Comment by hosh

Water in the fabs gets mostly recycled. There’s an old slidedeck from Intel’s Chandler (Phoenix metro area suburb) fab about it. This includes discharging what isn’t recycled to refill ground aquifer.

From what I understand, the area is more seismically stable, so the special building structures and equipment for more seismically active places are not needed.

There is the presence of ASU. The ASU president had been hired a while back to implement a very different kind of university system focused on broadening (not gate keeping) higher education and building up innovation. This includes both improving graduation rates in the traditional tracks and expanding non-traditional educational tracks. I don’t know if all those were considered by TSMC; they like hiring engineers straight out of college and training them in their methods.