reality is the marginal cost of water determines the feasibility of vast sections of economic activity, and that determines the fortunes (or not) of people and their leaders in concrete ways. This is also true of other natural resources of course - oil, iron, coal, uranium, etc.
- ryan93 5y ago
  Intel recycles and stores the water. They even remineralize and put back into the city water system. they don't dump it into the dessert.
  - lazide 5y ago
    They don’t do that for a large portion of the water - they dance around that with weasel words (like ‘return to the environment’), aka evaporate. You can see they are constantly weaseling out of giving anything concrete that someone could accuse them of lying, or could use to point out the actual impacts, and stating ‘a lot’ can be reclaimed from evaporation for instance in the building - while ignoring cooling, which is evaporative at these scales [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/why-intel-tsmc-are-building-water-dependent-chip-plants-in-arizona.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/why...] It’s pretty typical corporate green washing of a real problem that other folks will end up having in diffuse, hard to pin on them ways, that with some nudging on the right officials will never be pinned on them. In my experience, anyway.

CamperBob2 5y ago

And you posted that brilliant insight using what...?