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As drought tightens its grip across the US, researchers at Virginia Tech have built an AI model that helps policymakers balance water demands between agriculture and insatiable semiconductor factories
Researchers have developed a causal AI model to help policymakers balance growing demand for freshwater from agriculture and semiconductor manufacturing in drought-prone regions of the United States.You might be right in thinking farming and chip manufacturing don’t have much to do with each other. But one thing they do have in common is that they both require enormous amounts of water.
According to scientists, agriculture alone accounts for about 70% of freshwater withdrawals in the US, and semiconductor fabrication plants use huge volumes of ultra-purified water to clean and cool silicon wafers, pulling most of it from the same municipal supplies that farms and local communities rely on.
As drought spreads across large parts of the country at the same time as chip production is ramping up as a national priority, those two demands are landing on the same water sources more and more.Apparently, it’s worst in states like Arizona, California and Texas, which are some of the driest places in the country and also where a lot of the new fabrication plants are being built. For example, building another chip factory doesn’t just use water locally – it can eat into the irrigation capacity that farmers downstream were counting on.
That kind of knock-on effect is what a team at Virginia Tech, led by associate professor Feras Batarseh, has been trying to get
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