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Micron picks Syracuse for computer chip plant that would bring up to 9k jobs
- rm_-rf_slash 4y ago> The manufacturing complex could consume up to 10 million gallons of water per day, enough to supply a whole town or village. The entire city of Syracuse, by comparison, uses an average of 40 million gallons per day. We have a lot of water in the area, and foundries are very water intensive. That was a smart long term play of Micron. Very happy to hear about this.
- gimme_treefiddy 4y agoAny idea why it would require this much water?
- yababa_y 4y agoIt gets ultrapurified and used to wash _everything_ all the time, lots of steps are chemically nasty and need to be completely gone before production proceeds.
- chinathrow 4y agoCan they recycle it on site?
- yababa_y 4y agoYes, and they (universally?) already do recycle substantial fractions (>30%) of their wastewater. It’s a hot area of development. Truly enormous amounts of rinsing, mindboggling.
- pkaye 4y agoThis video from YouTube talks a bit about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3RzODSR3gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3RzODSR3gk
- missedthecue 4y agoThis is why it seems so odd to me that companies including both Intel and TSMC keep setting up shop in Arizona of all places. At least NY has ample rainfall and borders two Great Lakes.
- MoreSEMI 4y agoLow sesimic activity. You want the FAB to run 24/7 even if that means trucking in expensive water. Any down time will absolutely wipe out any cost savings from cheaper water. Probably even easier still to invest some extra capital to recycle more water.
- themitigating 4y agoWhat sesimic activity occurs in upstate ny?
- throwayyy479087 4y agoNone, but taxes are much higher in ny
- doobiedowner 4y agoSomewhat often but minor. I believe it's called glacial rebound. As someone tangentially involved in the optical side of chip fab, I am excited to have a neighbor like this. We work primarily with Micron competitors, but this is good for WesternNewYork.
- JshWright 4y agoI feel like naming regions in New York is a fools errand, sure to “offend” everyone, but “western” New York is generally considered to be west of Rochester. Syracuse is about as Central New York as you can get.
- adventured 4y agoSan Francisco is actually central California (Eureka is northern CA). Same premise.
- itishappy 4y agoI feel these numbers are always a bit misleading. Sure the processes takes 10 million gallons a day, but much of that water can be reclaimed and recirculated. > “Conventional treatment of wastewater at semiconductor plants had recycled anywhere from 40 percent to 70 percent of water used in their processes,” explains Govindan. “Some manufacturers still only recycle 40 percent of the water they use.” > However, over the past two years Gradiant has been working with semiconductor plants, improving their water reuse so that they're able to recycle 98 percent of the water they use. So, instead of bringing in 10 million gallons of freshwater a day from outside, these new recycling technologies mean they need to draw only 200,000 gallons of water from outside the plant to operate. https://spectrum.ieee.org/fabs-cut-back-water-use https://spectrum.ieee.org/fabs-cut-back-water-use
- cronix 4y agoYes, it's basically like an indoor swimming pool. It takes a lot of water to initially fill it, but they clean and reuse most of it.
- speed_spread 4y agoThey use hydrofluoric acid to balance the pH, then go skinny dipping.
- uup 4y agoWouldn’t the upper range, 70% recycled water, still be 3,000,000 gallons of water / day?
- pfdietz 4y agoGradiant has this cool scheme (from MIT) for distilling water using a carrier gas. The special sauce was a "bubble tray condenser" that condenses water from the carrier gas by bubbling it through trays of progressively cooler water. This provides enormous surface area to get around the problem of mass transfer through the boundary layer.
- Double_a_92 4y agoI also can't take those numbers seriously, since I once saw a documentary about coffee... And they calculated the water of a small river nearby that was partly redirected to wash away the shells of the coffee beans.
- BurningFrog 4y agoFunny how the factory "consumes" water, while the city only "uses" it.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoDoes the effluent have different outcomes?
- s0rce 4y agoFactory might be recycling, city probably just treats and puts back into the environment (just a guess but doubt they are recycling water in NY).
- JshWright 4y agoThe city of Syracuse gets most of its water from Skaneateles Lake, a small lake southwest of the city. It’s very clean water, and the city has a filtration waiver that allows them to use unfiltered water from the lake (it’s widely considered to be some of the best municipal water in the country). The city’s treated (and sometimes untreated, depending on how much rain we’ve had) waste water is dumped into Onondaga Lake, which is not part of the Skaneateles Lake watershed. Most of the rest of the area, outside the city limits (and a few surrounding towns that are connected with the Syracuse water system for legacy reasons), gets its water from Lake Ontario, which is where this plant’s water would be coming from as well. If anyone is curious, I am happy to ramble on for quite a while about the municipal water systems of the greater Syracuse area (occupational hazard of a couple decades as a firefighter in the area).
- JaimeThompson 4y agoI am very curious, please do!
- JshWright 4y agoHah, it would get very boring, very fast... When the area was first colonized by Europeans, the major hubs in the area were actually south of Syracuse, along the Seneca and Cherry Valley Turnpikes, which were the original east/west routes through the state, prior to the construction of the Erie Canal (the canal is a significant contributing reason Syracuse became the major settlement and the southern towns are just suburbs now). Due to those earlier settlements though, there were a number of water districts that predate the Syracuse city water district in the southern part of Onondaga County. Those districts have now all been rolled into the county water authority, which coordinates with the Syracuse Department of Water to deliver water to the surrounding area. Of interest to firefighting though, this patchwork of water districts that combined over time has resulted in a variety of different threads on fire hydrants, with "Syracuse Standard" and "National Standard" hydrants often being found within the same fire districts. Pretty much every fire truck/engine in the area carries adapters to convert from one to the other.
- Covzire 4y agoI hope Micron got their tax agreements in triplicate and signed in both ink and blood, I wouldn't trust NY state without mithril-clad contracts.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoI know chips need to be cleaned with ultra pure water - but 10 million gallons?! That sounds like a lot. It's like 20 Olympic swimming pools - 30 acre feet of water... That's about how much 7500 acres of farmland uses per day - a decent portion of which is actually just rain... Is there an easy way to understand why they need THAT much water? IIUC, there's about ~600 chips per wafer (depends on chip and wafer size), and a plant produces ~30,000 wafers per month. That's ~18M chips per month, or ~600,000 per day. So each chip needs ~17 gallons of water?! These chips are TINY - like not even a cubic inch. Volumetrically, that's like 5000x as much water. Why??
- somehnguy 4y agoHow weird to see this on HN, I just bought a house 8 minutes down the road from the chosen site. It's completely unrelated, this is the first I've seen this news.
- itishappy 4y agoWelcome to the area! Hope you like snow. :)
- thehappypm 4y agoI got married in Cazenovia. Love that region!
- s0rce 4y agoThat sounds like a mythical place hah, I grew up on the otherside of the lake in Toronto!
- mercy_dude 4y agoYikes Toronto. I grew up there (immigrant parents first destination before moving down south) but despise it now for what it has become. An over expensive cesspool of the house owning NIMBY class with terrible traffic and disregard for driving rules or anything really that Canada I grew up in used to stand for like good manners. Lived in Syracuse as well before moving to the west coast. Don’t miss the snow or the cold. Only if there wasn’t so many wildfire.
- breitling 4y ago>An over expensive cesspool of the house owning NIMBY class with terrible traffic and disregard for driving rules It's actually even worse than that now. With the massive influx of immigrants recently, there are now 2+ families sharing one apartment. It's turning into the worst of the ghettos in many areas. Traffic is worse than ever. GO trains are fuller than ever. Many people are escaping to Alberta. No respite in sight
- yolobey 4y agoI was just surprised at how cheap housing was in Syracuse. Maybe it's time to buy before interest rates get even worse.
- thehappypm 4y agoIt’s an interesting area. It has the opportunity to really bloom but has a couple issues. Climate sucks, it’s cold even for Northeastern standards. The cities all have urban issues like crime, not many upstate cities have really become cute and desirable. That’s mostly the smaller or mid sized towns.
- chrismartin 4y agoI grew up nearby. Being just downwind of Lake Ontario, Syracuse gets 10 feet of snow per winter. [0] If you're susceptible to seasonal depression, it's a rough place to live. Just 50 miles south (around Ithaca / Elmira / Binghamton), the winters get milder, still dark but less cold and snow. For decades, the region has wanted for STEM employment opportunities. (It's the rust belt, a lot of industry moved away.) I get the impression Rochester weathered it better than Syracuse, even after the downfall of Kodak. Rochester feels a little more vibrant to visit. That said, to the extent Micron is willing to train people, I imagine they'll have an easier time hiring in Syracuse than a lot of other places. [0] https://nyskiblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ncdc-ny-snowfall-map.jpg https://nyskiblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ncdc-ny-sno...
- thehappypm 4y agoAs a reference, Boston averages 60 inches, which would put it at the lowest scale on this map. So, even the milder regions are still quite cold and snowy!
- a4a4a4a4 4y agoIt's cheap because it's an awful place to live. You can work in insurance, or hospitality, or for terrible wages in "tech", aka making CRUD apps or doing IT for the aforementioned industries. State taxes are super high and a huge burden. The weather is awful for all but 1-2 weeks in the spring and 1-2 weeks in the fall (hot and humid in the summer, extremely cold and windy in the winter). Schools are generally terrible. There's a reason housing is cheap and there is a net population outflow out of NYS.
- collegeburner 4y agodissapointed to see expansion in a high tax blue state with a trash tier record on gun rights. i can't find any mention of why they chose it, any ideas why? edit: looks like water and seismic activity are the leading suggestions?
- skullone 4y agoI doubt gun rights are high on the list when embarking on $100B chip fab builds.
- collegeburner 4y agoidk i've heard a lot of noise on companies paying for female employees to get abortions if they're unavailable in-state and imo it's a pretty good benefit in states with overly draconian laws. so i'm sort of hoping micron (and other companies who choose to expand in states that infringe on people's freedom) will announce a similar program to help employees access and exercise their gun rights.
- lkschubert8 4y agoAre gun rights particularly related or is this just an axe to grind?
- jimbob45 4y agoHe seems like a troll but it is curious that such a deal would go through this late in the election cycle, too late to affect races the way it could have in July.
- JshWright 4y agoWith the exception of the Governor, most of the folks getting face time and taking credit for this either aren't up for election this year, or are running unopposed (or only facing token opposition).
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- chrismartin 4y agoI hope this doesn't turn out like Foxconn in Mount Pleasant WI. (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd)
- beebeepka 4y agoThis seemed like an odd choice - having a chip plant in a small, beautiful tourist town. Then I clicked the link and boom - it's another place with the same name.
- pavlov 4y agoYou're thinking of the original one in Sicily? It's sometimes confusing how Americans repurposed city names wholesale without the "New" prefix. Most of them are tiny towns, as for example Paris, Texas made famous by the movie. Of the larger ones, St Petersburg, Florida always weirds me out — it makes me think of Lenin giving a speech at Finland Station under palm trees, dressed in a white suit like Don Johnson.