> One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them ...
This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure water.
This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab, despite having the human resource for it and investors and government showing great interest to setup one.
Two or three decades back Intel desired to setup a fab in India, but the deal fell through because it would mean India would have to divert a huge amount of water from agriculture and potable water for the population to such fabs. TSMC has approached the indian government many times (even this year) seeking permission to setup a fab in India. But the indian goverment has remained non-commital.
The indian government believes it is in their long-term interest to wait for fab tech to evolve to use less water. Indian states already squabble over sharing water resources, and India has to feed a billion people, and such a diversion of resource doesn't make sense in the long-term.
(Perhaps the James Bond movie was right - we'll all be fighting for fresh water in the coming decades. :)
This is a very false premise. Water is no reason to not have a fab, just like Japan builds semiconductor & nuclear plants in a seismically active zone. So does Israel in a dessert.
India receives way more rain than it requires even in the drier parts, the problem with soil degradation and deforestation that came with unchecked "modern" agriculture.
The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor ecosystem in India will far outweigh any negative, putting a plant close to a nuclear plant and a massive desalination plant to ensure both power, water as well as security will do the job.
> The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and semiconductor ecosystem in India will far outweigh any negative, putting a plant close to a nuclear plant and a massive desalination plant to ensure both power, water as well as security will do the job.
Diversion of water resources to fabs (they require around 2 million liters a day; Intel fabs consumed 9 billion gallons / 3.4 trillion liters in 2015) can gravely affect our food security as 60% of our cultivable land are in "drought prone" areas. Moreover, the water released from the fabs is toxic and can heavily pollute our environment even after they are treated and stringent standards are complied with (and expecting that is a joke in India).
Your suggestion of using a nuclear plant and a desalination plant might seem practical, but it ignores the fact that the byproduct of desalination plants are huge quantities of various salts. And dumping them causes pollution (if you dump them back in the sea, it can create dead zones for kms around as most aquatic life cannot survive in such a "salty" concentrated environment).
The run off from agriculture and tanners is several orders of magnitude greater.
If you factor the over all benefit to the pollution and resource consumption, a fab is several orders of magnitude better, why else would everyone else scramble to get one built.
A fab at the expense of food security is not a good deal. When you can't feed your people, you are at the mercy of other nations, and that greatly harms national security. India used to once have frequent famines, and had to beg food from other countries. Today it can feed its billion+ population because it is the world leader in producing fruits, vegetables, grains, diary produce etc. A starving population doesn't care about CPU chips.
What happens to the water the plants use? Is it polluted and unusable, or just tied up temporarily and can be released [safely] back into wherever it was diverted from?
> The manufacturing of semiconductors generates wastewater that contains heavy metals and toxic solvents. Due to the hazardous nature of these liquids, semiconductor companies historically have incurred clean-up costs related to groundwater contamination of up to USD 100 million ... Some companies are proactively meeting these challenges and mitigating related risks by reducing their reliance on chemicals and pro-actively improving the treatment of water before discharge. STMicroelectronics, for example, recycled and reused 45% of the total water it withdrew in 2015 and it partnered with Micron Technology to install on-site fluoride waste treatment facilities.
The report also gives concrete numbers: Intel fabs consumed 9 billion gallons (around 3.4 trillion liters) of water in 2015.
Apparently a fab roughly consumes around 20,000 tons (around 1.98 million liters) of water per day:
> The chipmaking industry is water-intensive. According to nonprofit China Water Risk (CWR), an average semiconductor factory consumes roughly 20,000 tons of water a day, equivalent to the daily water use of a city of 58,000. Yet despite its high water consumption, the chip industry—in Taiwan, at least—is not normally a noticeable drain on communal resources.
Evaporation, goes to ground water table, stored in plant matter, goes back to river now enriched with fertilizers from fields. If there is fight over water the last one is likely quite small fraction.
Is the returned water safe though? That's what I wasn't sure about, do the fab plants pollute the water to the point it's unusable, or is it able to be re-used(drank).
This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure water.
This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab, despite having the human resource for it and investors and government showing great interest to setup one.
Two or three decades back Intel desired to setup a fab in India, but the deal fell through because it would mean India would have to divert a huge amount of water from agriculture and potable water for the population to such fabs. TSMC has approached the indian government many times (even this year) seeking permission to setup a fab in India. But the indian goverment has remained non-commital.
The indian government believes it is in their long-term interest to wait for fab tech to evolve to use less water. Indian states already squabble over sharing water resources, and India has to feed a billion people, and such a diversion of resource doesn't make sense in the long-term.
(Perhaps the James Bond movie was right - we'll all be fighting for fresh water in the coming decades. :)