Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

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At what point will current fabrication plants reach their limit? Is it a supply issue? Or maybe a resource constraint?

> Similarly, a fab will use very large amounts of ultrapure water for wafer cleaning and CMP, along with the regular water for things like chillers for process cooling. A large fab can use millions of gallons of ultrapure water a day, as much as a town of 50,000 people, and producing it requires its own specialized plant.

This is wild. All of this water so companies can create chips that will ultimately be used to …

pump out “advanced” chat bots.

I really hope all of this sacrifice is worth it in the end. Climate change is accelerating the loss of drinkable water around the planet.

If the best we could do is a slightly better chat bot, then we are doomed.

The water is not used up, and it doesn’t even evaporate, except for the small amount used in evaporative chillers.

The big scary sounding number at the input has a big number at the output.

Not to mention that up to 98 percent of the water is reused on site. It just gets cleaned and goes back into facility. It’s a big loop, not an input disappearing into a parallel universe.

science be damned, why oh why is all this water pouring into our universe. luckily its not 2% more or we'd all be doomed

"...as much as a town of 50,000 people"

This is always so funny to me. Oh, something that can make enough chips for millions/billions of devices also uses as much water as a small town? That sounds perfectly reasonable. Don't build it in the middle of the desert, I guess, but otherwise it's not a problem.

The desert is fine. That’s like a couple of idiotic farms worth of water for a much larger benefit.

>chat bots

Ignoring Alphafold, moderna partnering with openai, the new class of antibiotics, etc etc. There's a lot more to ai than chat bots. That's a disingenuous reduction.

I agree that it's a bold bet though, burning how many ever billions a year on the hope that ai can help us solve medicine and fusion and climate change.

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