The Great American Microchip Mobilization

It took astir 2 years of readying to get here. This is 1 of astir 2 twelve “superloads”—pieces of road cargo that measurement much than 120,000 pounds—that volition beryllium lumbering crossed Ohio for Intel. Today’s load, fig 13, is 280 feet long, 23 feet tall, and 20 feet wide. The gargantuan apparatus, weighing astir 1 million pounds, is called, precise anticlimactically, a acold box. It was made by a European company, shipped to New Orleans, brought by barge up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and offloaded astatine a rudimentary -purpose-built larboard adjacent here—and present it needs to get transported overland to the tract that Intel hopes volition 1 time go the largest root of AI chips successful the world.

To bash that, it turns retired you request 7 days, a clump of trucks, a batch of permits, each these dudes—from cablegram companies, powerfulness companies, hauling companies—plus a fistful of section cops and road patrol officers. All on the route, you request to physically determination powerfulness lines and postulation lights conscionable truthful the load tin marque it through. And due to the fact that it’s truthful disruptive to the radical who unrecorded on the route, the biggest superloads request to beryllium delivered earlier the schoolhouse twelvemonth starts.

A acold box, by the way, is portion of thing called an aerial separation unit. To marque microchips, your mill level needs to beryllium a cleanroom, due to the fact that adjacent a microscopic speck of particulate tin wreck a silicon wafer. So you request to abstracted aerial into its constituent gases and usage the nitrogen to region immoderate different gases, moisture, and particles from each supplies and tools. (Other aerial components are besides utilized successful the manufacturing process.) Eventually, 4 of these acold boxes volition beryllium stood up vertically, similar skyscrapers, astatine Intel’s new, 1,000-acre site.

Along the route, the superloads person a following. People ticker for updates from the Ohio Department of Transportation connected Facebook. In the comments, galore are supportive—one pistillate offers the unit blackberry cobbler—some are huffy astir getting stuck successful traffic, immoderate are psyched astir the logistics of moving thing truthful large. Some privation to ticker it each spell by.

Emily Stone brought her campy chair. Her friends telephone her the Load Chaser. This is her 2nd superload. “Small municipality America—this worldly doesn’t happen,” she says. She was calved here, grew up here, loves it here. Back successful the time Portsmouth had footwear factories, a alloy mill, a brickyard. A large works adjacent utilized to enrich uranium for atomic weapons—back erstwhile that was the exertion that superpowers competed over. Stone’s dada worked determination for 35 years. He died of leukemia aft the works stopped enriching uranium successful 2001. A mediate schoolhouse adjacent aboriginal closed aft investigating affirmative for radioactive material. Stone has been protesting the works operator’s refusal to instrumentality nationalist responsibility.