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by wonderwonder
1669 days ago
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They are setting up fairly close to Tesla. Wonder if they are working on a deal for Tesla to provide battery backup. Interestingly enough Austin, TX appears to be rapidly approaching SF status as a tech hub and may soon surpass them. Its an interesting thing to watch and really gives insight into how politics and taxes affect business and growth. |
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Running an entire leading edge semiconductor plant on battery backup is a crazy proposition in my view. Especially, for intentions of surviving another Texas winter situation without any disruption to operations. Approximately 24 hours of full-coverage battery backup would have been required to bridge the rolling blackouts.
Last I checked (about a decade ago), the SAS A2/S2 lines accounted for ~13% of the electrical load for the entire city of Austin. Just look at the amount of power one EUV light source requires today. These lines will have potentially dozens moving forward. Then consider that all of the photo area accounts for a tiny fraction of total power consumption in one of these plants.
If it were even remotely feasible for the Samsung semiconductor lines to operate on standby generator power, they would have installed these units already and no losses would have been incurred.
They might as well be smelting aluminum behind those walls. Any backup generator power or UPS devices are designed for life safety and stopping the line without causing 10+ figure losses. You cannot run one of these facilities on in-house power. Another commenter proposed a nuclear reactor installation. This is actually not a terrible idea once you understand the scale. Putting 10-15 semiconductor lines around a nuke plant makes perfect sense to me.