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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

i wonder why Texas?

making semiconductors tends to produce a lot of toxic waste. and Texas is pretty lax on these issues, especially under the current administration.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/10/13/what-does-trumps-rep...

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"...at the same Austin facility where Mac Pro has been made since 2013". I assume that it would be easiest to use an existing facility.

We're talking about assembly of the Mac Pro not semiconductors. Presumably Apple chose Texas back in 2013 because they gave the biggest tax break, just like every other company.

Though there are fabs in Texas. The 2 that I know of for sure are Samsung is Austin about 5 miles down the road from the Flextronics plant that builds the MacPro.

National Semiconductor has a fab up in Arlington Texas.

I'm not sure if Texas Instruments still has their fabs open or not, but they had several at one point too. Sure there are more that I don't know about.

Aren't all Apple A series CPUs made by TSMC in Taiwan?

If you're referring to the 'Samsung Austin Semiconductor' in Tech Ridge, I wonder how well the fab is aging. The last building I remember was built primarily for NAND flash production back around 2007 ( https://phys.org/news/2007-06-samsung-largest-wafer-austin-t... ).

Though chipdesign and not fab, also worth remembering Apple acquired Austin-based Intrinsity in 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity)

Samsung did expand the building a couple of years ago. IIRC it was to expand the NAND production.

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