Locating Vital Research and Production Facilities in Earthquake Prone Areas Is Inappropriate

Locating vital research and production facilities in earthquake prone areas is completely inappropriate. I’ve complained consistently about having 40% of the world’s fab capacity on the island of Taiwan not just because of the political risk but also the very serious risk of earthquakes. Locating any semiconductor facilities in the ring of fire is dumb as heck.

Well I’ve complained about Taiwan, now it’s time to complain about California. There was part of a recent Toms Hardware article that stood out to me despite not being seemingly relevant to the story. Google made a quantum chip that can do some amazing maths, that’s great, but it’s where that chip was fabricated that caught my eye.

Google says it fabricated Willow at its purpose-built state-of-the-art facility in Santa Barbara. Willow features 105 qubits, which may not sound like a big deal, but the company insists that it is “focusing on quality, not just quantity — because just producing larger numbers of qubits doesn’t help if they’re not high enough quality.”

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/quantum-computing/google-claims-its-new-willow-quantum-chip-can-swiftly-solve-a-problem-that-would-take-a-standard-supercomputer-10-septillion-years

Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara California sits in the ring of fire and has multiple fault lines near it. And yet a vital research and fabrication facility is there. In fact a multitude of research and fabrication facilities are in or adjacent to Santa Barbara. All of which could easily be destroyed by an earthquake emanating from the San Andreas fault. Of course any earthquake strong enough to wipe Santa Barbara out would most likely effect the entirety of California. Say goodbye to Silicon Valley.

That means that the Googleplex is gone, Meta Platforms is gone, Nvidia, Intel, and AMD are gone. Trillions of dollars in value wiped out. The approximate market cap of California based tech firms is over $13 trillion.

Are you ready for America’s tech sector to be wiped out? Are you ready for the largest stock market crash in history? I’m not.

illustration of an earthquake

Locating these facilities in California is absolutely an unacceptable risk on the national level and should be addressed through a Federal relocation program. Keeping these companies in California just because it’s tradition and supposed network effects is NOT worth it. It is not worth the risk.

California is a tech hub when it shouldn’t be. Just like there shouldn’t be an Intel fab in Oregon. And there shouldn’t be fabs in California. It’s not just Taiwan that is foolhardy. As a nation we should be prepared for the worst, so that we can always be at our best. The location of manufacturing facilities matters. We should be taking this stuff seriously.

Just think about just the national security implications of a major earthquake in California. Let’s ignore the defense production facilities that will be hurt and just think about the fabrication and research facilities that would be damaged. There are over 600 fabrication facilities in California. 600. The disruption to the national supply chain would be so great that the economy would no longer function.

The United States would have to rely on Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Japan for a huge list of semiconductors and inputs. That is an unacceptable situation. Not only would there likely not be excess capacity available for the United States, even depending on allies for chips is a step too far when we’re talking about the sheer quantities and the diversity of chips we’d need.

And we’re completely ignoring the social consequences of a major earthquake. God only knows how horrible things would be.

Anyway the point is earthquakes happen and we need to stop pretending they don’t. There’s a huge amount of danger in locating so many tech facilities in the ring of fire. And we should start taking natural disaster management into account as a nation.