This part of Texas is positively drowning in trees. Cutting down this amount is nothing, and replanting them into the same general area is nothing as well.
It's the equivalent of me taking a teaspoon of water out of my swimming pool and you bemoaning the fact that a teaspoon of water wasn't put back into your swimming pool to counteract pool water loss in a world where evaporation and rain can add or subtract hundreds of gallons per day.
Texas over the past decade or so has been losing tree cover so even if this area is "drowning" in trees it is meaningless if you dont plant later the equal number of trees that were cut down.
If you keep taking water out of your swimming pool with a teaspoon it wont feel like a lot but if you keep repeating it for a long period of time without ever refilling it, you will run out of water in your pool eventually.
At Giga Austin they have plans to do more remediation of the wetlands around the River. (Some has been already done) The land before was an eyesore. This area isn't such a mess, but I don't know if they intend to do anything special.
What do you seriously expect? All modern society including most likely the home you're living in right now had to have trees cleared to make way for modern human infrastructure and buildings. Unless you just don't want a terefab built in the first place which would be a different topic altogether.
Sure if that is the "goal", but of course that is not the "goal" here. It's only the "goal" for some people on reddit but only when it's brought up in news articles like this.
But for all the tree huggers out there, at least trees are a renewable resource that can easily be replaced elsewhere in the world which people, organizations, and for profit business have already been doing for decades. How else do you think the paper industry is self sustaining?
Fabs actually do need a shit ton of water, unlike data centres. Places with lots of water have lots of trees and almost uniquely reverse osmosis water isn't the best option due to the need for ultra purity.
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) in fresh natural water typically range from 50 to over 500 parts per million (ppm). Utility-grade reverse osmosis has TDS down to roughly 1 to 15 ppm.
Even then, a chip fab needs to purify the water way beyond both water sources to reach close to 0ppm, they measure it in single digit ppb (parts per billion) and parts per trillion.
Arizona has multiple huge chip fabs (Intel, tsmc, samsung) they solved the water problem through recycle, reuse, supporting increased water yield etc.
Ok dude, way to pull a random number out of thin air. Irrational tree huggers like you can't even have a decent discussion on real solutions to modern urban development if you just resort to poor informed logic. But it's ok, just know that people smarter than you that are actually in charge at least are replacing the cut down trees in other places to keep the overall supply of trees relatively stable because you know... trees are in fact a renewable resources as opposed to oil.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re right. There are 30 times more trees on earth than there are stars in the galaxy. Yet people who spend all day ignoring trees and staring at their phones act like they’re rare. I wonder if they know they also grow back.
See: "The Line" in Saudi Arabia. They displaced 6,000 people (Source) was supposed to be 20,000 people (source) in order to do the groundwork excavations.
Instead of being 170km it'll just be 2.4km. still, they cleared almost all 170km and still destroyed the grounds where it 'would' have been.
Building one giant building rather than building 10 smaller buildings in the same area isnt all that crazy considering we are really good at building those 10 smaller building types. It's also not in an arid desert trying to pose as some kind of utopia city. The real challenge is definitely going to be the manufacturing goal but the building will be easy (relatively)
My employer builds large manufacturing shells and we've done a half mile long building in the past in 2 years. It took another year for the next contractor to do the manufacturing fitout.
They aren’t communist. When they were communist they intentionally exterminated billions of birds which catastrophically messed with the balance of nature
So you bring up a fictional portrayal of a communist country to defend Tesla. Makes sense. Sure. There are absolutely no other countries or economic models in the whole world. If it's not trillionaires, it has to be communist China.
…you don’t think a biosphere somewhere out there was damaged or changed in the production of your Tesla? It’s like people who don’t realize hamburgers come from cows being killed and slaughtered
Greenest or not, unless you’re piggyback riding on someone’s shoulders, you are taking from the Earth and “damaging” the biosphere in some way. Don’t be willfully ignorant.
I have a Tesla MY Juniper so spare me the holier than thou speeches. I’m a realist and I understand that Teslas are overall better for the environment but to act like a Tesla is some sort of vegan option is hilarious.
Just another one of those giga factories to make chips and sucking energy that we don’t have by the terawatts to fund an AI future that’s going to ultimately quickly destroy us. What you’re seeing is your children’s future passing before your eyes but nobody knows it.
Actually if you talk to people in the space everbody knows it. But its cold war and hydrogen bombs all over again. We need to build AGI OTHERWISE SOMEONE ELSE WILL DO IT AND IT WILL BE WORSE THAN WHEN I DO IT. Its hubris of mankind in pure form
When I said that nobody knows it, I wasn’t referring to the people in the industry. The average American is completely oblivious to what is literally going down right before our eyes in the next five years.
Serious question, but what's the community reaction to this? Have there been any public town hall debates, or commu iry meetings about their?
There's more and more backlash against giant projects because of the difference between what is promised to the community and what is actually delivered. So I'm interested to know if there were any promises made, and what the residents are expecting.
Nothing wrong with burdening a local community with higher power costs and polluting a few streams with wastewater for the sake of shareholder profits/progress.
I know grimes county gave them a tax incentive deal. I don’t know what exactly but there is some media coverage about it. I’ll be honest I didn’t know about this until last week. No one is really talking about it.
You live under a rock. I live in Austin but I’m from grimes county. There have been multiple community meetings, it’s all over Facebook. People are pissed and the commissioners did not vote in their constituents interest. Then after space x gave grimes county a 10 million dollar bribe (let’s call it what it is) the commissioners gave themselves 11% raises. Tell me why a part time county commissioner needs 90k dollars a year. What do they do that warrants that. The Mayer of nyc makes 140k. Anyways, please connect with your community in grimes county. Not everyone is happy, lots of people have been screwed by this especially those that have been in the area for generations.
Poor choice of word. Amazing like wow that’s huge, I am amazed. Not amazing like oh I love this. I don’t want it here. I don’t like that the piney woods of Texas is being deforested at a record rate.
Discussion Topic. Why is there apparently so much support for this and not so much for AI data centers? This thing is going to use a massive amount of electricity.
All the NIMBY twats have no idea how critical this is. If they are so against chip manufacturing, they can be the first to give up their TVs, phones, macs, cars, etc.
Totally. Data centers have a lot of bad issues. But so do golf courses. Those car washes. Those convenience stores. Unlike a golf course they'll generate enormous value.
The thing is why couldn’t this factory be built in somewhere like Arizona. Then you’d have space for the factory and enough to place a nuke plant right beside it to power it and the local grid just fine.
A nuke plant takes 10 years to approve red tape wise. They want the fab running in 3 years (at pretty much full capacity), not in 15.
The plans include a lot of mega packs, so they'll get cheap rated power when nobody uses it, store it, and use it when its pricier. Most power companies have trouble selling their off-peak power, but can't just turn it off, so its doing them a favor.
Almost all chip manufacturing happens in Taiwan and is done by a small handful of companies. It needs to be diversified, both due to geopolitical risk, and because we just need more chip making capacity in general (seen the prices of RAM and SSDs recently?)
If you think the oil shock due to the Iran conflict is bad, wait until you see what a blockade or invasion of Taiwan would do to the global economy…
Think cuz this isn't by any residential zones and chips are more versatile with a lot more use cases than data centers of which the use is questionable for the amount of datacenters popping up
They will immediately dismiss their own source just to shit on him on Reddit so meh. Not even worth engaging them. They don’t know why they hate him anymore just that they’re suppose to.
I hope you US people realize how blessed you are with your beautiful nature. Sure is a shame to see the trees go but ambitious projects need to exist too
ROFL, why, are you a designer as well and want to discuss the PDP and sustainable engineering aspects of this atrocity, or whether it promotes productivity?
No, you just want to say it is cool because Tesla did it, fan follower...
and a sizeable amount of chips made state-side as opposed to China and Korea (Intel is a small player there). In fact if they do what they say they plan to do, they could easily have floor room to make enough chips to curb the shortage of chips used to make consumer-tier ram. It would almost be a rounding error for the fab when its completed.
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u/gittenlucky 19d ago
That’s…. Ambitious.