| ▲ | hliyan 3 days ago |
| This doesn't seem like the giant step I thought it was: > 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. |
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| ▲ | AuthorizedCust 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Texas is a big state. It’s lazy journalism to generalize the state as droughty, which is implied by that sentence. 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... |
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| ▲ | monero-xmr 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Also the water doesn’t disappear from the universe. It either evaporates or is pumped back out. People who lose their minds over water have been saying for 50 years we were about to enter a desert world | | |
| ▲ | rini17 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Clean water does disappear. Not from universe bit from places you need it most. That there's plenty of it in the air or sea or Saturn rings, is little consolation. | | |
| ▲ | scarab92 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | These fabs don’t evaporate the water though, they use it as process water, and then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system. 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. | | |
| ▲ | pfaphotoresist 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system. 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+... | |
| ▲ | rini17 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | oceanhaiyang 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I read they either dump it into a local river while monitoring it or back to water treatment plant. Some datacenters have started reusing water but for some reason using it more than once is not appealing. Definitely the biggest problem is it’s not always a closed system and dumping it into a river potentially damages the river and makes the area lose their water. A percentage of the water is also lost via evaporation. Source: https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/ | | | |
| ▲ | corranh 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s definitely not a closed system unless the water from the waste water treatment plant is pumped back upstream of the source of the municipal water which is not how most of these work. |
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| ▲ | ugh123 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | guy has never seen 'Waterworld' |
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| ▲ | tossandthrow 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You should definitely bring this attitude into the housing affordability discussion - remind people that they indeed can find cheap housing in rural Africa. | |
| ▲ | ta20240528 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Aral Sea says otherwise. | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you really think that that's what the authors were thinking? You can't accuse people of not using their brains when you haven't engaged yours. Also you seem to be unaware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting |
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| ▲ | trebligdivad 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's lots of more boring chips in phones and mundane devices that are fine on older processes; things like audio stuff and battery controllers.
If you want to get away from relying on China, then those chips are the ones that are in everything from your USB hubs, keyboards, phones, washing machines - everything
Less sexy, but in many ways more critical to keeping stuff going. |
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| ▲ | zozbot234 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The trailing edge is also where Moore's law in its original sense is still going strong. The fabrication processes get cheaper and more refined over time, while this is becoming a lot harder with new leading-edge nodes. |
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| ▲ | zozbot234 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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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| ▲ | hliyan 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | xyzzyz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Just for context, around 200 times that amount simply evaporates from the Lake Texoma’s surface every minute. | | |
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| ▲ | uoaei 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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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| ▲ | wqaatwt 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why are they all building factories in places like Arizona and Texas? Aren’t there plenty of areas where water is ample and land prices relatively cheap. |
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| ▲ | axiolite 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Land in Texas and Arizona *is* rather 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. | | |
| ▲ | le-mark 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > The southern US mostly doesn't have blizzards and ice that regularly knocks out electric supply lines 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. |
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| ▲ | nxobject 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Also, very, VERY long histories of manufacturing there - TI has been in Arizona since 1969, for example. | |
| ▲ | blks 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Taxes and labour laws/no unions | | |
| ▲ | masklinn 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Also limited to no environmental regulations and very… accommodating… administrations. |
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| ▲ | dboreham 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Republicans. |
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| ▲ | oldpersonintx2 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | Gud 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What the fuck.
This is terrible news. |
