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cm2012 5 days ago

Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.

cheschire 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Significantly more pollution though, right?

perihelions 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's many orders of magnitude more energy to fab a chip than to ship it across an ocean.

TSMC alone accounts for 12% of Taiwan's electricity demand, and growing fast:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/taiwan-semiconductor ("TSMC’s Energy Demand Drives Taiwan’s Geopolitical Future" (2024))

xxs 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sea freight is the least polluting one - due to the extreme amount of cargo. Air is expensive and very pollutant.

However, talking about chips that are hundreds of watts each the pollution produced by them is a lot higher than any transport.

hajile 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are moves being made to test ships with modern "sails". Here's a paper published about a cargo ship fitted with 4 sails in 2010. The findings are interesting with it achieving up to 25% better fuel efficiency when using the sails.

https://www.stg-online.org/onTEAM/shipefficiency/programm/06...

cm2012 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, much less pollution. It costs less carbon emissions to ship from Shanghai to California and back then for one person to drive 10 minutes to the store in their personal car.

almosthere 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But the boat is already going back empty

wila 5 days ago | parent [-]

and then the chips stay in Asia?

almosthere 5 days ago | parent [-]

then 5 pounds of chips on the way back is worth millions of dollars so it can be flown on a passenger jet or fedex jet that is already going here. or a boat and take up 3% of a container

5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
nobodyandproud 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What about freight trains?

1718627440 3 days ago | parent [-]

From the US to Taiwan? I mean if Elon Musk want's to build a hyperloop through a sea floor spreading zone, then sure why not.

nobodyandproud 3 days ago | parent [-]

The context was truck-based shipping being more expensive than ships. I was thinking Arizona/New Mexico to ports (and vice versa).