Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers

Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50,000 jobs and much-needed computer memory production to US shores, as the AI boom continues to push memory prices up. The company’s stock surged on the news that shovels had been put to work on the facility first …

[DS999]

Mass production in 2030

So only a couple years after the DRAM shortage is over, and no doubt well after the AI bubble has burst.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Mass production in 2030

I can't wait for the times when I'll be finding ram sticks in a bag of crisps.

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

Re: Mass production in 2030

You can always trust the software industry to come up with new innovative ways to waste ressources.

[Paul Crawford]

Why woodland?

Most cities have large areas of near-derelict buildings that could be brought down and replaced.

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you are trying to apply common sense to America. Would you like AI to help?

[ridley]

You reckon you'd be able to find 500acres, IE 2sq km, of contiguous brown field space in one city?

I don't think so.

(Maybe Detroit...)

[Pickle Rick]

Swindon.

Which parts? No, no, just Swindon. FTLOG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Disposal regulations probably.

Cities are also full of people and traffic...and if you're going to be tankering in chemicals and tankering out corrosive waste, you don't want to be too near people and traffic.

Lot of nasty chemicals are used to make PCBs and chips.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Lot of nasty chemicals are used to make PCBs and chips."

And you don't want people to see that.

[Saigua]

Nasty chemicals and their hermetic recovery loops.

Yeah lots of 00000 clean air, 3 foldy recovery loops, and catalytic combustion for anything left. Processes to tear that down and back together with similar Q.

[Saigua]

Choices on how much bat service to buy with your memory.

I mean, hopefully they don't go to wetly with the bats or fail at their squad goals of LEED Pt green roof buildouts, or at least quelling the notion of having too many lights about at all hours to ruin plainly everyone's (plus bats and avies') sleep cycles and solar rails on the roof that make for roosting maladies (read bluntly, short circuits.)

[DoctorNine]

The main reason is the cost of the land and the cost of construction. Both are cheaper in the country versus city.

[Anonymous Coward]

Redeveloping abandoned indistrial areas costs more

That's why they want "virgin" land. Intel asked that in Europe too. In ex-indusrial areas there are probably asbestos, slag and chemical pollution, etc. etc. removing which has its costs.

In the mind of executives is thereby better to destroy wildlife to profits and bonuses are higher and sooner.

So you get rusting abandoned areas, and less words. Then to achieve environmental goals, you buy some "credits" on the Monopoly market to look good, and they get praised for that.

[brainwrong]

What was moved to make way for the bats?

Do the bats prefer their artificial habitat over the natural one?

How do they intend to communicate to the bats where they should move to?

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

I believe the Police Commissioner of New York has arranged for the use of a large light in the sky to lure the bats.

[Pickle Rick]

(Finds appropriate icon...)

Joker Alert!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever danced at the RAM fab in the pale moonlight?

Never rub another mans RAM stick!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they've clearly built the site on top of Wayne Manor...I can't wait to buy Bat RAM from the Bat Fab.

If it's good RAM, I'll be sure to always buy it at the same Bat Time from the same Bat Channel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the type of bat...some bats move around in large groups rather than stay in one place all the time...they may have simply waited for the bats to go elsewhere. They don't always live in caves and they tend not to stay in the same place...they go where the bugs are...the bats we had ate mosquitos and other night time flying nasties

Growing up, we had bats in one of our trees one year...by the end of the year they were gone and they never came back...so for precisely one summer we had virtually no gnats, mozzies and midges...the drawback is if you sit outside at night you get them swooping all around you snatching up the bugs...sometimes they bang into you or stuff around you.

A couple got in my bedroom once while I was reading some exam materials for the Windows 2000 MCSE. It was the same day my parents suffered an ill fate down an aisle in PC World. They bought a Packard Bell which was overpriced for the spec. It was this day I vowed justice and became BatNerd. I visited the local citizens advice bureau and set them up with a signal. It's a BSOD they project on to the clouds to summon me if they need to raise a ticket.

[Snowy]

BSOD is that the Bat Signal Of Dave?

[Bran Muffin]

And here I am, sat wondering...

I've got a box on a storage shelf that currently has 2.5 pounds (1.134 kilograms) of DRAM sticks, and that isn't counting some extra sticks sitting in various drawers in my desk. Quite a variety, just looking through them gives me a sense of my personal history of computing at home. I've no idea what to do with them but it seems like a waste and kind of a shame to just throw them away.

[Saigua]

SDRAM, et al Re: And here I am, sat wondering...

Aces on you for m...ildly energy hungry slow compute RAM provision and using out the bathtub curve of its lifetime patiently taking patient and N008 data while the AI, memory the size of a planet, jaws away at bedside manner while deciding when the banshee screams.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tree Huggers"?

<deletes Register bookmarks & RSS>

[Col_Panek]

Clay

For those not familiar with New York geography: Clay is just north of Syracuse, near the center of the state. It takes 5 hours to drive there from where most people consider "New York". The Micron site is next to a power distribution site from the two nuclear reactors 30 miles away of Lake Ontario. It s 5 miles away from Oneida Lake, which has a third cubic mile of water (and a lot of ice, currently).

Don't feel bad for the bats. They have several large swampy areas nearby. Five miles to the southeast is The Great Cicero Swamp, which by personal observation contains half the world's population of mosquitoes. The Micron site can be seen on a map as a large barren area on the north side of NY Route 31, between I-81 and the big power switchyard. My daughter just closed her microbrewery in Liverpool, which was several years too early to serve thirsty Micron workers. The bats weren't interested.