This is actually a brilliant location for them. One of those places that has much more going for it than people not from the region would realize.
International airport, large rail depot, extremely low cost of living and a city/region that has more good restaurants and activities than might be expected. Ohio State University is in the city and is a huge school that is rapidly growing in academic standing. Road transit in the area is also very good allowing access to any part of the city from any other part in rapid fashion. Good schools, relatively low crime, etc. Probably the only drawback, from a lifestyle point of view, would be the winter and that's not even that bad, compared to other winter regions.
> extremely low cost of living and a city/region that has more good restaurants and activities than might be expected
That's what people said about Salt Lake City and Boise... until about 5 years ago. Cost of living has skyrocketed since 2017, housing alone has doubled in price. It doesn't take long for a low cost of living region to become high cost of living.
Cost of living in Columbus is low if you are looking at it with Coastal city eyes. That being said, its still the most expensive city in Ohio. Houses in the hot neighborhoods people write articles about were hitting 700k 6 years ago. Rents in new apartments are like $1300 for a 1 bedroom.
> That being said, its still the most expensive city in Ohio.
Yes, because it's the only major city that's growing. Cleveland, Cincinatti, Toledo, and Dayton are all losing population year-over-year while Columbus's grows.
Just remarking its not entirely cheap. You can move there and get a job that pays well, but you aren't alone, other people are going to have well paid jobs too and you will find the same competitive housing market for decent neighborhoods that you see in places like Portland or wherever. Especially when you consider how your full tax structure works it might not be as much of a deal over time as CA with prop 13 as your taxes will be reassessed every few years and if the market climbed, so did your tax bill. There's probably fewer opportunities to leg up your earned income to match in a place with less jobs and smaller network effects like Central Ohio than there is in major job centers with more options for lateral moves.
I don't get why cost of living is factored at all.
The biggest expense is typically housing. And if you bought the house, it means the biggest expense is... building equity into an asset you can sell afterward.
Keep in mind the engineer who purchased a 2 million house in Palo Alto can sell it for two million, and then move to Ohio to a much cheaper house purchased in cash. The reverse isn't true.
You also pay taxes. But you are right that for the first movers it will be an easy transition into living opulantly in Ohio. The same can't be said for the next generation of workers, who graduate and have no capital accrued from working at bay area rates, and start their careers working for these Ohio based employers at Ohio based salary rates, and since Columbus is experiencing the same lack of supply issue everywhere growing faces, this generation are going to find a cutthroat market for them like the current generation of engineers fleeing 2 million dollar homes in Palo Alto.
As long as the market is allowed to build housing to meet demand it's not too bad.
Main issue in Palo Alto (and to a large extent the rest of the bay area) is that there's massive population growth in the bay area, but very little housing is allowed to be built. This creates artificial scarcity and the people that bought houses 30yrs ago accrue massive wealth because of it at the expense of new people (and the new people that manage to buy at exorbitant rates also end up paying the majority share of taxes too).
This is the natural incentive made worse by things like locked property taxes and rent control. You really need legislation that allows the market to build (easier said than done).
The (build) supply side of the housing market is complicated.
Remember that even when you aren't hampered by lack of space and/or zoning, most build starts are still 'investments'. I knew a whole lot of folks who did homebuilding in the first decade of the century. Housing starts were all over the place, partially because the investors were sure that with prices rising, it was a sure thing, right?
But then the market glut happened. Housing starts stopped. All of those folks left homebuilding and few if any ever went back to it.
I think nowadays Investors are back to preferring smaller buildouts, potentially in more phases. The supply/labor issues from covid haven't helped things lately though.
Population isn’t coming from nowhere. You can also directly compare the amounts new housing vs new commercial development in the Bay Area to see what’s going on.
The rules created by existing residents where designed to push up rent and home prices, and they have succeeded.
But unlike Palo Alto, Columbus can expand in all directions indefinitely. So while it may have housing issues, it would be completely surprising for houses to get as expensive or even relatively as expensive as a place like Palo Alto. Though the downside here is because of car-first urban planning and design we will create our own little version of Houston.
LA has by far the worst wages-to-rent ratio in the entire nation so I'm a bit skeptical of you claim here. Also note that the other post said a new apartment.
You are welcome to peruse craigslist and fact check my claim yourself. I do note the poster said new apartment, that poster was me. It is still surprising to me that for the money spent living in Columbus, you can live in LA. Even if the acommodations are a little bit older in the LA example, it's not like you are getting a multibedroom apartment for the price of a studio in LA or anything. Plus minimum wage is $15 in LA and $9.30 in Columbus and more skilled jobs go up from there accordingly (SWE in columbus make like 70-80k probably). Here's a studio clocking in under $1300 in LA in Koreatown, which would be very convenient if you worked in hollywood or downtown LA:
1 bedroom apartments go for closer to $700 or even as low as $400ish in Dayton just an hour and a half south of Columbus. Even here though housing prices are skyrocketing, so that won't be the case for long. Prices in Columbus are going to be absolutely ridiculous once this fab opens unless housing prices plummet for other reasons.
Agreed on the skyrocketing prices. Local here - I live 15 minutes from where Intel is breaking ground and it's bittersweet to be honest. I make good money for this area as a Software Engineer, but it's not coastal money and I can see the writing on the wall. I grew up in this area and have watched the locals slowly get pushed out. It's somewhat sad, but what can you do? Single family homes have went up 40% in the last five years and I'm guessing it will only get worse. The theory is that Columbus is supposed to grow by one million people in the next five to ten years, so a tech hub in New Albany will only exaggerate this.
All that being said, I have every intention on trying to work for Intel or at the tech hub itself, make my money/deal with it until retirement age, then get the heck out of here and find a place far far away where I can get something that looks and feels like this place once was.
Cost of living is relative. San Francisco is about 50% more expensive than Seattle. Which in turn is about 70% higher than SLC, judging by a quick scan of apartment rents.
The midwest has some of the greatest engineering schools in the nation. I have been beating this drum hoarse for a few years now - but it's true. Specifically, members of the Big 10 conference are probably the best engineering schools conference in the world. Within 300 miles from Columbus (where you have Ohio State - Big10), you have Penn State, Michigan, Michigan State, UIUC, Indiana, Purdue from the Big 10 along with Carnegie Mellon, Case Western and Pitt. Even the state of California doesn't have so many so good tech schools.
With a potential $100b investment, it's not about what they have now, it's about what will be in 20 years.
Ohio is a great place for this kind of corporate gentrification. As a CMU grad, I know there was a collective desire to get students to stick around, but there was better lifestyle, more money, etc.. leaving after school and a fairly large number of us weren't from the area to begin with. Something like this can be a game changer for the region, plus, there will be dozens of additional companies that set up camp and start up there for support.
If it really works and the region supports it and leans in, all of the schools anywhere near by will step up their engineering programs.
Relative to economic output, not really. In absolute terms, yes, because the plants are massive and "facilities staff" misses a lot when you're talking about machines worth 150 million a piece, clean rooms, and billions in depreciation per year.
They keep the process parameters within the optimal zone. That is considerably more complicated than it sounds. They also work on incremental improvements.
The R&D fab(s) definitely have a high number of PhDs. I don't know about the production fabs. PhDs will definitely visit when starting up a new fab or process or when issues need to be addressed.
If it is anything like BioTech, they will. I was shocked when I joined a large firm and realized that the person spending most of their day breaking down boxes and checking log books has a masters from Berkeley. Most of the techs running equipment have masters/Phds.
As I have come to realize, when a mistake or delay costs $XX million, it often makes sense to hire with high educational background. I have also come to realize that your bog standard MS or Phd isn't as talented as you might think.
Sadly Ohio's state government doesn't want to invest in higher education. My father was in the physics department at Kent State University (my alma mater) and I remember him complaining year after year about how the state was cutting funding. Really a shame.
Between this, Ohio's shameful anti-LGBTQ laws, and the truly awful racism, it's really like the state is trying to drive people away. I moved to CA 7 years ago and couldn't imagine moving back after talking to friends who are still there.
The incredible University systems in the US are an amazing asset… failure to recognize their value by craven businessmen turned Republican politicians that only understand money is going to be one of the biggest tragedies to befall America.
Republicans are pretty good are recognizing the value of good post-secondary education, their leadership still counts good schools as alma mater, even Trump.
They lament some social issues on campus from a populist perspective but sometimes I think it's not always without merit, or at least a discussion.
The political issue is at the elementary and high school level, and it's more about supporting families than it is the schools, where 'teacher quality' is a huge and ridiculous distraction. If every kid got a chance to attend school while living what most of us would call 'Normal Middle Class Circumstances' (i.e. decent parents, stable home, economic stability, no gangs or crime) there would be progress.
This investment is such a hugely important announcement, the number of really high quality jobs ... and the secondary economic factors will be even bigger.
The US Midwest has long been under utilized.
If US leadership could do anything, it would be to convince some of the big SV operators to invest decisively and aggressively in 2cnd and 3rd tier places which are frankly very prepared for it. Ohio, Miami, Raleigh, Michigan, Chicago etc..
Concentration in specific areas has been going on too long and is at least a decade past it's benefit.
> Republicans are pretty good are recognizing the value of good post-secondary education, their leadership still counts good schools as alma mater, even Trump.
The assertion wasn’t that Republicans are too stupid to know the value; but that knowing the value, they still want to make it difficult for more people to achieve it.
Rich people recognize the value of money while at the same time denying money to others.
Even if that is the assertion, I still wouldn't agree.
The US spends more on education as a % of GDP than anywhere in the world. And - it has a very high GDP/capita as a starting point. And sends more people on to post-secondary education than most places, more than in most countries were post-secondary is socialized.
Germany, with fully socialized University has to ration it - the end up 'streaming' kids by age 15, and those slots are disproportionately allocated to rich kids, moreover, the number of post-secondary students (in College programs, not internships) is lower than in the US, kind of exacerbating the inequality problem.
To boot, the US has a massive problem with post-secondary debt.
University education itself is not the only key to success, rather, it was historically a status marker of the elite. Since it is not just that anymore, we have to be more practical about who we send to school.
I would argue we have too many liberal arts graduates, and not nearly enough trade programs and internships. While Liberal Arts programs absolutely embellish students with higher order thinking, and it would be nice if everyone could attend ... it's frankly the purview of the people who can afford to pay for it without having that cost related to a job on the other end.
And, given that in the US that basic literacy is still a serious problem for many of those in High School ... do we really think that the quantity of post-secondary students really the problem?
Probably not.
The US does a pretty good job at getting people into post-secondary programs, even when they generally would not be qualified, and it's arguably inefficient.
If this were 1970, then it would be an easy argument of 'getting more people into College'.
But conditions have changed and it's a much more difficult situation.
Keep the bars high and objective instead of trying to send everyone to College by virtue of magical thinking.
Maybe we can graduate everyone from highschool as a matter of social equality, but providing kids with projects they can sink their effort into and especially develop the middle-tier apprenticeship programs (i.e. Germany) would be probably a better approach.
I'll bet $1000 that these Intel Chip Fabs require just as many 'trained specialists' as they do College Grad designers.
I'd also bet $1000 that 'Republicans' (at least practically and ideologically) would back that kind of approach.
We could start by breaking 'Doctor' and 'Nurse' into more categories. By making college only 2 or 3 years + 2 years teachers college instead of requiring a 4 year degree. By defining and regulating some types of skilled trades, possibly even software. Etc.
And of course, probably by raising minimum wage, supporting automation and happily moving out non-productive jobs to Mexico and Vietnam where the net surpluses are greater anyhow.
In 2021, it's reasonable for people to take the position that fudging more people through college is just not the most productive or even equitable approach we should approach.
A bunch of victimhood to excuse their bad actions (and change the subject). So they are sacrificing assets and essential services to the American people for political revenge? They won't provide public goods to Democrats?
Which ones specifically? I’d like to learn more and this is something that I’ll pester my representative about. For Columbus specifically in day-to-day life I’m curious what effect these laws have. We have gay clubs and actually a reputation as a “gay mecca”. In Columbus we also have the doo-dah parade, a gigantic, corporate sponsored gay pride parade, and lots of drag events like during our big Halloween party.
> and the truly awful racism
Eh you can find racism in all 50 states, California included. People say this but it’s just the news talking that’s coloring your opinion.
Even as a product of one of those schools, I think the comparison against CA might be going a bit far, but as long as we're talking perceptions/stereotypes...
In Aerospace, within both U.S. government and industry, midwest engineering schools are widely seen as producing more undegrad-level engineers who actually want to be engineers than places like Stanford.
Stanford, in particular, seems to attract proportionally way more engineering majors that want to use engineering credentials as a gateway out of engineering (high finance, startup executives, management, etc.). A colleague of mine in Big Aerospace says there's a pretty consistent pattern of not being able to hang on to many Stanford or MIT grads for very long. Granted Big Aerospace can be a miserable place to work in a number of ways, but if you want to hone your craft in a number of aerospace disciplines, you'll need some level of exposure to that kind of knowledge/experience-base. You're not going to get that at the next delivery drone or flying taxi startup.
Not really. There is a whole wide world outside CS - mechanical, chemical, materials. And while Berkeley, Stanford, UCSB are amazing in them Caltech for example is not and is just over hyped.
Desalination is awesome, and I love to see it improve. No matter how good it is, it won’t be cheaper than water that is available in rivers and aquifers.
Idk what we consider the “Midwest to be” but here are some schools generally in the area that are good. Happy to delete any you don’t like. No particular order. ;)
1. Northwestern
2. Notre Dame
3. Wisconsin Madison
4. Ohio State
5. Minnesota Twin Cities
6. Carnegie Mellon
7. University of Chicago
8. Purdue
9. Penn St
10. Washington University St. Louis
11. UIUC
12. Case Western
13. Michigan
So there are plenty of world class educational institutions in the Midwest. Frankly I’d take this list over your list and that’s not including other brand name universities like Indiana, Pitt, Michigan State, Nebraska, or Iowa, some of which do “non-sexy” research in agricultural science and other fields. Ohio State has the only undergraduate wedding engineering program in North America even. It really is an absolute powerhouse of a region with far more national brand name recognition and reputation and monster enrollment numbers.
> Cornell (ever heard of it?) is just as close to Columbus as UW-Madison is.
I was just going off of the “Midwest” versus distance.
> California has all that stuff because it’s literally further from SF to LA than it is from Columbus to DC.
Yea it’s a big state. I’d love to go off of distance though so we can include lots of other fantastic universities just to further drive home my point.
If you substitute "University of California" for "UC", you'll be able to decipher a lot more of them if you know your California cities. For example, "UCSD" translates to "UC San Diego". "CP" gets you "California Polytechnical", but good luck sussing "SLO" unless you've been anywhere near San Luis Obispo.
You think UCLA, USC, and UCSD are second tier? Last I checked, UCSD is #9 for engineering in the nation, which is above UIUC at #10. USC is #12 and UCLA is #16 relative to Columbia at #15, John Hopkins at #17, Harvard at #21, Princeton at #22, and UW at #22.
For example, when it comes to hardware & electrical engineering, UCSD alone is as productive as say Purdue & Illinois combined. And it’s a young university too.
The problem is not the schools in the Midwest but that many don’t want to live in the Midwest. I am married into a family from Illinois but they have all left or are leaving because they are tired of the weather. I also went to grad school in Illinois and never considered staying after I finished. I did actually like it but wasn’t a place I wanted to stay forever.
University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne was the pre-eminent school for Computer Science. It’s still a fantastic school but most don’t seem to want to live in a cornfield.
CMU, CWRU, UMich, UIUC, and Indiana U are wonderful schools, but none of them are in Ohio [correction: I'm an idiot, CWRU is]. OSU doesn't belong in that list.
My undergraduate degree in ECE at OSU went far more in-depth on topics and set me up far better than the graduate programs at Purdue or UIUC do in their first year of graduate school. A huge part of that is that OSU's ECE department does not have senior-level courses. They only have senior/graduate courses. So the seniors are taking graduate level courses (when I went there, at least 4 were required to graduate). Also, you list Indiana U? Really? I'm sorry, but it's second-tier compared to Purdue.
Purdue has a great reputation but I don't know anything about it personally except via Eugene Spafford. I may be biased because I like Scheme — SICP was a life-changing epiphany for me, and Essentials of Programming Languages was also quite revelatory — and Indiana has done a lot of inspiring Scheme work. I don't know of anything of similar importance from OSU but maybe they're really great in CPU design or subthreshold logic families or something?
As for getting in-depth information on topics, you don't need a university for that anymore. Library Genesis and sci-hub has more in-depth information on topics than you could ever possibly absorb, assuming it's legal in your country. What universities uniquely offer is community, financial support, and research: without universities, sci-hub would be a pretty empty place.
You're not going to learn electrical and computer engineering by reading stuff on Sci-Hub. You might get some knowledge, but so much is just simply never published that it's essentially tribal knowledge. Heck, even with professors walking you through every step of learning the topics, it's hard.
As for computer architecture, OSU is not heavily into computer architecture. It's much more focused on custom accelerators and ASICs as well as semiconductor research. And it is recognized as one of the best ECE programs in the world with one of the main problems with it being that the CS department is comparatively weak.
My graduating class, in a December, was still over 1,000 engineers. Spring graduation typically had 2.5-3.5K/yr.
I appreciate the correction about OSU's EE department. I'm probably unfairly prejudiced against them because mostly I read in CS.
I'd make a stronger statement than "You're not going to learn electrical and computer engineering by reading stuff on Sci-Hub." You aren't going to learn by reading. You have to actually do stuff in order to construct the knowledge inside your own mind, and as you say, that's hard. But the information is available, even if it isn't academically published; in electrical engineering, in addition to sci-hub stuff, you have Bob Pease columns, appnotes (especially the ones from Analog and Linear), The Art of Electronics, EEVblog, allaboutcircuits, Hackaday, Marco Reps, Camenzind's book, Jeri Ellsworth's Short Circuits, Don Lancaster's website, Forrest Mims's books, patents, Adafruit, etc. LTSpice is proprietary but gratis, while QUCS, ngSpice, and WR-SPICE are free software, and now you can get stuff mostly automatically fabbed by JLCPCB for ridiculously low prices. And with the rise of iceSTORM it's becoming practical to design gateware without signing a support contract with Xilinx. Just like the undergraduate EECE curriculum, a lot of this stuff is aimed at beginners (you can learn a lot by fiddling with Falstad's circuit.js even if it doesn't do Monte Carlo simulation), so it doesn't go very deep, but some of it is very much not.
(Still, there is a lot of information that isn't publicly available at all, because it's a trade secret of TSMC or Lam Research or Intel. But the professors aren't walking undergraduates through that stuff either.)
The huge thing about custom accelerators and ASICs and semiconductor research, though, is that you can't really do it in your basement. MPW/shuttle programs like MOSIS and CMP go a long way to making chip design accessible, but it's going to be tough to even run DRCs on your designs without proprietary software, and then it still costs you US$10k to get back 10 chips that don't work. Going to a university for EECE, even for undergrad, might give you the chance to go through that painful cycle enough times to actually get something working, and the mentorship you need to find out what you don't know.
Something to note -- Indiana U doesn't have engineering stream unlike Purdue. Only thing close to engineering is computer science and Intelligent systems engineering.
Right - Indiana splits up subjects across universities so they can focus money. It is by design that Purdue is the engineering school and Indiana is the liberal arts school.
IU is a great liberal arts school - but doesn't compete in engineering by design.
No need for embarrassment but I do wonder where you momentarily thought it was. :)
One night while struggling with a problem for work I took a walk and wandered by where I calculated the IBM 650 must have been located back in the day, hoping for some kind of inspiration, or something. It was a good distraction but it did not work at all.
I was a math grad student at IU. The place had one heck of a good music school, say, comparable to the best in the world. An Isaac Stern protege, later a concert master, violin prof, conductor, etc., put his old Italian violin under my left chin, and I was hooked.
Took a violin course; the teacher, one on one, was FAR too good for what I needed and later played the Brahms concerto in Toronto! According to the rules, at the end had to play for the violin faculty, including the former concert master of the Cleveland Symphony -- poor guy! Eventually I made it through much of the Bach E Major Partita and the Chaconne! Great fun! Met my wife.
The math department had some good mathematicians. The weekly seminar flew in some of the best mathematicians in the world. Later where I got my Ph.D., at a much more famous school, the seminars were nowhere near as good.
As a grad student, since I was teaching ugrad courses, I got paid, enough actually to live nicely, e.g., eat all my meals in restaurants, and save some money!
But I didn't fit into their program: (1) My first semester they put me in their abstract algebra course. Okay: I'd done well in a similar course in ugrad school, and my ugrad honors paper was on group representations. So that I wouldn't have to waste time in the course, the prof and I had an unspoken agreement: At the end he gave me a little oral exam in his office -- I went through some Galois theory! (2) They put me in a topology course, from the famous book by Kelley. In the first class, the prof said that the homework was to work all the exercises! HA! Some of the exercises were notoriously difficult! I wondered if HE could work all the exercises! Besides, in ugrad school I'd taken a reading course from that book -- once a week gave a lecture to a prof, chapter by chapter, one week on the theorems and the next week on the exercises. For the material on Moore-Smith convergence, a second prof showed up -- maybe he wanted to learn some about that topic! I wrote out solutions to about 1/3rd of the exercises (to be honest not the same ~1/3rd I'd done in ugrad), turned them in at the end, and did show for the final exam. (3) They put me in a real analysis course. On the first test, with just one exercise, in set theory, the prof wanted to "see me after class". He had marked my test paper as wrong. Gee, I doubt that many students got that exercise. Since the previous summer I'd had a course in axiomatic set theory, the test was easy for me. When I explained to the prof that my notation, I didn't have time on the test to define, was standard, he saw that (A) my solution was correct and (B), as we both noticed and he confessed, was one step shorter than his. I didn't know that prof, had never had any interaction with him, but concluded he was for whatever reason on my case. My victory over him on that test was enough for me -- I never saw him again. No biggie loss: The book he was using was awful, e.g., was just some typed notes -- Royden, one of the best math texts ever, was MUCH better!
So, net, I did my teaching, used some of the money I was getting, more than I needed, to have fun while saving some money, did my teaching, met my wife, and started violin -- I liked it!
Since that was Indiana, that is, out in the Midwest flat farming country, a lot of the other grad math students were pretty good athletes. So one afternoon I showed up at the volley ball game those students held. Soon I was very much not wanted! I was the last to be chosen! And soon even the other team would make sure I never got to touch the ball! Those guys took athletics VERY seriously, much more seriously than the math!
But in the ugrad teaching, nearly all the girls tried hard to look pretty and be sweet! One course I taught was some math for elementary education majors. There were maybe 30 students in the class. There was one boy there, maybe looking to meet the girls! So, all the rest were girls. And they had their career direction decided, no doubt, high determination -- they'd get a teaching certificate, a husband, a home, and some babies. NO DOUBT! And they were just AWFUL at that math, and soon just terrified of it! Due to the influence of computing, I had to teach them about base 2 and base 16 -- that was more painful for them than having their teeth pulled! I also taught calculus, trigonometry, etc., and in those courses the girls did fine, no angst! So, there was something about elementary education majors!!!
Many years ago, I did some tutoring for a friend in elementary education math. It was sorta neat, in that they were teaching them different number theories (in practice some discrete math) and forcing them to learn how to work with numbers in much the same way their first students would. It was smart and made a lot of sense when viewed in this manner.
The problem was the author of the book had no idea why they were doing this, or what the purpose of this was. It provided the curriculum, but had already lost the inherent reason behind it.
The money: I lived with low rent, in a dorm that had the option of no meals in a university cafeteria. Since I was teaching, I paid no tuition and, as I remember, paid no fees. My teaching was a bargain for the university, i.e., I was no doubt MUCH cheaper per course taught than a prof. They had me teaching a wide variety of courses and, one semester, two courses. That wasn't fair to me, but I didn't mind.
It was an old dorm, REALLY nice. And it was next to the music school and, still, not far from the math department or lots of places to eat.
Half of Ohio is flat, and gets lots of storms that blow through the plains and prairies from the west, so not exactly low probability of tornadoes.
Source: I grew up in central Ohio. Public schools made it a point to practice tornado drills. In addition, there was an old Cold War-era air raid siren a block from the house I grew up in that had been repurposed and tested for tornado warnings. One of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9rRSY0dRIU
> Xenia has a history of severe storm activity. According to local legend, the Shawnee referred to the area as "the place of the devil wind" or "the land of the crazy winds" (depending upon the translation).
> On April 3, 1974, a tornado rated F5 on the Fujita scale cut a path directly through the middle of Xenia during the 1974 Super Outbreak
> Xenia was struck by an F2 tornado on April 25, 1989, and again by an F4 tornado on September 20, 2000.
Even large, damaging tornadoes have quite localized impacts (max of maybe a mile in path width) -- and you don't generally do much more than stay up to building code in order to prepare for one. In contrast, earthquakes devastate entire areas and require substantial changes to building construction in order to protect against them.
Tornado protection is mostly about avoiding damage in the periphery of a tornado. A building of that size can't realistically be protected from a direct hit of a major tornado. Proper engineering can protect a building from basically all earthquakes. Whether the contents inside are secured properly is a different matter and that's where most damage occurs.
you don't generally do much more than stay up to building code in order to prepare for one.
Interesting. I'm unfamiliar with building code provisions that are designed to mitigate the effects of tornadoes, which are arguably the most destructive force on Earth apart from an erupting volcano or a nuclear attack, on a semiconductor fab, which is arguably among the most sensitive and easily-disrupted facilities ever built. Any good sources for further reading?
You just get different natural disasters. Flooding that could damage your basement and foundation and prevent you from accessing certain roads is a regular occurrence, some people are always pumping out their basements every time it rains. A bad roof you could get away with in California where it rains 5 x a year could quickly spiral into more expensive rot and repairs in places that see heavy rains. Storms can still fall trees onto your house or car. Snowstorms often don't stop your employer from demanding your presence in the office or schools from closing because we are supposedly hardy in the midwest, and increasingly as the weather gets milder, ice storms that manifest as rain during the day but dangerous ice as soon as the sun sets and temperatures fall, coating your car in an inch thick layer of ice when you leave for work in the morning. And plus when the west burns up in flames, the smoke plume wafts east and settles down on the midwest, giving you the bad air anyhow. Speaking of air quality, if you have any allergies, the midwest is also not for you. You get slammed from pollen both from a variety of seasonal weeds, as well as from the intensive agriculture performed in the region.
Fun fact, Ohio was supposedly high on the Soviet nuke target list, because of Wright Patterson AFB, which houses the Air Force Research Lab (and aliens).
I have an old Soviet invasion map of central Ohio, marking all potential airfields etc.
There's a lot more to it than urban legends. A FEMA publication[1] from 1990 has a map on page 86 with assumed Ohio targets.
Tiny Waverly would have definitely been wiped off the map because of its fuel refining facility. There's a non-zero chance I keep my EMP-proof diesel truck running due to growing up in those times.
Looks to be a 1:500,000 topo map of the Ohio/Kentucky/WV border. You can see Columbus and I think Dayton at the top. Google translate via camera is a real charm here.
Apologies in advance for Imgur, but two other services I tried simply didn't work /sigh.
The small town I grew up in also had a specific Soviet doomsday theory. Which in hindsight, doesn’t feel very plausible.
In the wake of the George Floyd protests family talked about their concern that out of state “Antifa looters” were spotted driving down the interstate headed right for them.
I don’t mean to call you a liar, Im sure there indeed are some obscure targets, and your home might be one.
I do think it’s a fascinating phenomenon- this idea of small town obsession with their own destruction.
A quote from Terrence Malick’s BadLands goes something like:
> and if the reds ever do drop the bomb, well I hope they drop it right here in Rapid City (South Dakota).
In fairness to the parent poster, in the event of nuclear war an Air Force base with two runways longer than two miles each isn't an obscure target, it's just a target.
It's not just two runways it's the headquarters of the USAF Matrials Command since 1961 I think. Which is the biggest airforce command (by budget). They are responsible for running most R&D labs of the Airforce and for procuring new weapon systems and airplanes. It certainly would have been a major target. Dayton in many ways is still the birth place of new trends in aviation.
Guess which is a more important target to the enemy in the event of an all-out war: the runways, hangars, and fuel facilities or the research and development offices. (I mean, it's sort of an academic question if a well-placed enemy warhead makes it through...)
In the imagined scenario of a 1980s MAD first-strike, it's wherever the nuclear missile silos are. There's a lot of farmland around Dayton. I would not rule out the possibility that there is at least one nuclear launch site near Wright Patterson AFB.
Lol, growing up in Ohio I've heard this same thing but for various different reasons over the years. Would be interesting to see an authoritative source if one exists
I have a book that is all those old soviet maps - amazing how detailed they were. All hand drawn and they had detail down to individual houses and streets. Many time those maps were more detailed than the ones the US was making about itself!
Yep - one of my classrooms in Ohio was in the old fallout shelter. I saw the signs with radioactive label every morning going into the building. The location is now demolished.
Same. My high school was very near a GE plant in northern Cincinnati and I frequently heard how we were a target because of that. Seems plausible but based on other comments in this post, it may have just been cold war propaganda.
We also have a particle accelerator in Southern Ohio, I’ve heard it would be on a lower priority tier of things to nuke/otherwise destroy. Not sure how accurate the statement was, but I think it was from somewhere credible enough…
Wright Patt definitely has some high level stuff stored, I have a few friends who work engineering there.
The invaders would cross the ocean from an orbital path streaking in as multiple units launched from submersed platforms or silos in the Motherland raining down from heaven. Those invaders would not need to put a single boot on the ground.
When I was growing up the rumor was that both sides had enough nukes to destroy the entire earth 10x over. I have no idea whether that is even close to true but at that point every city is a target because, why not?
We've asked you many times to stop posting flamebait to HN. If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please stop.
Low Geopolitical risk but high risk to personal liberties, especially if you are a woman. Look at Ohio and its slow decline from purple into red state. Gerrymandered to hell and back too to prevent this from changing in the foreseeable future, and a state democratic party that is powerless against the state republicans who have secured tenures for life thanks to their inventive mapmaking processes. Companies move to Ohio because a corrupt politician offered them a cherry deal on property like this more often than not.
So you're saying maybe in the future there might be an issue?
Also plenty of people here want to ban abortion too. Tons of small counties have managed to prevent any kind of reproductive health clinics from opening or defacto forced them to close.
Makes sense to me to play to where the ball will likely be, not currently is, if your investment timeframe will be many years in the future. I believe Texas just effectively came to within an inch of banning abortions outright, but effectively they reduced people’s access to it.
My prediction is state governments will make a big difference in quality of life for many people.
I was going to say the same as you did: SCOTUS may very well make the legality of abortion a state-controlled issue, so that's definitely at risk in Ohio.
Ohio has no parental leave laws, especially ones that provide women with automatic 6 to 8 weeks of disability leave for the period before and after childbirth.
California does. CA also has other protections beyond federal ones for breastfeeding and other pregnancy related accommodations, and gives employees the right to sit at work if they do not need to stand.
I would not raise my kids in a state outside of CA to WA and NJ to MA and IL just for this reason.
> Ohio has no parental leave laws, especially ones that provide women with automatic 6 to 8 weeks of disability leave for the period before and after childbirth.
How is this a "personal liberty" thing? This in turn is probably violating the freedom of association that employers have...
>breastfeeding and other pregnancy related accommodations, and gives employees the right to sit at work if they do not need to stand
Of course, there is no free lunch. But nature dictates that if you want society to have workers in the future, women need to make a huge sacrifice.
So you can either worry about the small picture and employers losing a little freedom about who they have to employ. Or you can look at the big picture and realize that for women to maintain financial independence and still be incentivized to have kids, society needs to offer them something.
The first thing I thought about was tornados, actually. That Amazon facility in Missouri was just totally flattened back in December. Given the cost of manufacturing chips, it seems like it would be a huge loss if it was hit.
Also, within "can still drive home every couple months to see the family" distance of UIUC and Purdue, which are two of the top ten Electrical Engineering and Computer Science universities in the US.
I'm somewhat concerned for Taiwan though... At least having a headstart on chip production gives them some cover from those who would be more likely to step in as China makes strides towards potential invasion. Could make HK look like a beach party.
The chip progress by TSMC was made possible by ASML from The Netherlands that supplied them with ultraviolet lithography machines. Those are real example of techno magic with ASML solving many really hard issues much sooner then was expected.
Surely TSMC advanced the process itself, but Samsung and Intel are not that far behind. But all of 3 use ASML technology and it is not allowed to be exported to China or Russia for that matter. Attacking Taiwan will make a prospect of getting that for China even more unlikely.
I think it's more about diversifying locations for labor pooling... Phoenix is growing and now going to have fabs for Intel, Samsung and TSMC. I think it's more about hedging or spreading out the labor pool a bit more and less competition.
As for location, in terms of shipping, they're probably about on par to each other. Not sure how stable it is regarding weather conditions, or natural disaster risk in Ohio vs Arizona though.
In either case, it's good to see some uptick in distributed manufacturing. Concentrating most high technology infrastructure into a relatively small region has proven a disaster when problems inevitably happen.
> Picking a location with natural greenery expands the labor pool.
This is provably false. The US population is fleeing the areas with the most natural greenery, migrating south and west. The south western US is primarily dry desert.
"As of the 2010 Census, Nevada was the fastest-growing state in the United States, with an increase of 35.1% in the last ten years. Additionally, Arizona (24.6%), Utah (23.8%), Texas (20.6%), and Colorado (16.9%) were all in the top ten fastest-growing states as well"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_United_States#Cit...
Greenery is nice. Warm weather is also nice. Lack of things like ice storms, fog, black ice, trees falling on power lines, etc., is nice, too.
Ohio has a lot going for it, geographically. It has major pre-war cities that contain identifiable centers. It has the same overall population density as Spain. Its major cities could easily be served by high-speed rail. It has a reliable source of fresh water. If it weren't for its across-the-board anti-government slate of elected officials, it could regain its prominence among the states.
The worst thing going for Ohio is the political landscape. An effort to restart passenger rail with a line from Cleveland to Akron was killed in the early 2000s, thanks to a small township of like 2000 people that would have had to hear a passenger train in addition to the freight rail traffic currently using the rail line already in place in their back yard. Regional planning is impossible with such a selfish and fractured political foundation, not to mention the gerrymandering done by statehouse republicans that maintains this state of dysfunction and pushes the state red.
It has Ohio State University. One of the largest Universities in the world (50,000-ish students) and one that has been rising in the rankings steadily over the last couple of decades. It's quite a decent public school today. There are over a dozen colleges and universities right in and around the city.
It's Columbus, so yes. It's also one of the fastest growing cities in the upper midwest, afaik.
There are a ton of good big10 engineering schools, and columbus should be able to draw from the east coast as well, since it's a LOT less expensive (currently).
There are many smart people who grew up in the Midwest and want to stay there. A lot of Midwestern public schools have pretty good engineering programs, it's not just OSU, there's also Michigan, UIUC, Purdue. These cheap midwestern cities seem like a pretty good place to put high-tech manufacturing in the US.
I think this is due to a lot of money in the region coming from things like coal and natural gas. There's a _lot_ of money to be had for folks that just happen to own land that sits above valuable minerals.
I've only ever seen billboards for "clean coal" in SE Ohio, SW PA, and West Virginia.
Except there really isn't that much money in Coal - and Ohio doesn't has little of it anyway.
Ohio produces 1/20th the coal of WV - which is a much more economically poor state - and coal isn't even really that important to WV's economy. Ohio's economy is much more similar to PA - and PA produces 10x more coal: https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/weekly/
Coal is all politics.
I mean, it is still used for a lot of energy production - almost everywhere in the US - Ohio definitely: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=OH.
I'm sure power plants don't want to shut down overnight because someone bans coal completely - and they shouldn't. But it's just not economical in most places - the plants are phasing out naturally almost everywhere.
The less scale there is with coal - the less viable it becomes. It's a vicious cycle.
Power plants naturally phasing out because coal isn't economical will have almost 0 impact on Ohio.
Places like WV - that's a different story. WV sells coal! Ohio doesn't.
I don't want to say so, but...so? At Intel scale, they're able to buy carbon offsets or - gasp! - install their own solar/wind in their properties. The municipal and state governments are I'm sure bending over backwards to get the plants and infrastructure investment, a permit to run whatever solar/wind/renewable they want is probably chump change for them.
I'll eat a sock if they bother with solar in Ohio. I guess it's better than nothing but large parts of Ohio just don't get that much sun. Wind is much more likely.
Cincinnati (where I live) is about half a year away from completing the largest city financed solar array in the US [0,1]. Ohio gets plenty of sun, in fact it averages more sun than _anywhere_ in Germany which is known for it's solar [2,3].
In Ohio for residential, which is a good bit more expensive than commercial/utility scale solar, the payback period is about 12 years[4], well within the margin of getting your money back and then some.
Pretty sure Germany is more know for poor green energy planning, burning more coal, and instance on non optimal strategies for power generation (killing nuclear).
Well objectively yes Ohio gets more sun per m^2, but neither Germany nor Ohio are particularly good places to build solar[0]. They would be much better try something else like Nuclear or wind.
The Columbus area is blue. Most of the biggest cities in Ohio are. It's the countryside and rural areas (Ohio has a lot of small towns) that are deep red.
Yes but increased population will increase the number of blue which tilts the whole state in favor of blue. Yes, there will be shenanigans(voter intimation, making blue areas harder to vote) from the red side like we see in other currently purple states but those tactics become more ineffective the more blue voters you have so this can only be a net positive.
People always complain about the downsides of all these blue areas but at the end of the day there is still a massive population that continue to live there. For example: Exodus from California is mainly limited to people making less than 100k a year. People making more than that actually increased their population in California. So this is mainly a rich vs poor issue. I'm excited at the prospect of transforming some of the rural states into a mindset of progressivism. It will help prevent some of the gridlock that is holding back the country from trying big bold ideas.
I mean it's pretty much known that rich people can avoid nearly any consequence intended or unintended of politicians......
It's why people view the ability to ignore politics as a privilege having the resources to just avoid whatever they happen to do gives you a massive degree of freedom.
Also aren't these progressive policies supposed to have helped people on the lower end of the economic scale rather then forced them out?
>I mean it's pretty much known that rich people can avoid nearly any consequence intended or unintended of politicians......
Its not a long term strategy when the majority suffer. Thats why the blue side have shifted towards pushing European style Democratic Socialism policies and the Red has shifted into authoritarian right style policies.
>Also aren't these progressive policies supposed to have helped people on the lower end of the economic scale rather then forced them out?
What progressive policies? There is no real progressive party in the US. California(and the rest of the states (save for a few districts here and there) has been extremely hostile to real progressives. What we have now on the "left" is a combination of neo-liberal right leaning centrists mixed in with fake leftist social populism.
However it's misguided. Cost of labor is still 10x higher than a plant with the same productivity in a relatively poorer country. American manufacturing is mostly indirect social welfare now, it's not economically efficient.
Is cost of labor really one of the major costs of a semiconductor plant? Plants in South Korea and Taiwan are economical and they have relatively high labor costs, so I'm not sure I buy this.
This was my thought as well, chip production has to be so necessarily automated to maintain a clean state that it feels like the cost of engineers to maintain systems is always going to be high, but also a small cost of the overall system. I'd love some real numbers.
The only reason it’s not in China is because they don’t have ready access to the technology that allows for this. All the “fabulous” chip makers in Asia are all US allies.
It's not like semiconductor plants are using the cheapest possible labor they can get their hands on. I imagine there are very few people working in semiconductor plants that don't have post secondary education.
This same street has a Facebook data center, an AWS data center, and a Google data center (within a couple of miles). There is a biotech research campus, Bath & Bodyworks main research lab, and the main operations center for AEP (a midwest electric company). If you travel about 2-3 miles orthogonal to that street we have a big data center for Nationwide Insurance, a campus for Discover (credit cards), and a State Farm insurance facility.
It is literally across street from one of the Ohio East-2 availability zones. If they were making rack-mounted server boards, they could just walk them across the street and plug them into the cloud.
Silicon fabs do not make server boards. They just produce the silicon wafer i.e. "die" of a semiconductor device. Most die must be assembled into a package before they can be used. The die packaging aka "backend" is almost never done at the same place as the fab. Most backend is in Taiwan or Malaysia or China. Even after the die is packaged, it needs to be mounted on a complete PCB with all the other components. Intel typically does not do PCB assembly, they mostly just sell assembled CPUs (or other devices) to other companies that do the PCB assembly.
It's interesting to watch what Amazon runs directly versus what they contract. IIRC they own trailers but contract the semis to pull them. At one point, they actually considered buying an RV park for their seasonal warehouse employees. I wonder why they don't directly sell their surplus like the government does at gsaauctions.gov.
> The die packaging is almost never done at the same place as the fab.
Are you sure? TSMC definitely does packaging. And it seems like it would be crazy to ship a delicate unpackaged die to a different factory when you could just keep it in a clean room and do everything in one place. I think it would be mad for Intel not to do packaging there.
> needs to be mounted on a complete PCB
Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.
> Are you sure? TSMC definitely does packaging. And it seems like it would be crazy to ship a delicate unpackaged die to a different factory when you could just keep it in a clean room and do everything in one place. I think it would be mad for Intel not to do packaging there.
True, the very advanced packaging techniques, such as TSMC CoWoS or Intel EMIB, are done at the fabs by those companies. These packages are for very high performance multi-chip interconnects. In both cases, the "package" itself actually is partially constructed from silicon, so we are kind of blurring the lines between what is "chip" and what is "package". The vast majority of chips do not use packages anywhere near this advanced and are not done at fabs.
Also, it's not crazy to ship finished wafers (i.e. "unpackaged die"); it's standard practice. Once the final process steps are complete in the fab, the chip is not as sensitive to fine particles any more. The wafers get loaded into cassettes then vacuum-sealed in anti-static bags. They ship out to the backend assembly sites just fine. In fact, globally, there are probably ~100,000 wafers shipped like this every day.
> Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.
True. But if you are buying an LGA socketed Intel CPU, the silicon die had to first be mounted on a substrate and the heatspreader attached. That wasn't done at fab, it was done at backend assembly. Ever notice that Intel CPU's often say something about "assembled in Malaysia" on top? That's because it was assembled in Malaysia. Intel does not have any semiconductor fabs in Malaysia, meaning, they fabbed it in one place and assembled it in another.
If you are a company like Dell or HP and you are buying the laptop BGA CPUs, Intel still had to assemble those into the BGA package before shipping to Dell/HP. And the BGA package assembly also is not done at fab.
I know there are PCB manufacturers somewhere in the US. I don't know about packaging. Do you know which firms do packaging of the dies and why can't the US do it(It can't just be cost)? How hard can it be really? Its essentially plastic , maybe some metal, and gold isn't it? Maybe an argument could be made to locate at least one source of manufacturing for all these steps in a local area. But thats just the programmer in me wanting to optimize without understanding the realities of manufacturing costs.
It's all about cost. The assembly and test is the "low tech" part of semiconductor manufacturing and can be done well in Asia by workforces that are not as highly educated as those you need to run a fab. US and western economies have always focused on doing the highest value add portions of manufacturing domestically (where the highly educated workforce is key) while outsourcing the lower value add (lower margin) portions of the supply chain.
Consumers demand low cost. Many times they just buy the cheaper widget, because most people are not even capable of distinguishing the differences in performance or quality between two different widgets. But the difference in price is obvious to everyone and so most people just use that. The pressure of reducing every single penny out of the cost or semiconductors is enormous.
They said that there would be spin off and supporting industry also moving into this new industrial zone. Maybe a board manufacturer will move in, to pick up the chips from Intel one side of their operation, and deliver them to AWS on the other.
> This same street has a Facebook data center, an AWS data center, and a Google data center (within a couple of miles). There is a biotech research campus, *Bath & Bodyworks main research lab*, and the main operations center for AEP (a midwest electric company).
i bet it would be fun to chat and talk shop with engineers at the bath and body works lab during a lunch.
They regularly dump batches of perfume into the air - you can smell it for miles. It probably confuses pollinators and other wildlife because the smells are so intense.
Intel said the same thing for Arizona as well. Initial $20B investment which could expand to $100B. So they are building it in two places. I wonder why they dont keep it all in Arizona? ( May be Tax Break, but I have no idea how Tax Break works in US )
And if you include their (expected) expansion in EUR, Intel is layering the foundation for Foundry Services. Compared to its half assed Custom Foundry in 2012/2013 with little to zero CapEx increase. Foundry Services 2.0 is very real.
Note: Investor Notes from ASML are also interesting, suggesting Intel may be ahead in terms of High-NA EUV orders. Initial shipment expected in 2023.
"The obvious way to address heavy dependence on one medium-risk or high-risk source (a single factory, supplier, or region) is to add more sources in locations not vulnerable to the same risks."
That's similar to the method defense contractors use, they spread out their manufacturing locations to have influence over as many politicians as possible.
I'm a space nerd and the geographic distribution of the Apollo contractors was downright impressive. They built major systems from New York to California.
This is an interesting point I never thought of before. Now I wonder if the tech giants would have faired better politically if they weren't all co-located in one of the most politically polarizing areas of the country.
Honestly? They should be spread out. There is no reason for FAANGS to be located in mega campuses in the Bay Area. Let people who eg graduate from Midwestern colleges have the option of working in the Midwest (or returning there), pay them equally well. This would create so much economic activity in areas that really need it instead of simply enriching the landlords in the Bay.
It is a part of the reason why all the big government contractors are spread out all over the place. Even around a single metro area they'll have different offices in different congressional districts.
If you are on the winning end of that bloat life is pure happiness and joy. But if you are on the losing end (ie. not employed/a beneficiary of these firms) then you are paying dearly for the joy that others have.
I would think a lot of people benefit from the motivation for companies to geographically diversify. A lot of the bad things about the Bay Area boil down to people willing to put up with a whole lot because of a group delusion that a certain kind of thing can only happen there.
>I would think a lot of people benefit from the motivation for companies to geographically diversify.
Yes like I said there is the "in group". Is that "a lot" of people, I wouldn't say so. Namely the people who are employed or benefit financially from these orgs. If you are paying for the bloat via the government which is the customer of these defense orgs, it is effectively a tax on everyone else.
It’s not a delusion. While it’s true that you can start a business anywhere, being in the vicinity of people who have a ton of experience is very useful. There’s a reason why people move to LA to make it in entertainment or to NYC to make it in finance.
That said, for a non startup technology job, yes, no reason to be in the Bay. That work can be done from anywhere.
The Great Lakes region has a surprising concentration of advanced manufacturing skillsets. With large manufacturing facilities with extremely stringent quality standards like a bleeding edge chip fab there's going to be a enormous need for people with traditional manufacturing-specific support skillsets that are simply not available in large quantities anywhere else in the US.
If the current administration's support of the transition to electric vehicles doesn't falter, that's going to drive an increasing need for microprocessors in vehicles. Intel locating themselves in central Ohio puts their production facilities on an interstate highway hub that puts them within a 6-12 hour drive of nearly every major auto manufacturing facility in the US, which is an enormous incentive for the auto manufacturers to source from them. Additionally, Columbus has the Rickenbacker International Airport which is a dedicated air freight airport that lets them get their product global faster.
This announcement of two facilities makes me think that Phoenix is going to be a smaller facility handling the more advanced, smaller run chip designs, but host the R&D and design offices (To take advantage of the city's concentration of tech talent) while Columbus is going to be the primary production facility.
I was surprised to learn Minnesota has a fab that's critical to the US govt! They are one of the only secure trusted chip makers.
Growing up there I had no idea. My dad loved to talk up MMM, Honeywell, Monsanto and a bunch of other legacy companies in MN that still play huge roles that I have overlooked.
Just one article at top of search I found even talks about the public-private partnerships (tax & other incentives)
They’re going to fab there and then ship the output to Malaysia, Costa Rica, or the Philippines for package and test. Being close to Detroit doesn’t count for much.
the only thing an ev actually needs chips for is charge controllers which can be old fab tech, and motor controllers which aren't normal silicon or tiny feature size. Tesla is using silicon carbide, and gallium arsenide will probably be next.
The Bollinger takes this route of minimalism. Ironically, an EV has less reliance on processing than a modern ICE vehicle.
> the only thing an ev actually needs chips for is charge controllers which can be old fab tech, and motor controllers
I wish I had the time to explain how this could not be more wrong.
Quickly, I’ll mention that the vehicle I’m working on has 8 separate modules for the driver’s seat. Inside these modules are a combined total of 10 processors with as many bootloaders and flash procedures and validation records and crypto and peripheral drivers, 17 CAN-FD modules, 6 system basis chips, 9 switching power supplies with a number of accessory LDO supplies, at least 40 more “chips” of various functions and capacities… for just the driver’s seat alone
The steering wheel buttons for radio left and right side and the cruise control comprise 3 modules and power supplies and etc etc.
>The Bollinger takes this route of minimalism. Ironically, an EV has less reliance on processing than a modern ICE vehicle.
I know what you are trying to say, but it is largely incorrect. The EVs still have “engine” control modules and powertrain systems. Instead of figuring out injector pulse widths, they’re calculating deliverable torque. The ABS/brake controllers are more complex, the battery heating and cooling systems require modules and processing, the HVAC, the transmission, steering systems, everything is more complex compared to ICE with an old ample supply of hydraulics and coolants and a simple fuel that is stable and usable at all storage temps fed into a mechanical device.
I’m not trying to be confrontational, but you couldn’t be more wrong about automotive electronics.
The previous poster is definitely massively oversimplifying things, and I do value your input as someone who actually works in the field. Obviously, there's still a lot of the same kind of controllers when it comes to all the switches and displays and motorized chairs and turn signal logic and all of those things which are practically the exact same as an ICE. And obviously there's some places where you don't need controllers and sensors on an EV where you would have them on an ICE, like mass airflow sensors and fuel injection controls and stuff like that. Meanwhile you do have additional circuitry like the inverters to actually drive the motors, BMS systems, there's still sensors on the motors and wheels and what not, brake regen, etc.
You mentioned the transmission is more complex compared to an ICE, but that does not make much sense to me at all. To my knowledge most EVs are essentially fixed gear ratio gearboxes, so you're either in drive, reverse, or neutral. Meanwhile ICE transmissions are becoming more and more like computer-controlled manual transmissions what with the rise in popularity of dual-clutch automatic transmissions. To me it seems a ton more complicated keeping track of operating that DCT than just "the dial is in D, change transmission to the forward mode."
you are absolutely right. I couldn't figure out why GAN didn't make sense so I spelled it out and got the wrong one. It is amazing how much smaller and cooler GaN made usbc power supplies and rf power amps. I'm waiting on lunchbox welders based on it. It is so insanely efficient.
Also the infotainment. And real questions because I'm genuinely curious: do driver assists (ABS, ASR, TCS) and their adjustments rely on processors? What about in-car adjustments to suspension height, ride firmness, throttle response (e.g. eco vs sport vs comfort modes)? Lane keep assist, blind spot checking, adaptive cruise control all seem like things that would require processing power as well.
> do driver assists (ABS, ASR, TCS) and their adjustments rely on processors?
If I'm not mistaken, microprocessors aren't the only semiconductor components that have been in short supply recently. Things like shaft position sensors are also solid-state devices.
Most current vehicles use separate embedded microcontrollers for those features. In principle it's possible to build a car with a single powerful processor controlling everything, but the engineering becomes far more challenging and you need a higher level of vertical integration on the parts supply chain. There are also safety risks: you don't want an LKA code defect to cause a TCS failure. And wiring harness would have to grow to carry all the separate data signals.
Tesla is partially going the integration route but they still have many separate processors in the car.
Do EVs not have all of the ancillaries hanging off CANBUS or something? Or is the lion's share of chips in an ICE vehicle engine and transmission control?
Most of the complexity of EVs is just generic modern car complexity, though. EVs don't have to be any more complicated than ICE vehicles, and EV conversions especially are usually really simple (though to be fair a lot of the vehicles being converted are old classic cars that didn't have any computers in them to begin with).
The EV drivetrain might have more or less computers than an ICE drivetrain, but really managing batteries and a motor isn't inherently all that complicated. On the ICE side of things you have a lot more moving parts and the necessity of keeping everything properly tuned so it can pass emissions checks.
Braking and traction control I could see being fairly complicated, but it's a similar problem whether it's an ICE engine or an electric motor.
Self-driving is hugely complicated, but that's not complexity that's inherent to EVs specifically, it's just a feature that's usually only implemented on EVs for some reason.
All the other stuff: infotainment, tire pressure sensors, back up cameras, and so on are just modern car complexity.
The braking is way way more complex because of regenerative. That isn't a factor with ICE.
Trust me - it's not simpler. I know you think we just apply power to the motor and go, but that is not the case. There are facets of "soft start" and it ties in to traction control, there are efficiency processes, etc. Instead of map tables for rpm and injection, you have battery heating and cooling targets with current sensed feedbacks and torque targets, and bla bla bla. Stop making me bring work home with me! ;)
EVs are not simpler. It's literally impossible in automotive to ever get simpler. At least since the 1970s. I think we're hitting a point of unsustainability and the people in charge think OTA firmware is going to fix that, I think it'll make it much worse.
EDIT: fwiw, I wish I could go back to a time when backup camera was even mention worthy of "things I consider complex in a vehicle". It's just a couple shielded wires and plugs into the radio/telamatics. I can tell you without a doubt that the starter in most vehicle is now far more complicated, to the point it too has it's own microcontroller and data bus (typically LIN, not sure I've seen a CAN yet).
I agree it isn't simpler. I only assert that it could be if you ignored all those efficiency gains from regenerative braking and battery temp management. Things that aren't often in ev conversions. But you made me realize that is apples and oranges, because an ICE that gave up on efficiency could be an old vw beatle with aie cooling and a carburetor. I feel you on the seemingly endless stairway of complexity. I work in embedded safety critical and I often tell people to never do anything in software they could have done in hardware. Hardware is cheaper bat this point...
Most conversions have regenerative braking nowdays. Most AC motor controllers support regen as a basic feature. A lot of the old series-wound DC motor conversions didn't have it because it was hard to do on that kind of motor (similar how it's hard to reverse; you have to flip the polarity of one set of leads but not the other, which requires a bunch of contactors or IGBTs or something).
Where regen gets kind of complicated is that you generally need to turn regen off when someone slams on the brakes. Unless the traction control / antilock braking system knows how regen figures into its calculations and can apply the proper braking force to each wheel taking it into account. I don't know what OEM EVs typically do in that situation, but for conversions you usually just have a brake switch so that regen can be automatically disabled when you're actually braking.
What does the software industry look like for this stuff? I've got two decades of embedded c++ experience, some of which is safety critical. How much of automotive is offshored these days? Is it still mostly C and a bsp and a text editor, or is it gitlab and pipelines now?
I don't know, I'm just familiar with what the motor controllers do because I'm trying to do an EV conversion.
I would imagine that the people working on parts for the conversion market have a somewhat different development process than a regular auto manufacturer, in part because they're making things in low volume and in part because they just have to design generic reusable parts that do one thing properly. If you're building a whole car, you have to make sure everything works together as a cohesive whole. In some ways that would be easier because you know exactly what parts are being used together.
I would hope that most of the safety-critical real-time software that controls a car's basic functions like braking and traction control and so on would be relatively simple and straightforward, but maybe that's too much to expect. My understanding of the way the auto industry works these days is that the major manufacturers are increasing dependent on a complicated network of 3rd-party parts suppliers, and I'd expect that to influence the character of the software stack somewhat.
Ohio is situated on the great lakes and therefore has a lot of cheaply available water, while Arizona does not. Chip production is water intensive. Not to mention the vast expanses of cheap land, and their electricity costs are pretty low as well.
Modern Fabs can recycle its water usage by up to 90%. Electricity cost for Business in both state seems to be about the same. Land are cheap as well ( From what I have been told ).
You do get operational efficiency from having Fabs all located within one place. And that is a quote from TSMC's ex-CEO Morris Chang. That is why I wonder if there is something missing. Or is it the simplest explanation Not to put all eggs in one basket.
Arguments can be made that TSMC's choice to consolidate locations is part of the reason that we have a semi shortage right now (concentrated water shortage risk, concentrated worker illness risk, etc. etc.)
One guess: if the reliability of Intel is considered a national security issue, they may get funding specifically to be more reliable to offset these costs.
They're building the plant near Columbus, which isn't near the Great Lakes. If they wanted Great Lakes water they would've chosen Cleveland, which is very close to Lake Erie.
Are you from California? It rains a ton in that part of the country, water is not scarce. It’s hard for Californians to wrap their heads around but water is not universally rare.
It's on the shore of Lake Erie. If it were any closer to Lake Erie it would be underwater!
Lake Erie is not so far from Columbus: When I was a prof at Ohio State, my wife and I would go to Lake Erie just for a pleasant Saturday afternoon. So we'd go to Cleveland, ..., Sandusky, etc.
Semantically, damning water in the Great Lakes Watershed (how Columbus get's its water) is not THAT different from letting that water flow into Lake Erie and then piping it back.
Point being, Ohio has very few long-term drought concerns.
Columbus is not in the Lake Erie watershed. It is in the Ohio River watershed. The Great Lakes Compact does not allow Columbus to get its water from Lake Erie.
There are actually extremely specific and intense rules about which parts of the country can take water from the great lakes and what burdens they incur when they do.
It's not necessarily aligned with any specific jurisdictions either, I believe it's largely based on the boundaries of the watersheds. Or at least where the boundary was ascertained to be at some point.
So yes it's very different, regardless of the semantics(?).
The idea that the Great Lakes are going to be tapped to solve water problems outside the watershed is fall flat when they realize those Great Lakes states aren't going to sell off access like that.
I remember some moonshot proposal to pipe the water to the Southwest, which is wild.
It's surprising, actually, how small the Great Lakes watershed is, compared to the surface area of the lakes. You really aren't going to get much of anything from tributaries; if you want some of the water you draw it from the lakes.
I thought that while chip production uses a lot of water, the water is mostly not consumed in the process and due to environmental regulation the water has to be cleaned at the plant so they form a closed loop system. It takes a lot of water when the plant is built, but after that it requires only a small amount of water to continue running.
It's political distribution, to be called upon as needed. Same reason NASA is sprawled the way it is.
You can more easily get numerous Senators to go to bat for you and your various causes (Arizona is a growth state, Ohio still has a lot of clout (not as much as CA, TX, FL obviously)).
Which is coming a lot quicker than anyone expected. It's why all of the cities and water authorities hooked up to Powell and the other Colorado River reservoirs are in panic mode these days.
Just a few weeks ago, the various states came to an agreement about cutting water use. Lake Mead is at historic lows. There are mandatory federal restrictions either in effect, or about to start.
They grow lettuce in Yuma during the winter because it's warm enough to grow it there during the winter. Something around 90% of the USA's winter grown leafy greens produce comes from Yuma.
I agree about the game theory/race to the bottom as an incentive. I think there are more great reasons compounding these decisions that others point out too.
Large corporations love to hold cities and states hostage and make them bid against each other. AMZN is a great example with their campus 2 bidding war. I am glad NY had the cajones to stand up to them.
Most cities and states even have dedicated EcoDevo staff to actively seek out these companies.
Cities and states compete to give the largest tax benefits, usually something like you don't have to pay ___ taxes for __ years (like 10, worth tens of millions). Plus they'll spend on infrastructure and give preferential zoning, city regs, etc.
Sure having more jobs probably creates more incoming/housing taxes for the city.
But states like Texas win this race to the bottom (TSLA and Musk personally) and in my opinion the costs of these corporate incentives (imho handouts) are just passed along to citizens in the cost of less societal services and needs, less school funding, less everything. Just a funnel up.
Musk may be an outlier. He is part of a collective of libertarian techbros who have taken what they can out of California and are now looking for a new set of suckers. Texas has a history of playing second fiddle to California so they were an obvious choice.
Yes other tech companies are also moving to Austin and I think that is more a sign of some millennials and other young professionals opting to leave California for a lower cost reasonably sane area. Its still does not seem like massive California sized numbers though. We just have to wait and see. I'm still long California though.
Sucking the Colorado river dry probably has a lot to do with it.
Taiwan was (is still?) in a drought and semiconductor manufacturing requires so much fresh water that TSMC was bringing in huge tanks on ships from the mainland.
>Our plants are in rural areas and everyone is struggling to hire, from auto to bakeries.
This is a solved problem isn't it? Just pay people more and treat them with dignity and respect. The pandemic has given a lot of people the opportunity to realize that they do not have to settle for poorly paid jobs that treat people poorly. You should have realized and adjusted by now. If you cannot accommodate to these requirements, then you have no place in this market anymore. Just close up shop and move on.
That’s true if you’re talking about, like, Burger King or something. But even places that treat their workers well are even having problems. Not everything is black and white.
Where I live—the Seattle area—it appears most or many places are having staffing issues. From basic grocery stores to higher-end New Seasons/Metropolitan Market type stores, for example. Same with restaurants. Heck, it’s even difficult to hire software engineers right now.
The Intel plant in AZ plant is in Chandler, which is more suburban than rural - it can draw on much of the Phoenix Metro population (4.5million) for hiring.
I've read a bunch of newspaper articles from that region recently about how people in Arizona and New Mexico are getting very pissy about water going to new industries. And from what I read on HN, chip manufacturing needs lots of water.
One thing Ohio seems to have plenty of is water. At least compared to places like Arizona.
Good luck to them! Always nice to get as much semiconducter talent in-country as possible, fabs are a pretty crucial supply line after all.
I'd imagine most people would want a pretty significant pay raise to move to somewhere like Ohio, but they are nearby Ohio State University, so maybe they'll get local talent.
Depending on where they're moving from, they might take a pay cut.. Ohio is very cheap to live in. New Albany is not particularly exciting, but nearby Columbus is a nice vibrant city, not the end of the earth. OSU is a definitely good asset for Intel, they put out 2k engineering degrees a year.
I hope this spurs a nice tech ecosystem for Ohio--it's been dominated by insurance and medicine for a long time.
> I'd imagine most people would want a pretty significant pay raise to move to somewhere like Ohio
Yeah. The region isn't known to attract or retain tech talent.
> Depending on where they're moving from, they might take a pay cut.. Ohio is very cheap to live in
The thing with Cost of Living is that the biggest expense is typically housing. And if you bought the house, it means the biggest expense is... building equity into an asset you can sell afterward.
Keep in mind the engineer who purchased a 2 million house in Palo Alto can sell it for two million, and then move to Ohio to a much cheaper house purchased in cash. The reverse isn't true.
I think the region has been attracting talent in the remote shift. Columbus has tens of thousands of software developers. Certainly not on the same scale as the bay but we are here. Lots of insurance and finance. VC influx from former coast vcs at Drive Capital and the folks at Rev1 have been pumping cash and resources into the local startup scene. CoverMyMeds/Root/Olive were the recent unicorns.
It might not be the well known bay/NYC/Austin but it has a vibrant scene for the population.
given that over the last 2 years we've all been trained to live like hermits I wonder who is going to be bothered about lack of city amenities? You can still jog around the block and walk your dog but large public gatherings (big city specialty) isn't much of a draw any more.
Nitpick: Small and medium, not just large public gatherings, and a larger variety of them, are also a big city draw. But one of the biggest big city draws is the large variety of employment -- not just for you, but your kids. You don't know what career they'll go into and they're more likely to be able to do it while staying near the metro area they grew up in if it's a large one with a good large varied job market, as opposed to having to choose between career and staying near family. Obviously remote/hybrid work makes that a little easier, but a lot of stuff still has to be done on site, it's still a competitive advantage to be able to choose between local AND remote jobs as opposed to ONLY remote jobs because your hometown is so small, and hybrid doesn't really make metro areas irrelevant, it merely expands their size, much as highways and commuter trains once did 50 and 100 or so years ago.
Local businesses and restaurants, especially having a lot of variety and choice for each, are big draws for big cities. I'd thought about moving to suburbia for a larger property but I'd really have nothing to do all day beyond peter around my larger house. I wouldn't be able to walk to all the things I walk to from my place now, from businesses and stores but also hiking and parks, and especially informal city stuff like the people selling tacos or fruit on the sidewalk. I would miss out on a lot of hobbies I engage in that wouldn't be well supported in an area with a smaller population. Tons of little services I rely on only really work at scale with a big city population, both from private companies and services offered by the city itself (like the free compost program I exploit heavily).
This is all stuff I've been doing or using constantly even with the pandemic. Some stuff like taking advantage of public amenities like hiking trails have become an even stronger habit of mine, thanks to the pandemic. I'm one to opt to walk to the local store, feel a product in my hands and decide to buy it, vs ordering from Amazon, something you can only do if you live somewhere dense enough to sustain these local stores. Even getting an uber to come out to a Columbus suburb is going to be a process; they are probably going to just deny your ride if you aren't doing an easy couple mile bar hop around OSU or the Short North/downtown area or going to the airport.
sounds like you're living in a bubble. people in NYC are out and about socializing. not living like a hermit. there's like 50 dance events every weekend.
Even in the most closed-down part of the pandemic, getting some takeout was a nice way to make yet another evening stuck at home into at least somewhat of an 'event,' silly as that seems.
This may be true for you but come to any major city and there are large events every single night. It's back to pre-covid. Every bar in NYC is packed, concerts are back. I went to see 4 shows last weekend.
Those numbers are incredible. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that a lot of what we're talking about when we say "Columbus" is suburbs. And the plant Intel is building is even in a different county.
That's fair, and Japanese apartments also tend to be smaller, for sure.
Nevertheless, Tokyo is a metro of 40 million people, with national importance that's equivalent to slamming NYC, LA, and SF together into one region. That its rent has managed to stay this low is a result of zoning that's practically the opposite of the US: density by default, rather than density as exception.
The nice thing about where they've located that Intel site, purely in terms of housing cost, is that you can get there quickly from plenty of cheap small towns. I'd live in Columbus if I worked there, but you could certainly go in the other direction without too much of a commute.
Sure USA workers are probably better off but in USA there would be 6k in deduction for Kaiser Healthcare family plan plus up to 3k out of pocket; then there are the additional dental costs; employee likely must own a car (no Taipei transport); deal with potentially higher income, sales, and property tax; much higher child-care cost; schools for children in many areas may be of lower quality or more expensive; the rate of gun crime, gun suicide, and drug use is higher; etc etc
The US could issue special visas for workers in chip fabrication fields, but that'll probably anger our ally Taiwan. There's also top workers in South Korea and Japan, other US allies.
This mandatory comment is your threadly reminder that node names are entirely unrelated to any physical dimensions, as has been the case for many years now.
You should not interpret node names as meaning anything more than a point on the semiconductor roadmap. Nodes that share the same names across foundries will not have the same performance characteristics, but are usually roughly comparable (especially since Intel's new naming scheme).
Somewhat related- this reminds me of this recent fact that I learned [1] that 1" camera sensors are not 1" in any dimension whatsoever. That number is rooted in historical diameter of a tube that video camera "sensors" were housed in. That tube was 1" in diameter.
> node names are entirely unrelated to any physical dimensions
I agree they're not necessarily related to any particular transistor dimension but are you sure it's entirely unrelated to any physical dimensions? If so, here is a question I have. 28nm, 22nm, 20nm, 14nm, 10nm, 7nm, 5nm, 3nm. What progression is that? Why skip 6nm and 4nm?
A "full node" step is 1/2 the area of the previous. Since area is dimension-squared, 28 x 28 == ~800 area, while 20 x 20 == ~400 area.
So 28 -> 20 is a "full node" decrease (ie: twice the transistors).
---------
We can see the full-node step from 14nm -> 10nm as well: 14 x 14 == ~200, 10x10 == 100. So its a full node step. The next full-node is 7 x 7 == ~50, which is half of 100. After 7 comes 5, because 25 is half of 50.
The next full node is sqrt(12.5) or 3.5, smack dab between 3 and 4, so not really easy to round.
---------
The steps in between are "half-node" decrements, where you didn't quite achieve a full 1/2 area reduction. An incremental technology that represents something in between the full node step progression.
That's an interesting explanation and somehow I never heard it explained that way before. It makes sense if one thinks of the transistor count doubling relative to where that company previously was, and not where the industry is. In the transistor density plot each curve is roughly x^2, but with different initial conditions.
Does anyone know why Intel would want to build a "mega-site" in the city of Columbus Ohio? Why not choose Cleveland Ohio where one has port access with an existing route to Europe? Fabs are international affairs, no matter where they're rooted, because just to keep the place running one needs a constant stream of parts from everywhere. It seems like being in a sea/rail/truck hub would be a logistics advantage.
So, I live in Columbus Ohio and I’m friends with two of the top people in our economic development department the broker this deal.
I can’t speak well to why not Cleveland but I can say that the actual city that they chose (New Albany, OH, 25 min to downtown and 15-20 to the airport) was built by Les Wexner, founder of L brands/Victoria’s Secret, is now home to data centers for Facebook, Google, and an AWS data center (there are two more within 30 minutes), and the general metro is one of the fastest growing regions in the US.
There is also a ton of available land on the fringes of the Columbus region and the sheer scope of acreage needed is bonkers.
I grew up near there. I guess I wouldn't quibble with the idea that Wexner "built" New Albany -- since it definitely isn't the same anymore -- but it was a town before he came along (two roads and a farm supply store, basically).
I used to go to summer camp at the old New Albany HS, and got my pickup truck stuck in the mud there many, many times while doing some odd job or another.
It has an international airport, intermodal rail freight depot and interstate highways.
I would guess that raw materials can be transported by road or rail. Access to a waterway is sometimes needed for very heavy indivisible parts (not sure if this is commons for fabs) but that is unlikely to be a regular occurrence. Just drive it down the interstate with a police escort at 2am.
I am pretty shocked but I guess ASML delivers by 747. [1][2] But they do seem to know what they're doing. :)
"The current generation of EUV machines are already, to put it bluntly, kind of bonkers. Each one is roughly the size of a bus and costs $150 million. It contains 100,000 parts and 2 kilometers of cabling. Shipping the components requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks."
>Amid the recent chip shortage, triggered by the pandemic’s economic shock waves, ASML’s products have become central to a geopolitical struggle between the US and China, with Washington making it a high priority to block China's access to the machines. The US government has successfully pressured the Dutch not to grant the export licenses needed to send the machines to China, and ASML says it has shipped none to the country.
> needed for very heavy indivisible parts (not sure if this is commons for fabs)
It is not common. Semiconductor equipment is generally designed to be sent via air freight and assembled on site.
Some of the supporting operations (water and air purification plants, on-site chemical production, LN2 production, etc) may require some large parts but that's a case-by-case basis and probably avoidable.
> Does anyone know why Intel would want to build a "mega-site" in the city of Columbus Ohio?
My guess would be access to talent and costs. Columbus is more than 2x bigger than Cleveland. Building cars is also an international affair and we see those plants all over the place.
Columbus metro area is roughly the same size as Cleveland metro area so I don't think that is the reason.
However, it could still have a talent advantage. Having OSU nearby is helpful, and maybe it is easier to attract talent to move to a city with a big university.
Columbus grew 15% in the last decade, Cleveland shrank 6%. That could also have something to do with as there's reason to believe it will continue to attract skilled talent.
New Albany is a suburb of the capital of the third most active manufacturing state in the US. Intel is courting the federal government for direct semiconductor industry support that goes beyond tax breaks on semiconductor fabrication equipment.
> Edit: On second thought, Arizona doesn't have port access either so I guess it's not really a significant consideration.
From a pure logistics perspective, I'd say that Arizona beats Ohio. BNSF connects Arizona with both the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. (Not to mention Lake Michigan.) It's impossible to drive Route 66 from California to Texas without rolling alongside extensive trains hauling cargo through the desert.
For me, the trains are one of the most scenic aspects of that drive.
LAX is the eighth-busiest air cargo terminal in the world, and it has plenty of cargo flights to Asia where computer devices are often assembled. PHX is also one of the busiest cargo airports in the United States, albeit much less so than LAX or CVG.
Fabs have massive physical plant inputs (eg. lithography machines), substantial commoditized manufacturing inputs (eg. boules/wafers, freshwater, industrial gas), and core outputs with small size and high value (ie. chips). The former two can be pipelined without knowing the exact product-by-product breakdown of customer demand, and the latter cannot.
Infrastructure and labor concerns might also tip the scales one way or another. Water supply, wastewater management, energy cost, grid resiliency, labor supply, access to institutions for professional training, and other considerations can differ wildly between the two regions.
"Without identifying Intel, JobsOhio sent a request out to its regional economic development directors asking for potential sites that meet the company’s parameters. They had just three days to respond. One Columbus was the only regional partner to respond with a potential location: Jersey Township in western Licking County, near New Albany" https://www.dispatch.com/in-depth/business/2022/01/21/how-mi...
Port of Cleveland is not a big container port like you'd imagine using for consumer goods. It's for supporting industry, mostly steel, through moving commodities. Think a big open barge full of coal, and holding facilities for limestone or iron ore. There's probably a limit to the size of the sort of ship can navigate to the port of Cleveland as well, you definitely can't fit a huge cargo ship in that port.
Yep, the constraints of the St. Lawrence Seaway mean we get the cutest little container vessels every couple of weeks from Europe. Sometimes they have a portion of the deck set aside for windmill parts.
Presumably this plant will be trucking containers to Baltimore's port or sending air freight out of the cargo-only airport nearby.
It's hard to understate just how driveable this side of the country is from Ohio. In about 7 hours one direction you are in Chicago. 7 hours another direction you are in Toronto. 7 hours another direction you are in NYC, or DC, or Boston. Stretch it to 15 hours or so and you can drive all the way to New Orleans, or most of Florida in that time, and anywhere in between. Anywhere east of the Mississippi really is seemingly doable for a road trip in about a days drive, especially if you are driving in shifts. You can get flights pretty fast as well, but the issue is the ohio airports have limited direct connections; its frequent to fly to ohare or charlotte first. It's not like LAX where you can score a direct flight to half the western US from southwest for $59.
Highways do back up in Cleveland and Columbus in the cities during rush hour though, as well as when there is any construction or accidents or inclimate weather.
One thing I noticed is that the freeways in, say, Cleveland, are all 5 lanes wide or so in each direction, serving a population of 400k in the city and 1.2m in the county. You go to LA and what do you see? The same size freeways as Cleveland, 5 lanes wide or so, only its serving a city of 4 million and a county of 15 million. It's like, of course there is no congestion in Cleveland and tons of congestion in LA, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see an issue with capacity. There's literally an order of magnitude more people using the same capacity of infrastructure.
Wow, it really takes an insane amount of money these days to make a leading edge fab. I really hope they can pull this off and it doesn't end up like Foxconn in Wisconsin...
I was thinking that. Im a former Ohioan and most of my family is still here. I have much more faith in Intel than in Foxconn. My understanding is that Foxconn had a shoddy track record of building out locations outside of their home country.
There are plenty of Americans who are okay with 60-80 hours of even repetitive manual labor. I know a few who work for shipping companies.
What Americans don't want are jobs that pay less and don't offer 1.5x overtime. Unlike shipping, foxconn jobs can be done in a place with a cheaper cost of living. America isn't competitive in low margin businesses because poor people need to pay rent which is just higher in the US.
> Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) faces challenges managing employees at its new fab in Arizona who are unaccustomed to the long work hours and management culture that in Taiwan have helped make the company the world’s largest chip foundry.
Having worked at Intel, I can tell you that the process side of Intel has similar work hours. This, in particular, rings true for Intel:
> Different positions may have different requirements, so work hours vary, according to the principal engineer. “An equipment engineer might start work at 8 o’clock in the morning and leave around 9 o’clock at night, but is it normal? This may happen two or three days a week. On a production line, the equipment must be maintained.
> “If you are a process engineer, it will be more stable. Maybe you can start work at 8:30 a.m.and leave before 7:30 p.m. If there are some urgent matters, you may have to stay later.”
At Intel, process engineers had to attend a daily meeting at 7:40am (mandatory), and would rarely leave before 6pm (meetings scheduled at 5 or 6pm were common). I sometimes would wander around in that part of the building at 7pm and a significant fraction of cubicles would be filled.
But it's a little more nuanced than pay for two reasons.
1) Intel is a little like proto-Amazon. There is a preference for hiring people directly out of grad school and inducting them into the cult while they are still naive, so that's just what they come to expect for work-life balance.
2) The whole semiconductor industry is like this, and particularly so for production fabs. If you have domain expertise, you have no alternative work-life balance choice short of a career change.
> There is a preference for hiring people directly out of grad school and inducting them into the cult while they are still naive, so that's just what they come to expect for work-life balance.
Heh. I once interviewed for an internal SW position that dealt with fab automation. I openly told them in the interview that I knew about their work culture and that was of great concern to me.
Interviewer: I know what you mean, and I promise the org has been working to improve the conditions. It's not as bad as it was.
Me: Great! However, for me the comparison isn't the "old you" but the rest of Intel.
<Back and forth>
Interviewer: Look, you're not going to get a 40 hour/week job anywhere in the SW industry!
Me: Umm... All my SW engineer roles at Intel were 40 hour/week jobs. I haven't worked on weekends in years. <Proceed to list friends at big name SW companies who also don't work more than 40 hours/week>
Interviewer: OK. We normally interview people straight out of college who don't know any better.
Similarly, there's a Netflix movie by Obama's production company called American Factory that dealt with the culture clash of a Chinese glass factory in America: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/american_factory
its a shame we didn't see this type of investment after the rust belt area crashed in 2008. if we had more domestic chip plants, we probably wouldn't be in the current chip shortage rn
chip fab/manufacturing process probably doesn't generate as many jobs as the auto industry (the process is automated heavily from what I have seen) at its peak but at least they will be very high paying.
>if we had more domestic chip plants, we probably wouldn't be in the current chip shortage rn
Why? At the end of the day it's a capacity shortage. The only way to prevent that is to have surplus capacity prior to the pandemic. Considering how companies don't like to spend money on expensive fabs that end up getting underutilized, I'm skeptical that having more domestic chip plants would lead to that.
> The only way to prevent that is to have surplus capacity prior to the pandemic. The only way to prevent that is to have surplus capacity prior to the pandemic.
"Capacity" in a fab means throughput. Contrary to the breathlessness that I hear when people describe modern semiconductor manufacturing, fabs are nowhere near optimal. There's plenty of dumb shit that happens in an ordinary day at a semiconductor fab—and consequently, lots of room for (easy) improvements. Fabs have lower than optimal capacity because they go heavy on hiring for things like a background in physics and chemistry, or tangential degrees like aerospace[1], but they don't treat IT concerns or the day-to-day processes that workers are engaged in like engineering problems. This gets you things like routine showstoppers that take 20+ minutes to resolve because that's how long it takes to go turn off the Caps Lock on a given workstation before being able to resume work. So much room for improvement.
Fab is still considered high-risk. It made sense to MBAs that why build your own fab when you can outsource it to someone who is willing to sink all that money and does it well for reasonable price.
I’m for global competition as a force as much as the next thinking person, but as an American who grew up on Intel chips it sure would be nice to not get our asses kicked all over the field for a change. The ASML stuff seems to indicate they might mean it this time.
"largest investment in Ohio's history"
"the largest semiconductor manufacturing location on the planet"
What is it that makes Ohio such a key and ideal place for such a massive investment? I assume there must be an abundance of energy + work force + land available that makes this possible, as well as a foundation built up by the Rust Belt.
Ohio has a good mix. It’s in a low cost of living area with a business friendly climate, being economically depressed, Intel gets lots of perks. Workforce is cheaper than elsewhere due to lower COL. There’s lots of water nearby. And, there’s the potential for talent with the many universities in the area.
I'm originally from neighboring Indiana. The midwest should have figured this out long ago, but political corruption, the coal lobby, and a lack of imagination has really blinkered the long-term planning there.
New Albany has a lot of corporate headquarters relative to the size of the city, even when you exclude the Les Wexner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Wexner) companies. Big Lots, Red Roof Inn and Bob Evans are the most prominent, but there are lots of other major companies with measurable presence (one of the two AWS US-EAST-2 DCs & a FB DC), too. From looking at the town's operating plan, The New Albany Company (a planned community, where Wexner & friends have/can buy up all of the swampy farmland they want and grow the city limits as necessary) already have lots of land (both for C&I and residential) and can offer tax breaks/rebates that can't be matched for corporations, instead relying more on the taxes from the residential developments of $500k+ homes (probably 1.5-2x MSA median) in the area (if you want to see a gerrymandered map, look up New Albany-- it is very deliberate in excluding multi-family developments from the city limits).
While I think that chipset factories require some valuable tech skills, much of the work is factory-based skilled labor work that is usually low to middle-class income. Ohio is probably ideal for this work because they have had a lot of factory closures where cost-of-living is a lot cheaper than West coast, and $35-40k per annum is considered good income to a lot of people there.
Tax breaks + cheap land + low cost local labor + business friendly local government + good PR. Geographically it's reasonably centrally located from a transportation standpoint to the rest of the U.S. and has access to lots of water.
New Albany seems situated nicely for domestic distribution, and also European distribution as it's about 150 miles from Cleaveland. Maybe there's another port it's closer to, I don't know much about Ohio. But if Intel can get chips to Europe more quickly than its Asian rivals, I can see that being a boon for them.
The site where they are building is half an hour away from an international airport, Columbus is a shipping hub, and it's tied in well with the interstate highway system. With all due respect to the Port of Cleveland, which is mostly focused on raw materials and heavy machinery as far as I can tell, that stuff is probably more of a factor.
When it comes to proximity research institutions, the choice of location is strange to me. Somewhere in the northern Indiana/Illinois/Michigan (i.e. "Greater Michiana") would have made a lot more sense. That way, you would be close to,
UIUC, Northwestern, UChicago, UMichigan, Purdue, Notre Dame, UIndiana, Argonne National Lab, etc.
Yes, but OSU is not especially well known for computer architecture. In comparison, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois are all top-5 schools in EE/hardware. And the Champaign area is even more affordable than Columbus. So choosing Columbus must have satisfied multiple constraints, some of which aren't obvious.
Champaign doesn't have sufficient infrastructure (think construction workers even) so they'd be looking at Chicago suburbs. This would make Labor costs way too high. Wisconsin would be a fantastic choice but Foxconn boondoggle probably ruined that possibility.
Largest university in the world? Top 3 in the US maybe but the largest universities in the world (I'm not talking about networks) are an order of magnitude bigger.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_public... Top 3 US, as you said, but nowhere near top 3 in the world, as you also said. Also, enrollment sure isn’t everything. Speaking as someone who used to live near Orlando, UCF is #2 on that list and I had consistent bad luck hiring computer science grads from there. And 3 of the top 5 are in Florida (it’s been like that since 2015) and I don’t see tech employers scrambling to move to Florida en masse. The focus and quality of the institution definitely matters.
I don't have a handle on how important this truly is (they build fabs in suburban Arizona, of all places) but if they're not interviewing on campus, it's a two hour drive from CMU and a two hour flight from MIT. For anyone used to the slow driving times in California, Columbus is basically close to everything east of the Mississippi.
I really do suspect they'll have some jobs for the ECE graduates from OSU, but I guess time will tell.
For such a high-tech industry, the choice of location is also about taking advantage of the talent and research ecosystem that is already established there.
I wasn't familiar with with this requirement but how close is close? I don't think the new semiconductor plants in Texas & Arizona are that close to a city center.
And how expensive is too expensive? At least compared to cities of similar size & stature, Chicago itself is not that expensive and can get much cheaper as you move slightly away from it (in the right direction).
This is great news. Letting China/Taiwan be the one stop shop for everything is going to be a big mistake in the next decade or two, it also reflects badly on the USA that we are completely dependent on a foreign power as much as we are. The current market has show that it won't price in externalities such as future wars (and cold wars) and only government pushes here and there will help it along. Intel is seeing the potential for that I believe, given the shortages and such. They certainly have the expertise to make these other types of chips that the US market has all but given up on. I think the big thing is we need to at least have the equivalent capability to what we are getting from Taiwan because it has become clear that China is not going to allow them to be independent for much longer, particularly under Xi.
If you spend $6 billion a year for 15 years, that's $90 billion which is almost the same as $100 billion. Even better is if you spend less than that but attribute other costs to it over the years, so that you get lots of tax breaks for bringing jobs to the area.
The initial investment is only 20B, and spending that money won't hurt their market cap because it's shifting money into new assets, which would be considered part of their valuation.
Long-term projects can hurt market cap because investors sometimes react negatively to investments that will return nothing for years and won't pay for themselves until perhaps a decade or more into the future.
Many investors would rather see a $20B share buyback instead of a $20B greenfield project.
All assets do not get priced at NAV by the market, even if the NAV is known. In this case, we don't know the future value of a major fab. We have no way of knowing future utilization and yield for the fab, so it'd be impossible to determine the timeframe for computing the present value of its earnings.
It will be interesting to see how the market digests this news story in the coming weeks. The price of INTC could move markedly; earnings are coming up next week and there's an Investor Meeting scheduled for the middle of February.
Intel is fabulously profitable and throws off $12B a year of free cash flow, most of these projects take 5-10Y. That's $60-120B investment without borrowing, which - well, capital is cheap at the moment.
Lots of long term debt, like any other capital project. The $100B number is purely speculative, if the project grows over 50 years; they can build the first functional fab for $10B.
Also this is a great move in my eyes. Intel's HQ is on the West Coast and I imagine that they lose out on at least some portion of East Coast talent as a result. Hopefully this allows them to have the best of both worlds.
The US gov is seriously under investing compared to it's peers. South Korea is spending nearly 9 times more with their $450Bn pledged gov investment into Semiconductors[0] compared to America's investment of $52Bn with the CHIPS Act[1]
This is a good book that goes through how economies develop and the role of State Owned/sponsored Enterprises are helpful in developing a nation's technology competencies. The author uses South Korea as a few of his examples, too.
Thanks for the recommendation! You mention that it uses South Korea, does it talk about Shipbuilding? The United States used to be a global ship building giant, but after Regan unilaterally reduced subsidies, it got completely crushed by state subsidized Japanese, Korean, and now Chinese shipbuilders. It's gotten so bad that it's a real national security risk in terms of industrial capability.
Design work doesn't need to be done close to the fab. Intel seems to be effectively splitting into two companies -- a fab company and a design company.
I don't think there are two worlds, either, unless you think that LA, SF and Seattle also constitute worlds unto themselves.
I wonder if big workforce investments like this in states like Ohio and Texas will eventually impact political leanings in the immediate area... will be interesting to see if anything's changed 10 years in
These are mostly blue-collar/striped-blue-and-white-collar jobs. So no, not really. Fabs are also giant ecological disasters. I wouldn't be surprised if Columbus was chosen over Cleveland because the different rules the Ohio EPA has based on localized pollution.
One fab will use 12 high-NA EUV machines from ASML and their price will be "well over $340 million". They will be spending more than $4B per fab just for for ASML machines.
Is it true that once such a plant is built, the number of skilled workers to keep it running is actually relatively low?
I.e. some operational "dev-ops" style engineers who can fix and troubleshoot highly automated lines, keep the thing running. People to supervise the systems, some workers to handle raw materials, etc. and then the packaging on the output side. But in general, quite sparse for a million square foot property, compared to other industries occupying a building of that size?
I wonder partly because the favorable tax / labor jurisdictions aren't exactly where you tend to find extremely skilled silicon engineers. But an operational plant is maybe not where those folks are needed.
> An initial $20 billion investment - the largest in Ohio's history - on a 1,000-acre site in New Albany will create 3,000 jobs
I grew up just north of there. An Intel factory nearby would be good news for anyone in the rust belt. I hope this doesn't fizzle out like Wisconsin's Foxconn plant.
I’m excited by this news for two reasons. I hope it bodes well for macro-economic political policies to bring well-paid jobs back to the US.
I’m also optimistic that this will inspire other companies (ie Apple) to double down on their CSR commitments and invest more into domestic manufacturing.
It’s because of water access, and Ohio basically bent over backwards to give Intel anything they wanted, included long-term sabotage of its own tax base in exchange for promises of jobs and other benefits. Ohio was the lowest, most pliant bidder.
I've actually been considering a move to Ohio this June. Any suggestions for whetr in Ohio I should look? My main consideration is low CoL as I work remotely but I'd like there to be stuff to do within a reasonable driving distance.
Columbus. I moved to Ohio from Florida some years back and do not regret it at all. I get so much more for my money that it feels like a cheat code.
Move to Columbus and look into the various suburban communities. A fantastic one that is up and coming (though it's really getting quite far along that arc) is called Grandview. Leafy, compact, cute, cool shops, bike paths and restaurants and only 10 minutes from downtown, even in traffic. There are many more so do dig in and look around. I live in the greater Cleveland area and it's also good... just not Columbus good. If you want space look to the northern suburbs. There are a number that are extremely nice.
Looking at a 5 bedroom home and the prices seem just in line with Miami prices here in West Kendall (3000 sq feet). Where are you looking that feels like a cheat code?
I just checked 5 bedroom homes in Kendall and the cheapest on the first page of results was just under $800k. The average (first 6 results on Realtor.com) is $1,029,333. With Columbus you have to check the various neighborhoods (like Kendall is to Miami) so checking one of the nicer ones (Dublin) I see 4 in the $600k range with an average of the first 6 results of $837,283. That makes Dublin (a suburb of Columbus with top schools and higher than average incomes) quite a bit cheaper in the huge house arena.
Kendall's average household income is $73,612 while Dublin's is $137,867. If I picked a neighborhood with an equivalent household income the price difference would be even more stark.
Moving to Ohio was one of the worst decisions I made in my life. Dayton is proud of its history of innovation but most of the innovators left for California 50 years ago where innovation was allowed. What's left is the lumbering bureaucracies and sprawling empires that grew from the innovators' products: NCR, the GM plant, Otis.
The region you live in matters greatly. Take Dayton. It doesn't impact me as I have not been anywhere near Dayton in all the years I've live in Ohio. Columbus, on the other hand, is a really nice city with a great vibe. I'm guessing it could be like saying, "Don't move to California. Moving to Riverside was the worst decision of my life." The real message is don't move to places that are down and out.
Aside from Cal, which other State(s) do you consider to be at least growing a culture of innovation? Just curious because might move to US from Canada in the future.
Innovation is a function of you and the people you work with, not where you live. You should be looking at the team you will be working on, not the reputation of a physical place or company. If you fail to do that, you will be disappointed when the reality inevitably doesn't match the hype. Nearly every state has loads of smart and innovative people, despite what HN's regional bias would lead you to believe. The exception would be the very tiny states, but they still have smart people, just fewer of them.
The people you work with (in person) is to a significant extent a function of where you live, though, and what the team is allowed to attempt is even more so.
Maybe there are a hundred smart and innovative fluorine chemists in your state, but 30 of them are assholes, 20 retired, 40 already have jobs too good to hire them away from, and the other 10 aren't allowed to do any lab work because of NIMBYs or because your legislature associates chemistry primarily with Breaking Bad. (That's a big problem in California today, but it wasn't 50 years ago.)
Chicago, IL is a hotbed. Boston, MA also is doing great these days. Texas and Ohio seem to be in a race to the bottom in terms of the types of work they're trying to attract.
Minnesota's twin cities plus Rochester. Excellent place if you're interested in biomedical, health care technology innovation. Top ranked companies headquartered there, a great university, the Mayo Clinic. Really top notch.
But if you're moving from Canada to escape the cold, Minnesota is not the place to stop. It's a bit warmer than Winnepeg, but colder than Toronto and the rest of Eastern Canada by quite a bit.
Boston isn't as scattered as it was 20 years ago. A lot of pharma and biotech in Kendall Square as well as outposts of California companies. And there are various startups maybe especially in the Seaport. Amazon has a lot of space in the Seaport as well.
But, yes, the computer industry in Massachusetts always tended to be in Metrowest and the defense contractors were/are out in the suburbs as well.
Most people are trying to move in the opposite direction. With that being said, here's a few interesting things about Ohio:
1. Vehicle safety inspections are not required
2. It's very flat, but their flag is the only non-rectangular state flag
3. Due to an oversight (congress never voted -- oops!), Ohio was not officially admitted to the union until 1953.
If you want stuff to do within a reasonable distance you might want to look at the eastern side, near Pittsburgh.
Many states require an annual vehicle safety inspection, often accompanied by an emissions test.
In Pennsylvania, I have to have my car tested each year. They make sure that tire tread depth, remaining brake pads, exterior lamps, and windshield wipers are all functional / within tolerance. There's other stuff that you can be failed for, such as excessive rust, etc.
That's one other thing to know about Ohio. Your car will rust. It's a cancer that will slowly eat your car, even if you do an undercarriage wash.
Some states do an annual safety inspection of vehicles - it's usually more or less "do your turn signals, brakes, and head lights work". Nowadays some states also need to do an emissions check. Some states require it every other year, some states I guess don't really require it at all?
I had to do an "inspection" when I moved to AZ and first registered my car. I dreaded what they might find since it was kind of a heap of junk. The inspection consisted of making sure the VIN matched up on the various locations on the car.
I did that too when buying a car out of state and bringing it to Kansas, but I don't think it was even called a _safety_ inspection. And definitely not an emissions inspection either. :)
IDK how many states don't require it, but Indiana, just to the west of Ohio, does not require safety inspections for personal vehicles. A few counties near Chicago do emissions testing I think.
I mean, you can take the Amtrak from Cleveland to Chicago... but it leaves at like 3:30 AM which is why I never take Amtrak to Cleveland to visit my family from Chicago.
Humid, yes. Excessively so? Not compared to a lot of other places in America. Houston. Louisiana. Florida. Coastal Carolinas. I guess it depends on how well your particular body handles humidity.
Cincinnati has fairly mild winters compared with the rest of Ohio. A meteorologist there explained it to me once. I think something about being in a valley, and the rivers (Ohio and Little Miami) moderate things a bit.
He said in weather circles, it's sometimes called "the banana belt of Ohio."
Toledo's pretty good too, and there's a bunch of smaller cities around that have already shrunk as much as they're going to. Roads are decent too, even though everyone complains about the construction (until they take a trip through Michigan).
Be careful going too cheap, as the rural parts have utterly terrible Internet service. A buddy of mine can't even play Deep Rock Galactic with us and his Discord calls sound robotic.
I spent a few days in Cincinnati on our baseball tour a few years ago and had a great time. Seemed to have a city/small town vibe, and is a days drive from Chicago or Atlanta.
Don’t know the area terribly well, but it seemed like a place that we wanted to “get to know” better.
I am very happy in Columbus. I hear Cleveland has better nightlife, but I came from up that way and the snow difference between Columbus and Cleveland is huge. I do not miss it.
Has snowplow service improved at all in Columbus? I was always struck by how bad it was compared to Cleveland. They got less snow, but dealt with the snow they got pretty badly.
Living in Cincy and it's pretty okay! If you're like me and you're coming from the bay then, well, you need a car. Many people that aren't in tech. Smaller town vibes, but that's a pretty good thing. Mortgage for a 3/4 bedroom with a garden etc. is 1/2 of my SF rent.
I'm an Ohio native that's recently moved back to the Columbus area myself. I know the area pretty intimately. Happy to respond to any questions about the area, as I'd love for there to be a larger tech scene around here.
A few things, some that are pretty general, and some that are pretty specific to my situation.
1. Family in general plays a large role.
2. I'm able to make stronger financial moves. Property is appreciating relatively quickly in the Columbus area, and purchase-cost-to-rent ratios are better here, from the investor PoV.
3. Full remote means that I'm still able to visit Seattle for the larger mountaineering trips, etc. that I like to take part in while being based out of a lower-CoL area. After several years, I was going to have to start taking flights to new destinations, anyway.
4. Opportunity to give back to the communities that gave me my start.
And some other factors come in, too. Covid definitely reduced my perceived benefit of living in Seattle. Nothing's forever though. It's a two-way door.
Two questions, does the area have symmetric gigabit fiber? If so, how reliable is it in your opinion? If not, what is the best option for multiple family members working from home?
How are water, electricity, sewage, road condition, utilities situation? Any reasons why a work from home worker might not want to live there?
I pay $70/mo for full duplex gig FTTH thru AT&T in Columbus. Super reliable but not available everywhere. You can get 1gb down/100mb up cable for similar price city wide.
No issues with utilities. Suburbs are better at handling snow removal/road maintenance than Columbus proper.
The internet infrastructure in Columbus isn't on par with a lot of the larger cities, and I think you'd have a hard time finding the speeds you're looking for, judging by what I've found - seems like there's some limited AT&T fiber, but it's not widespread. My service is reliable, though, and I haven't found bandwidth to be a problem as a full-remote employee.
Utilities are solid and seem much less suspect to outages compared to Seattle, a city I have a lot of experience living in. It's as though having more extreme weather more often ensures that the infrastructure is up to a certain rigor.
Roads are important here, and are well-maintained and addressed (e.g. expect trucks to be salting roads in anticipation for snow storms). Roads are also incredibly well-laid out in an inner/outer belt system that I miss when driving in other cities.
Very. First, any facility that uses reverse osmosis to purify/recycle water is left with concentrated impurities in the form of brine. Second, there are all sorts of nasty chemicals used in chip fabrication.
There are several Superfund sites where chips were once made.
What is the meaning of this comment? Are you highlighting the article title because you think that it’s incorrect in the context of this fab being built? Fabs like this are automated to the greatest extent possible, and the remaining jobs are mostly high-skill. The article makes this point directly.
> Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.
If you want tube socks manufactured in the US it can be done the same way. Not saying it is good economics, but if the government wants tube sock manufacturing jobs in the US it is trivial to make it happen. If you say "never" or "can't" your are lying, and you really mean you don't want it to happen.
I assume the deal with Intel was negotiated by the state government and so Cleveland was never in the running, but it must be said, the City of Cleveland has traditionally had a knack for repelling businesses that are interested in making big moves into the city. Progressive and Eaton both wanted to be headquartered downtown, instead of out in the burbs.
An Intel fab in the City of Cleveland proper is something to contemplate, but I doubt very much that it was ever a possibility. You'd probably want to locate such a thing further out in the county.
Really disappointed in many of the negative and insecure comments coming from members of this community saying “Ohio sucks” or “Ohio State University sucks because it’s not Stanford” or “how many startups does Ohio have”. It really reflects poorly on those making these comments and I can’t help but think seeing a state not on the east or west coast being selected is causing fear and uncertainty in the lives of those who wrap up their personality in being in California or something.
People in Ohio are excited about this and all of the negativity, frankly, is just unwelcome.
Think the Midwest and Ohio suck because there aren’t mountains or an ocean? What good is any of that from behind your keyboard with the A/C on or sitting on your couch watching the same Netflix special as everyone else? Meanwhile in 5 hours I can be on your beach and enjoying all the best parts of where you live with 0 downside.
Think Ohio State sucks? Right because Stanford has always been a top 5 university from day one and everything is static forever.
Intel employs “low skill people and they’re not startup software engineering jobs” ok? What actual value does your privacy-evading ad tech addiction company add over honest people who just want a job making actual things? I guess Tesla employs low skill people in Austin at the Gigafactory too?
Don’t like Ohio? Good we don’t care. You don’t have to live here and we have never needed to care about your opinion. You don’t have a monopoly on talent or anything else except maybe people who think that because their license plate says something different that somehow they’re better than us. Seriously grow up.
And you know what? For all those comments “blah blah there’s only family to move there for” like yea. Exactly. Maybe you should too. I don’t have to get my social life from doomscrolling on Facebook and making myself depressed. I actually have friends and family that I see everyday and can count on. We cook meals together and help each other. We play board games, celebrate birthdays, and like being near each other. These social media apps are filling a void that you created for yourself. I like visiting California and can live there if I want to. I choose my family and friends. Maybe you should too and get off your holier-than-thou attitude.
Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar. It's understandably annoying when people are dissing the place you're from, or you feel they are, but a flamewar like this should obviously not be at the top of the page (where it was stuck after collecting tons of upvotes, as flamewar comments often do), and you shouldn't be breaking the site guidelines yourself when something annoys you. Instead, you should follow the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and this one in particular: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.". In egregious cases you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take care of them.
Every time I've looked in this thread, the comments I saw referencing Ohio were overwhelmingly positive ("brilliant location", etc.). In fact, after skimming this thread, I couldn't find a single comment that matched your description. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they must be a tiny minority of what got posted here. (Edit: I saw your list at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031374 - the comments you were reacting to were not representative in the slightest, and you misinterpreted several of them.)
There's a strong tendency to fall prey to the bias of noticing, or putting a greater weight on, the ones that felt negative to you (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This is a function of your own pre-existing condition (I don't mean you personally—this is true of all of us), of being ready to flare up at the first thing that feels like a trigger. In that sense, what we're all actually encountering when we get triggered on the internet are our own pre-existing feelings. No wonder people find it hard to talk to each other about inflammatory topics.
The comments you've "quoted" in your first paragraph, for example, simply don't exist. The only occurrence of "Ohio sucks" in the entire HN dataset (I just checked) is the one in your own post. That's how that cognitive bias works, and that's how we get flamewars like this. People here (you, me, and everyone else) need to manage our own inflammation a little differently so we don't end up with complete derails like this, which are not in the spirit of this site nor in the interest of anyone in the community.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to start a flamewar. The comments I did see (the specific ones I found to be immature) were what this was meant for, but you’re right. Where you saw a general positive sentiment, I only saw the negative sentiment (like the potato “joke” or “Dayton ruined my life”) and I should have just ignored it ya know?
I do attach my exact name and LinkedIn profile to my comments so I hope that it’s clear that I’m not just trolling or have specific bad intentions. Just frustrated a little bit today with those comments I did see, so I ranted. My apologies. Again you’re 100% right.
Yours is actually the first comment I saw. My thinking was more along the lines of "what a great way to bring more future focused jobs to the mid-west".
We're seeing a very promising dispersion of future focused Jobs in the US (btw, I'm not American). While software has been predominantly west coast, and finance in the north east. Don't forget that TI is based in Texas. I believe much of Bio-tech is in San Diego and Boston, the list goes on and on. With giga & Tesla in Texas, will that bring more manufacturing and power technology to the area?
This is very positive in bringing employment and opportunities to these regions. I'm also hopeful that along with the tax credits that were likely given to the companies, there is a portion that is set-aside, or another allocation to improve access to the higher education needed to fill the jobs, and that the education will be provided to the local community, not just dragged in from other areas, displacing the local community and gentrifying it.
I'm Canadian (although on a clear day I'm almost close enough to see Ohio across Lake Erie) and I'm in complete agreement with you.
Everyone in the USA should be utterly ecstatic that Intel is building a large domestic chip plant and not outsourcing even more overseas. This is fantastic news.
Intel has some 15 or so fabs already in the US (most upgraded multiple times), and is constructing two giant new ones in Arizona.
The continental US has a good amount of domestic production capacity. The "problem" is that TSMC and Samsung got a node advantage on Intel, drawing a lot of the performance part manufacturing (including Intel contract work). Will this Ohio plant be competitive on the edge? I haven't seen information indicating that, and the two Arizona fabs Intel is building (operating in 2024) are targeting 7nm.
Samsung (3nm) and TSMC (5nm) are both building fabs in the US as well. A pretty healthy subsidy by the government and various levels of government lubricated the choice. It's good for the sanity and economic stability of the world if everything wasn't concentrated in Taiwan.
Thank you so much for the clarification as this is definitely not my area of expertise. It's heartening to hear that, subsidies aside, the US is managing to maintain significant capacity for domestic production, and it's increasing.
Such investment runs quite counter to the general trends I've witnessed in other manufacturing industries that continue to shrink every year.
To be honest, some shrinking manufacturing doesn't always mean it's bad. It could be, but not always. Sometimes it means increasing the efficiency or disappearing products that aren't in the demand of the society.
I'm surprised by the location. I would have expected closer to Cleveland to draw from Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland and Pittsburgh and get electricity from the Beaver Valley nuke plant. I'm guessing AFRL/Wright-Patterson and government contracts have something to do with this.
Columbus isn't exactly "low cost of living" except by Silicon Valley standards, either.
Scanned this submission several times today, never seeing a single negative comment about Ohio. I did chuckle at one pro-Ohio that basically said it's a great place because it has [list of things that every metropolitan everywhere has], but whatever.
After seeing your comment I dug through the comments and found a single negative comment that is clearly written by someone from and in Ohio.
Maybe you don't interpret these as negative. That's ok. Idk. Seem negative to me without really adding any value and that's not counting just general, unwarranted cynicism:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30029732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30026680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30029025 (as if that's some metric that we need to really care about)
I've responded to the first three now. Yes, they were bad comments. They were nowhere close to being representative of this thread, and they were all downvoted.
I apologize for being so direct, but you seem really sensitive about this topic. The tweet you linked to in your edit was actually questioning Intel's faltering business model, not Ohio. Of the comments you linked, most are banal or negative about a specific area. Columbus, for instance, really doesn't seem like a particularly compelling place to most people who don't already live in Columbus. That doesn't seem particularly contentious. I see absolutely nothing about (the) Ohio State, or how it compares to Stanford.
And a smattering of negative comments is hardly unique. Anti-valley rhetoric is nonstop on HN (as an aside, I suspect >85% of HN contributors are not in or near the valley). The theft gangs, homeless people, drug overdoes, etc.
But none of it is really relevant at all for an automated facility. Like a data center, it really doesn't make a big impact in an area outside of the initial construction . The real beneficiary will be ASML in all probability. Regardless, it's good to have more advanced fabs distributed around the globe.
I empathize with OP. I live in the Bay Area and most people here are convinced that every other place is a slum, particularly the “flyover states”. The negativity drives people to become sensitive to the topic.
Out of 430 comments, there are bound to be some negative comments. Some of them may be valid ( Not a place they want to live is not against Ohio, but an opinion ) , some of them are not. But that is still less than 10 comments.
>unwarranted cynicism
The vast majority are questioning Ohio not because of negativity or cynicism but curiosity. Why Ohio, why not other state? Are there important strategic reasons? Some of them are calling out Tax Break, that is a fair point, but aren't there Tax Break elsewhere? I did a quick glance in the first 300 comments on this page, barely any negativity.
No offence but your comments seems to be the most negative in this thread. But then I am not American. So may be I am not as sensitive.
Honestly this is one of the things I couldn't stand about the bay area. Tons of people that think they're hot stuff and the rest of the country is a dump pile. It reflects in HN comments all the time.
The reality is Ohio State is actually a good university and there's really solid talent out there too. You also have Chicago not all that far away that's a big talent hub.
Please don't take HN threads further into regional flamewar, regardless of which region you have a problem with. It's tedious, offtopic, hellish, and particularly avoidable.
This is getting old. I've lived in the Bay Area for 20+ years and guess what, the Bay Area != San Francisco (I personally go to SF less than once every two years).
Indeed how? If they really mean SF, then write that. Bay Area is much greater and much more than SF. San Jose alone is larger in area and people than SF and Bay Area is much much more than San Jose.
I'm trying to spread awareness to people not from here that the two things aren't the same at all. It's bad enough that media convulsively regurgitate the same tired fallacy repeatedly.
Perhaps if you consider that when people speak of the Bay Area, this is sometimes an example of metonymy (or even in another sense, synedoche), you wouldn't feel the need raise everyone's awareness of San Jose.
The whinging hits everyone. Look at any HN story involving the Bay Area, and you'll see a dozen subthreads about how it's a post-apocalyptic hellscape. (But it's home, you know.)
Speaking as an elitist left-wing hippie-business-geek-bro-demon in the Bay Area...
The Midwest makes some sense for building fabs. The two largest inputs are power and water - and the midwest has plenty of both. There's a small but thriving fab community in Minneapolis.
Hilariously, there isn't much in the way of fabs left in Silicon Valley. Those aren't suitable for any production. The last high volume fab to close was the Linear Technologies fab out in Milpitas.
There's a Raytheon fab in Lompoc CA, a few defense related fabs down in Santa Barbara and LA, but that's about it.
The major semiconductor manufacturing states in the US right now are Arizona, Texas, Oregon and NY. It's nice to see Ohio joining the list. Hopefully other companies will follow Intel's lead here.
I see maybe one or two negative comments of substance about Ohio on this post. Meanwhile you've written a rant about the bay area that implies everyone out there has sold their relationships and souls for some kind of elitism.
The midwest is great, but it's not some utopia (the same way the bay area isn't some kind of homeless wasteland). Please stop making the rest of us look ridiculous.
"west coast liberal" here -- I'm thrilled to hear about this project. While I'm not a fan of the political climate of Ohio I want to see the midwest (and rest or the country) thrive.
It's about the United States -- we're all on the same team.
The Tweet you linked seems to have a totally different issue with the announcement. Here's the follow-up Tweet:
> It’s so depressing to read about Andy Grove’s brilliant and expert pivot of Intel from memory to processing and then see the same company miss RISC when they had checks watch 50 years to prepare.
Um.... He was referring to Intel the company as a whole. Shut it down and give money back to investor. ( I am sorry to say he is not an expect on Semi-Conductor Industry judging from his other comments. So just ignore it ) Not targeting the Fabs in Ohio or the Midwest.
Seriously, you seemed triggered. No one is hating Ohio here. At least not as far as I can tell. It will be great for Ohio, and I am sure Ohio's future will be bright with many more tech companies to follow after Intel. Grab a coffee, take a break from Social Media and Internet. Have a nice day.
This is a very childish rant. You could swap Ohio, with Missouri, Indiana, Iowa... All country have states/provinces that are more developed than others. You liking your home state (or not) doesn't make it better. You can say whatever you want, good luck getting people to move to Ohio.
People used to say that about Idaho, now it’s half Californians. Maine was a backwater now it’s got some of the biggest population growth metros in the country. Florida used to be swamps now it’s growing like crazy. Things change, man. In fact the numbers show people are leaving California.
"Used to be"? I lived in South Florida for a long time.
- 0 tech scene, besides a couple of wannabe startups , ans a few outliers.
- Compensation is bad, taking into account the raising real state prices.
- Most companies are on the services, tourism, insurance, medicine sector.
- Racism is rampant, very ironix as SoFlo workforce is mostly south american immigrants.
- High level of organized crime, shitty schools for kids (including mass shootings), very few things to do(besides the beach), and so on...
Btw this is arguably the best part of Florida, don't even mention central/north Florida. People moving there are chasing tax breaks( I will still take Texas any day). SoFlo is great to party, and that type of things, but as long term move, for a techie , is going to be rough. But to each their own, I met people there that really love it.
This is sad because Boca Raton was where the PC was invented, and was also the place Microsoft and IBM worked on OS/2 together. When IBM moved all their R&D from Boca to Austin in the mid-90s, the scene was already fairly depressed, however.
> People used to say that about Idaho, now it’s half Californians.
Idaho has always been half Californians. Now we just have Californians who moved there 50 years ago complaining about Californians who moved there 5 years ago. It is like that in most western states.
Ohio has 5 metro areas and is decently well developed, with good schools. It's a bit culturally dull from a costal perspective (well mine anyway), but perfectly nice in most ways. I've enjoyed a number of visits to Cleveland and Columbus.
Now that brain drain isn't required to get a great job, we will finally see a diversity of distribution in talent instead of east/west coast. This will be a good thing. It's completely unsustainable to have talent cloistered away forever and always in the same couple spots.
I live out in the mid-West many years ago. It actually offers a lot of what people claim is missing on HN - affordable housing, low crime, good public schools, community, better work-life balance.
I’m assuming most people bitching about have never been there.
The worst thing about threads mentioning the Midwest are these inferiority complex rants. People shit on California, Seattle, New York, etc endlessly on any article mentioning them.
If a state is in the news implying it’s getting something good, people are going to shit on it. You need to grow thicker skin. Otherwise you just end up reinforcing the idea that Ohio residents are delicate and care what the coasts think.
P.s. the tweet you linked to is not about the location
What's wrong with Ohio? I hear only good stuff from there. I'd love to live there if I was in the states - quiet, reserved and self reliant to a point.
How much does the cost of labor really factor into a 20B factory? Assume 200k fully loaded at 3000 people is 600M a year on labor. That's not nothing but it seems pretty insignificant if you can save enough on the actual buildout of the fab(s).
Everyone is claiming this a race to the bottom on labor, but I'm not sure about that. Sure it's probably cheap compared to SV, but there are cheaper places too.
The state is claiming the average salary for the fab workers is going to be $135k. Maybe I'm missing something, but that's a very comfortable life in this part of the country.
I wouldn’t call it a race to the bottom. It’s more about a large workforce that’s educated and has some skills and a culture for making things, and also doesn’t need $300k to buy a house.
Balanced with other things I think. Ohio doesn’t have the cheapest labor in the US. Probably would be cheaper in Mississippi or maybe Georgia or Tennessee but I’m not sure.
I lost three years of the prime of my life to living in Dayton. It was one of the biggest mistakes I made in my life, one from which I will probably never be able to recover. I did miss the mountains but that wasn't the real problem. I got way more negative and insecure from living there, I had to work at appallingly terrible companies like Reed Elsevier, and I stagnated intellectually. It's the most racist place I've ever lived, and I've lived in Texas. Dayton's idea of a startup is an Amway distributor with a big downline. My ex-brother-in-law had a job making actual things (he's a machinist, specialized in wire EDM, and yeah he's honest) and ended up having to leave Ohio because the economy sucks and the government actively impedes progress. Now he works at Boeing.
I'm sure Pat Gelsinger knows a thing or two I don't about Intel's chances to prosper in Ohio. But Intel's chances to prosper are not individuals' chances to prosper.
The people claiming Intel's employees are "low skill" have no idea what they're talking about.
OSU is apparently pretty good though, and there's apparently a decent startup scene in Columbus now.
But I'm still going to share my experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028203) so other people can take it into account when they're deciding whether to move there or not. I did piss off, thank God.
But what does your comment even mean? "Texas" is your benchmark for how racist places are? Where in Texas? It's about as large as the average country. If you lived in Austin, or in the city of Houston, or in Dallas, you lived in a place with substantially more Black folks than San Francisco.
Dayton, for what it's worth, is a weird benchmark for the state of Ohio. It's a declining city with a troubled economy.
The Intel factory is apparently being sited on the outskirts of Columbus. Columbus is not Dayton, any more than Ann Arbor, MI is Livonia or Cadillac.
"Don’t like Ohio? Good we don’t care. You don’t have to live here and we have never needed to care about your opinion"
This tells me all i ever needed to know about Nohio. A worthy state for a tech hub doesn't say this. Instead try:
Don’t like Ohio? What can we do to help? Are you a startup? Can you help us better understand the concern? You don’t have to live here but were sorry we couldnt have done better. We value your opinion.
This isn’t very charitable. When companies publish this sort of thing they’re generally committed (however tentatively) to within some reasonable percentage of the amount. Provided of course it makes financial sense after further diligence and the like.
Anyone who believes anything said by a company from that region with respect to investments in the western world was always in for a surprise. It’s best to assume they think we’re all fat, dumb, lazy, and easily duped, and assume they’ll act accordingly.
Exactly. I'm less charitable because of Foxconn and how that story developed. Big companies promises tons of money and small/mid sized economies will give them huge tax cuts in exchange. In reality they build a much smaller plant and still take the tax cuts.
I don't think you can generalize between these deals when:
1. The semiconductor companies on one side of the table are very different: Taiwanese company mostly employing in China versus a US company. National cultures around commitments and deals vary.
2. The politicians on the other side of the table are very different. Scott Walker and Donald Trump with the Wisconsin deal and Mike DeWine in Ohio.
Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar, regardless of which region you have a problem with. It's tedious, offtopic, and particularly avoidable. Comments like yours triggered a hellish flamewar elsewhere in this thread—exactly what we don't want here.
Ohio is the 7th largest state by population and 10th in population density. It's also continuing to grow in population, especially around Columbus, unlike some other Rust Belt states. Whether they "want to" or not, LOTS of people live in Ohio and Columbus is arguably it's most vibrant city thanks to being the capital and home of its flagship university.
I'm a UMich grad, so am not allowed to live in Ohio, but I can see its appeal for some.
Careful, I think your biases are showing. To assert that nobody wants to live in Ohio is an incredibly myopic worldview. I can think of loads of people that would love to work in tech without the big city living, or the high prices that come with it.
I don't know where you get the idea "anyone in tech desperately tries to leave." I'm on the East Coast currently, but I'd love to move to Ohio. Cost of Living / Work-Life Integration is pretty compelling from several friends I've had who have moved to the Columbus area from Cali in the past 3-4 years for senior tech positions.
When 150k achieves a 400k lifestyle from Cali...and you start having a family..it's hard to not to at least pronder the idea.
This will be good for the midwest, for intel, and for the United States.
This is a bit of a weird take to me. I don't know anything about Ohio (maybe it's a shit hole) but large investment will raise the living standards. California is beautiful, diverse and whatnot, but it's not like there is something in the air that makes it that way. The influx of people and capital is what makes it special. Same for NY and most higher density areas.
There are definitely downsides to Ohio - namely, political- and weather-related. However, Columbus is a pretty big tech city with a lot of startups, VC money flowing, and a student pipeline from OSU.
Growing up in Michigan and moving to Chicago (12 years), I sort of felt the same. Recently visited Cincinnati though and it was kind of amazing. Little town in a "valley", Nice river front, people and shops were nice. Good downtown feeling. Would def consider it a low cost of living place on my radar now.
I'm guessing you've never been to Columbus and have little idea on what it's like there.
Plenty of people go to top schools in that part of the country for their PhD. If they're willing to spend 5-7 years doing that, I can see them willing to work there.
Also, if people moved to the middle of nowhere in New York to work for GF, or Burlington, VT - I think they'll be OK with Columbus.
I was born and partially raised in Columbus and Ohio in general. I defintiely left for the coast as soon as I could get a job that allowed it. So there's at least certain people they're describing the motivations of correctly.
That said, there are many who are happy to live there. I do wonder how many young and truly brilliant engineers are on that list, but maybe their presence won't be required on site? It's not an exciting place to be young and dynamic when compared to the big cities on the coasts.
The quality of life though, especially for someone raising a family and looking to build their nest egg, is great. Fresh air, relatively low crime, nice large yards and people with good Midwestern family values (might not be the "values" someone from San Fransisco would prioritize though).
Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar, regardless of which region you have a problem with. It's tedious, offtopic, and particularly avoidable. Comments like yours triggered a hellish flamewar elsewhere in this thread—exactly what we don't want here.
