| ▲ | tgsovlerkhgsel 4 hours ago | |
What is so energy consuming around fabs? The light source? I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes and would have expected energy requirements to be lower than e.g. a car factory (or similar to e.g. a mall) and completely negligible on a national grid scale or compared to something like a smelter or lignite mine. Edit: AI claims HVAC and air filtering/handling can be 40-50% of energy usage. Plus a megawatt per EUV scanner (ok, the latter matches what I would have guessed, but compared to the 16 MW of a single large bucket wheel excavator or estimates I've seen for large shopping malls, that's not that insane either). | ||
| ▲ | whateverboat 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
TSMC's Arizona fab needs 200MW of electricity. But even more importantly, they need 2 separate completely independent substation feeds, since a 15 second interruption can cause 0.1B Euro of losses. Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year. | ||
| ▲ | tyre 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
Check out asianometry on YouTube for deep dives into many parts of semiconductor manufacturing, including the lithography processes ASML uses. | ||