Fun Fact: While Phoenix is indeed in a desert, it is a high desert (unlike the Mojave desert in Southern California), and there are canals that bring water from the Northern part of the Arizona, which has more mountains (in terms of square miles) than Switzerland. Also lots of great places to go skiing.
Arizona has so much water that historically it spent 2/3 of its water on growing water intensive crops like alfalfa and cotton. The nice thing about growing crops in the desert is year round sunlight allows you to get more harvests in. As rain damages cotton, the ideal place to grow it would be something like a desert with canals bringing in water from mountains nearby.
But semiconductor plants offer much better revenue per gallon of water than alfalfa or cotton, so it makes a lot of sense that Arizona is trying to migrate its water allocation to higher value-add industries, and of course the state would rather be known for semiconductors than for cotton.
Arizona has so much water that historically it spent 2/3 of its water on growing water intensive crops like alfalfa and cotton. The nice thing about growing crops in the desert is year round sunlight allows you to get more harvests in. As rain damages cotton, the ideal place to grow it would be something like a desert with canals bringing in water from mountains nearby.
But semiconductor plants offer much better revenue per gallon of water than alfalfa or cotton, so it makes a lot of sense that Arizona is trying to migrate its water allocation to higher value-add industries, and of course the state would rather be known for semiconductors than for cotton.