The inside of a facility where AI chips are made is extraordinarily sensitive. Fabrication plants are filled with equipment so exquisitely delicate that even the tiniest contaminants can result in precious chips being ruined.
As Business Insider‘s Olivia Nemec found out firsthand, the list of things she wasn’t able to wear or use ahead of taking a peek inside Intel’s chip factory in Oregon was incredibly extensive — including makeup, hairspray, bluetooth gadgets, velcro, and much more. Even deodorant was a no go, leading us to wonder about the odors at the facility after a long shift.
Demand for the chipmaker’s semiconductors has skyrocketed lately, driven by the rush to construct AI data centers, so the financial of any error can be immense. These chips are being constructed on a scale of mere atoms, while a single human hair can be a million atoms in width. Aerosolized particles can range from a few nanometers to several tens of micrometers, which could make a quick squirt of deodorant or hairspray a catastrophic event.
“I felt like a giant moving through a world built for things far smaller and more delicate than me,” Nemec wrote.
Destroying one single silicon wafer, an extremely flat slice of semiconductor material that serves as the foundation for microchips, could cost up to half a million dollars, Intel’s vice president of manufacturing development Chris Auth told Nemec.
“Each little tiny speck can cause a defect, which would destroy the chip,” Auth said while Nemec and her team were inside a gear-cleaning room. Everything, including all camera equipment, had to be sterilized with wipes.
After the cleaning room came the gowning room, where employees have to put on white overalls designed to stop any skin particles from being shed while inside the factory. Even regular paper can shed particles that could ruin a chip, Nemec noted.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, therefore, that most of the workers inside Intel’s facility are robots of various kinds, from conveyor belts to robotic arms.
Humans, on the other hand, are almost like an invasive species, with air filters lining the floors changing out all of the factory’s air in just a single minute to make sure those bags of flesh and blood don’t release too many contaminating particles.
“We live in a world that runs on chips,” Nemec concluded. “To make them, however, we have to create an entire environment designed to protect them from us.”
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