Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-breaks-ground-20-bln-arizona-plants-us-chip-factory-race-heats-up-2021-09-24/

by thunderbong • 5 years ago

457 310 5 years ago

reuters.com

bloopernova• 5 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't you want to build a semiconductor fabrication factory somewhere cold?

Or is it because Arizona is dry?

(honest questions, I don't know what impacts the location of a fab)

CompuHacker• 5 years ago

As I understand it, you want inexpensive power and water. Bonus points for environmental stability over absolute temperature.

user568439• 5 years ago

Why should it be cold? This is necessary for data centers but for factories probably it’s much better to have your own solar powered energy

thehappypm7• 5 years ago

Arizona is a place where, with enough investment (like the billions here) power can be extremely green and cheap, with solar. Needing a huge amount of air conditioning is not a problem when it coincides with the moment the sun is pouring huge amounts of energy into your solar array.

zwirbl• 5 years ago

this leaves out the issues with the large amounts of water needed for semiconductor fabrication, although another commenter noted that Arizona has pretty good water management (I guess this includes recycling?)

raverbashing• 5 years ago

If you can manage to build your solar as to shade your building, your AC costs will greatly diminish as well.

cma• 5 years ago

Semiconductor manufacturing needs constant power aside from AC though, it presumably doesn't stop at night due to high automation and the capital involved.

lvl1002• 5 years ago

You don’t need a large constant source of water. It’s a bit like filling a very large swimming pool. They also already have plants down there and it works for them because AZ is surprisingly shielded from natural disasters. Also they can utilize solar power down there.

Nbox93• 5 years ago

AZ Natural Disasters

AZ suffers from heat waves, which are steadily getting worse over time. Last year in a heat wave Phoenix saw several days above 115F. A 115F heatwave is a natural disaster mitigated by air conditioning. Hopefully a heat wave doesn’t coincide with a 2020 Texas sized electrical blackout.

This isn’t a massive problem now, but imagine how bad AZ heat waves will be by the end of his factories life.

dragonelite• 5 years ago

You already need extreme climate and dust control don't think the location will matter that much.

newacct583• 5 years ago

You want to build them where you can staff them, and these fabs are going up next door to Intel's existing fabs in Chandler.

josaka• 5 years ago

I think it's because it's dry. Facilities guy in the semi plant I used to work in told me that their highest energy usage was when it was humid, not when it's hot or cold. Said the energy cost to cool the humid air to pull out water and then heat it back up to the fab's target temp was pretty massive.

dv_dt• 5 years ago

seems like you should be able to dump part of the waste heat back into the output air after the cooling stage.

jdshupe• 5 years ago

There were also a lot of Tax incentives for building in this location. The company I work for is doing the electrical work and all of our materials are tax free.

softfalcon4• 5 years ago

Arizona has a few major things going for it:

- lack of seismic activity

- very cheap, flat, easily excavated land

- rich history of fab production (see: Motorola) which provides the necessary city infra, construction groups, supply distribution to build such fabs

- consistently dry climate that despite being hot, is easily controlled for humidity

- numerous tax and subsidy enticements to do business there

sbierwagen• 5 years ago

rich history of fab production

I would rank this way higher. Clustering fabs together makes it much easier to hire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... Intel, Microchip, NXP, TSMC and Entrepix all have plants in Arizona.

As an antiexample, the Bay Area has every negative attribute you could hope to think of for basing a software company there, and yet everyone does it anyway, just for hiring.

kd9132• 5 years ago

Doesn't chip making a lot of water, most of it in Arizona is fed by Lake Mead?

The same reservoir that is at 30% capacity, with acute water shortages and with 4 years of increased precipitation necessary for an adequate refill.

We are adding a chip making facility which needs a lot of water here?

This sounds like a recipe for disaster whenever there is a period of water stress which appears to be occurring in that region significantly more frequently.

The more I think about it, the more US infra/urban planning makes absolutely 0 sense to me. Seems to more closely follow tax breaks and tax income than necessarily smart resource allocation.

jmartrican• 5 years ago

From what I understand they will try to recycle the water.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/why-intel-tsmc-are-building-...

bserge• 5 years ago

Can they create a water pipeline from elsewhere? Crazy, but not that far out. Oil and gas is transported this way.

solarhoma• 5 years ago

Society pays significantly more for a gallon of oil than water. Water can cost less than a cent in some municipalities. Building a pipeline would increase that cost 100x easily

tyleo• 5 years ago

Anecdotal but I have a friend who is an engineer in water treatment and he said pipelines aren’t a silver bullet for two reasons:

1. They are leaky so you end up paying more for the same amount of water

2. Wherever you are buying the water from (the source of the pipeline) knows their water is valuable and can charge more

pwarner• 5 years ago

you use a lot more water than oil, maybe 100x? I think 100 gallons / person / day is not crazy for water, and I hope you don't use that much oil, maybe a gallon a day?

eCa• 5 years ago

Not far out at all. The list of the world’s longest tunnels[1] is filled with water tunnels.

Added: They are of course short whem compared to pipelines, but still.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_tunnels

thehappypm7• 5 years ago

Arizona is famously good at water management. They require a 100 year plan and are basically completely non-dependent on the ever-shrinking Colorado River. If any state would have a plan for recycling and make sure this plan is done appropriately it’s AZ.

kirjav• 5 years ago

I am not sure having a giant aqueduct diverting water from Colorado River counts as "completely non-dependent". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project

ethanbond3• 5 years ago

… what?

The US southwest is entering its first ever Tier 1 water shortage next year, meaning Arizona will have reduced supply equivalent to 1.2MM people’s annual consumption. No reason to believe we don’t go straight from here to Tier 2, onto Tier 3, and so on. Nature doesn’t provide enough water in a desert to be running sprawling metropolises and even more massive farms and graze land - especially water-intensive cotton farms.

https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/drought-water-shortage...

Already, water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two major reservoirs that store the Colorado River’s water, are down to 34% of their capacity and may soon drop too low to spin the hydroelectric turbines in their dams. Some smaller reservoirs began emergency releases in summer 2021 to prop up water levels in these lakes.

https://westernresourceadvocates.org/projects/arizona-colora...

The Tier 1 shortage will reduce water to the Central Arizona Project by 320,000 acre-feet (enough water to supply 1.2 million individuals for a year).

Maybe Arizona is losing this battle as gracefully as anyone could, but they are very much losing this battle.

nabla9• 5 years ago

You are not wrong, but having access to people with right experience and companies that supply the products and services for chip manufacture chips is more important. Seismic stability is another benefit.

They have to spend more on recycling and cleaning the water than in other places. In 2020 Intel cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in Arizona. They have their own water treatment plats and public-private partnerships for water purification that purify Intel’s wastewater back to drinking standard.

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2021/manufacturing/Intel...

cletus• 5 years ago

The general perception of Arizona is that of a desert. But did you know that Arizona has ski resorts? The Rocky Mountains extend into Arizona and they get snow in the winter. >90% of Arizona's water comes from snow melt.

baybal22• 5 years ago

Microchips are a more strategic resource than water.

I would not be surprised if even using tanker caravans to bring water from Utah is an option for chip production.

phreeza• 5 years ago

Surely water is more strategically important than chips? It's just that chips are scarcer and thus easier to deny an enemy. If an enemy had the choice to deny one of the two resources, water would be the better strategic choice.

comeonseriously2• 5 years ago

That would be, what, several thousand trucks per day? I don't see how that would be any better.

buryat2• 5 years ago

I decided to check how much water a plant would use

a plant used 4 million gallons of water a day (according to https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shorta...) which is about 126000 metric tons a day

arizona used 7 million acre-foot of water in 2017 (https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...) which is about 19000 acre-feet a day == 23014434 metric ton a day (using http://www.conversion-website.com/volume/acre-foot-to-ton-wa...)

so a chip plant would be responsible for about 0.55% of overall water usage

lovemenot• 5 years ago

Thanks for doing a fact-check.

Might there be other other downstream states in USA or Mexico that would push that 0.55% ratio higher?

Buttons840• 5 years ago

So one business / structure will use 1/200th of all water? That does sound like a lot.

kiklion• 5 years ago

What is ‘using water’ in this context? Is it boiled off? Contaminated and needs to be cleaned?

dralley• 5 years ago

One single factory using 0.55% of the entire state's water consumption is pretty massive.

iamgopal• 5 years ago

On the other hand, there are very standard technologies for water recycling. UHF, RO, ZLD, MEE etc. Water is quite easy to recycle given intention to do it.

BurningFrog3• 5 years ago

Note that the Verge quote is

It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates

rrss3• 5 years ago

Why does this metric matter, when 95% of the water Intel uses is already returned to the water supply?

From the same verge article as the 4 million gallons a day figure:

Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It’s nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in 2020

tzs• 5 years ago

4 million gallons X 3.785 kg/gallon X 1 metric ton / 1000 kg = 15140 metric tons, not 126000 metric tons. The calculation for Arizona is correct.

That gives 0.066%, no 0.55%.

HomeDeLaPot• 5 years ago

Intel isn't stupid; they will want a return on their investment. I would love to see the internal whitepaper or whatever that summarized the decision.

wibagusto2• 5 years ago

It’s not about being stupid it’s about their self-interests versus all the folks who live in Arizona and depend on the water supply.

Remember intel’s modus operandi is increasing profits for shareholders.

ZetaZero• 5 years ago

The "average" chip fab uses about as much water as 3 "average" irrigated center pivot farms. If the fab land was previously irrigated farm land, this will be a net savings of water.

Math:

130 acres at 0.25 inches of water = 10 million gallons of water. Done once per week for 3 farms = 4.3m gallons per day.

Average chip fab uses 2-4 million gallons per day

wibagusto2• 5 years ago

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.

mschuster91• 5 years ago

The more I think about it, the more US infra/urban planning makes absolutely 0 sense to me. Seems to more closely follow tax breaks and tax income than necessarily smart resource allocation.

An issue that doesn't just plague the US. Here in the EU, we have similar issues with governments from local city councils to federal governments doing anything they can to poach businesses. Tax breaks, subventions, lax law enforcement (e.g. Ireland vs GDPR)... it's madness. And the problem is, you can't simply go ahead and centralize that planning because you always have to be afraid of a political party taking over and completely abusing that power in the next legislative period.

new_guy• 5 years ago

Probably a good time to remind people that this entire planet is 70% water. Water shortage shouldn't be a thing, but greed and short sightedness is.

Cthulhu_4• 5 years ago

Probably a good time to remind people that only 3% of that is fresh water. Fresh water shortage is definitely a thing.

thrashh• 5 years ago

It’s not greed and shortsightedness.

It’s logistics. Logistics is expensive af

matheusmoreira3• 5 years ago

Water shortage shouldn't be a thing, but greed and short sightedness is.

Yup. We'll never ever run out of water. Whatever problems arise, there are solutions for them. People just don't want to pay. They want it cheap and convenient.

ckastner• 5 years ago

Doesn't chip making a lot of water

Can anyone share an insight on why this is the case? (I'm assuming it is true because I've heard the claim quite often on HN.)

It's not really obvious to me where water is consumed during the fabrication process. It doesn't end up in the chips, so where does it go? If it were just used for cooling, it would be returned somewhere.

mwint• 5 years ago

There’s a lot of chemistry as part of the chip making process. Water is often an ingredient mixed with concentrated nasty stuff to get less concentrated, but still nasty stuff. Then they do something with it (like wash a part), but you can’t then effectively recover all the water.

This is how it was explained to me by someone who works directly on the process; I could be butchering the explanation.

ksec• 5 years ago

As mentioned, they are used to clean / wash off chemicals from wafers. And not just any water, but Ultrapure Water [1], it is an actual terminology, not marketing speak.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrapure_water

ovi256• 5 years ago

Seems to more closely follow tax breaks and tax income

It follows feasibility, AFAIK. All new manufacturing is in Southern US states because they're the ones that allow new plants to be built. The others tie projects down in long, expensive, non-successful environmental studies.

At this point, it's easier to bring water to the desert (Arizona) than get approval for a manufacturing facility in a non-desert.

IgorPartola2• 5 years ago

A thousand years from now your last sentence will be a proverb if unknown origin.

syshum• 5 years ago

There are many business friendly regions in the US with plenty of water. The mid-West for example. is pretty business friendly. KY, IN, TN, AR, MO, WV, and others all have plenty of water, and more business friendly laws than AZ

enkid• 5 years ago

It's more about seismic stability from what I've read. Arizona has much less severe weather than basically anywhere in the US.

seanmcdirmid6• 5 years ago

Intel has built fabs in Arizona for a long time, this isn’t a new thing. They do this because of seismic stability and a lack of severe weather. Water isn’t a huge concern because they can internally recycle most of it.

runako• 5 years ago

All new manufacturing is in Southern US states because they're the ones that allow new plants to be built.

New manufacturing is built in the South because that's where wages are low, worker protections are weaker, and there is less union activity. Companies will essentially tell you this in their PR about opening new plants.

kesselvon• 5 years ago

It's the lack of unions and cheap wages. Southern states are famously lax on workers rights and business regulations.

NortySpock2• 5 years ago

https://youtu.be/Dq04GpzRZ0g?t=472

Asianometry did a breakdown on water usage of chip fabs in Taiwan and Arizona, including noting Arizona's state-wide water management plan, and pointing out that land-use wise, a chip plant makes more money per acre (gross revenue, and in property taxes) than other commercial or industrial or farming zones. A gallon of water makes more money in a chip plant than in an almond tree. (Especially since it can be cleaned and reused, rather than evaporated as in a tree.)

1234letshaveatw2• 5 years ago

Wouldn't it make just as much money in a spot with no water usage concerns?

dcchambers• 5 years ago

Wishful thinking, but would be nice if Intel could take over that Foxconn plant in Wisconsin that has been a complete failure. There's 1180 cubic miles (1299318214239334 gallons) of fresh water right there in Lake Michigan.

hosh6• 5 years ago

I live in Phoenix and have heard some of the local discourse about this.

Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational.

Intel has invested in both recycling water as well as partnering with organizations on water conservation and ecology projects.

Arizona does draw water from the Colorado River, but among the four states, Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights. We get what is left over after Colorado, California, and Utah get their legal share.

The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial farmers. (The Hopi people practice dryland agriculture and so don’t irrigate at all; most everyone else irrigates using inefficient and destructive land management practices). Aquifers here have been draining, and it has been a big issue. Farmers are already getting restricted on water use this year (despite an unusually wet monsoon season), and water restrictions has not hit residential users yet. It is on the radar for policymakers though.

Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable. They each had to invest an enormous amount in the more seismically active Taiwan and California, and it gets more sensitive the smaller the chips get.

If we want to conserve more water, the most effective way is to change commercial farming practices. Fabs have already invested a lot to reducing ongoing water use.

For an example of what I mean by better land management practices in regards to water: https://youtu.be/-8nqnOcoLqE

da_chicken• 5 years ago

The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial farmers.

And farming has been booming in Arizona. I lived there about 10 years ago and even then there were a lot of complaints about all the tree farms (almonds, etc.) that were showing up in Arizona. Massive water consumption and virtually impossible to be sustainable in the desert.

dillondoyle2• 5 years ago

Interesting relevent article came out from Bloomberg yesterday about Arizona water authority helping boost new more efficient and cheaper drip tech:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-micro...

j_walter13• 5 years ago

Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational.

This is just not true. The amount of cooling required for fabs is extremely significant and without major evaporative cooling you can't get it. With evaporative cooling comes water loss...and not a small amount of it, especially in the desert. You can do a lot to recycle water that is used in the process, but not the water loss using in cooling.

This is also evident in the environmental goals set forth by Intel...they talk about returning 100% water to the environment. Well evaporation is back to the environment...

UncleOxidant2• 5 years ago

Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable

There are a lot of places in the US that are at least as seismically stable and also have more abundant water. I suspect the choice of Arizona has more to do with tax incentives and the fact that fabs already exist there (and thus there is an experienced workforce).

celestialcheese• 5 years ago

If seismic stability was the primary concern, why not choose a state like Minnesota? (lowest seismic activity in the US) Is it tax / local governments + seismic stability?

vmh1928• 5 years ago

Some statistics about Arizona's water sources and where it goes. 72% of the water is used by agriculture. 6% to industry 22% to municipal use

http://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts

But yes, water usage is a big issue in AZ at the moment with Lake Mead and Powell at very low levels which has triggered and will trigger more cuts to the use of Colorado River water via the Central Arizona Project canal.

Arizona has no law even measuring, much less restricting groundwater pumping which is a big problem getting bigger as cuts in Colorado River usage lead to more pumping.

cannabis_sam2• 5 years ago

Well, it’s a market, so the corporations with cashflow stand at the front of the queue. There is no other way of organizing this in our late stage capitalist shitscape…

It’s unfortunate that poor people need to starve or freeze to death to keep billionaires “alive”, but that’s what our genocidal, fellow citizens have been voting for..

ryan937• 5 years ago

Please try and actually contribute to the discussion. In reality countries without many billionaires have way more issues with water supply and heating.

Galaxity• 5 years ago

I don't understand why people keep saying Lake Mead when referring to water use. Technically the CAP canal come from Lake Havasu. But it's all from the Colorado River.

Regardless it's not the primary source of water. The majority of water for the Phoenix area comes from central Arizona rivers. The Salt river project, the Salt river and Verde, etc. You can see the big reservoirs to the east of Phoenix and from groundwater.

subsubzero• 5 years ago

And yet you have the east coast(north east in my example) which is extremely lush and has 0 water issues and most companies are building these large sites in western water poor areas, intel - arizona phab, tesla - nevada gigafactory, facebook, datacenter southern new mexico.

heavyset_go2• 5 years ago

The east coast gets hit by several hurricanes each year, some of which result in disasters and states of emergency being declared and cause billions of dollars worth of damage.

adminscoffee• 5 years ago

very good point about the water, side note for anyone reading this. we really ought to invest heavily in permaculture (restoring eco-systems). anyone who doesn't know exactly what i am talking about please check out the this "tech". it is a lot cooler than it sounds. the process can restore underground watersheds in the dessert and bring back forests. it's a science, but can be learned outside of a university on your own if you don't want to do more schooling, at first i thought it was some hippy dippy stuff but it has fangs

Karrot_Kream• 5 years ago

I enjoy a lot of aspects of permaculture, but a lot of it is cargo-culting pseudoscience. There's very little understanding of _why_ the techniques that they espouse work except for vague principles. I really wish more engineers took the time to do permaculture and documented their designs, instead of hippie experimenters.

ktistec• 5 years ago

The average golf course in Arizona uses 450,000 gallons a day according to [1]. According to [2], this means we're talking about 4-8 golf courses per day. There are over 200 golf courses near Phoenix, so your concern is legitimate the water usage here is marginal relative to the economic impact. As other commenters have pointed out, if you really want to impact water issues, there are far more efficient ways to tackle them.

[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...

[2] https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/25055/Ultrapure-water-sem...

downrightmike• 5 years ago

These fabs will likely be water neutral because requirements that they treat the water before giving it back to the city basically make it clean enough to use again.

sheepybloke• 5 years ago

One thing I don't see discussed in the comments is the trade off of resources. While water is an important resource, a quick Google show that a "Large semiconductor fabs use as much as 100 megawatt-hours of power each hour, which is more than many automotive plants or oil refineries do." [1] If you look at a cost analysis, I'm sure the price of energy far outweighs the total price of getting their water for the plant. By building in AZ, which has the ability to get a lot of solar and cheaper energy, they can reduce that cost dramatically, so the economics can still seem viable. My company is also energy constrained and we went through a similar analysis recently. It's hard to say no when you can cut your energy costs literally by a third. [1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv....

Cheyana• 5 years ago

The current fab here in Chandler, Arizona recycles all of its water now.

wiz21c2• 5 years ago

Next time the communication department says "less is more", I'll explode. Do we really need to produce more IC's ? Can't we just limit the demand a bit ?

Can't we make washing machines, cars, bikes, fridges, dish washers, coffee machines,... without IC's ? My Core2 Duo is 12 years old and I still use it 8 hours a day, do I really need a new generation CPU ?

I understand that global economy (and thus employment and other important stuff) rely on the trade of IC's but do we really need so much more ?

(kiddo's have been waiting their PS5 for 9 months now, but is that a insurmountable problem?)

Not to say that IC's are bad (I'm CS :-)) but just asking if the current IC shortage may be a good time to think about the sustainability of our appetite, or if it's the good time to think about living in a world with actual limits...

valine• 5 years ago

How exactly do you expect to build an EV without ICs? We’ve already tried cars without ICs, they’re noisy polluters. You talk about sustainability like we weren’t pumping carbon into the atmosphere before computers.

Also maybe your job is such that you can get by with and old power hungry cpu like the core 2 duo, most people can’t.

wiz21c2• 5 years ago

old power hungry cpu

note that global CO2 has risen since the birth of my CPU. So I doubt the next gen leads us to make less CO2... I know, the current CPU's consume less energy, but globally, because of the fall in price, I'm pretty confident that the energy saved on the CPU is completely offset by the number of CPU sold.

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

Power hungry is not a term I'd use to describe a Core 2 Duo.

Or do CPUs need more power to run as they get older? That would be news to me.

speed_spread• 5 years ago

Most newer CPU power is geared towards AI and telemetry (IoT, web advertising), which essentially feed the surveillance economy. Desktop CPUs have been powerful enough for non-ad driven web browsing and office applications for at least a decade.

mcphage• 5 years ago

Do we really need to produce more IC's ?

In this case, it's not so much about more ICs (although we do need more right now), but it's who's making the ICs. The US is trying to ramp up their internal production capability, rather than depending on Taiwan as heavily.

seanw444• 5 years ago

And then when (if*) we become independent, and China finally gets the balls to scoop up Taiwan, our administration will be nowhere to be found.

PerkinWarwick2• 5 years ago

A lack of Taiwan dependency may well avoid a world war.

Nbox93• 5 years ago

How is raising the information processing capabilities of humanity anything but a net good thing?

Dah00n4• 5 years ago

If it is to scan milk inside a refrigerator? Most can do without "smart" functionality.

mywittyname• 5 years ago

Without ICs, these devices have to rely on mechanical controllers, which are much larger, more expensive, less reliable, less efficient, louder, and really worse in ever metric.

I think your sentiment is not to produce wifi-powered, ad-driven refrigerators, and yeah, I can agree with that point. But the core ICs in these devices have been there for decades and do provide substantial, tangible benefits.

I can't speak for every device, but I've replaced the circuit board on a few appliances over the years and they are mostly generic boards with really cheap, ancient chips produced by brands most people have never heard of and sell in bulk for a quarter each. These are definitely not cutting the cutting edge designs that Intel will be building here. So let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

_Understated_• 5 years ago

What kind of ramp-up time are we looking at here? This can't be a quick process to get chips out the door I imagine!

wongarsu• 5 years ago

They are supposed to start production in 2024 (which sounds very quick, considering they just started construction). No idea how quickly they can ramp up production from there, but delays wouldn't be anything unusual for a new semiconductor plant.

acoard• 5 years ago

I've heard that the general industry estimates for something like this are 5 (up to 10) years. However, both Intel and TSMC's USA are saying 2024. Potentially related is that 2024 is a presidential election year.

It's like trees: a long-term investment, and you might as well start now.

phkahler• 5 years ago

Has Intel mastered EVU lithography yet? They've been close for a long time now.

htrp• 5 years ago

Nope... still getting pretty bad yields.

jmpman• 5 years ago

Is there any evidence that Intel has fixed its process problems? Otherwise aren’t they building a $20B liability?

acomjean• 5 years ago

I think they're doing ok. I don't follow too closely, but 11th gen intel mobile is behind AMD. The good new for intel is they're not so far behind this generation that no one will buy their chips.

Intel have new management and some optimism and by the time the plant is finished in 2-3 years they'll have their ducks in a row, but who knows what the market will be like then. In a bad scenario they could be a end up a bulk supplier to other companies of close to state-of-the-art chips, which might be an ok place to be.

thehappypm7• 5 years ago

If you look at many applications that are absolutely guzzling chips -- automotive, appliances, IoT -- you don't need cutting edge chips. Cheap and fast enough is a great market niche. Especially when "fast enough" is state-of-the-art from 5 years ago.

comeonseriously2• 5 years ago

So many of the AMD laptops I see are geared towards gaming. Makes sense in that they're powerful, but I wish there were more options for general purpose lightweight laptops.

sneak• 5 years ago

I often wonder if Intel and Boeing are going to end up as effective branches of US government, too big/strategic to ever let actually fail (or even let be sufficiently battered by market realities).

Boeing seems like it's already there, and Intel can't be far behind.

dillondoyle2• 5 years ago

There's already precedent with a fab in MN https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14416247

And the US Govt props up other critical industry, not just for military but trade, gas, & food.

Personally I support it.

robotnikman• 5 years ago

I pass by there every day on my way to work. Based on all the construction equipment I saw around the campus I figured the new fabs were going to start being built soon.

It also still amazes me how huge the campus is

Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

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