Hope everyone's autumn is off to a chilly good start. This is Yifan, sending this week's #tech Asia from Silicon Valley. I just came back from a reporting trip to Indiana where I got to preview SK Hynix's first advanced chip-packaging plant in the US, which will come online in late 2028 and assemble highly sought-after high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips.

I've visited a fair amount of plants and construction sites in recent years to document America's effort to reshore manufacturing, but I was still surprised when I saw how close the SK Hynix chip plant is to the town houses and apartments right across the street. While local residents have protested and even sued the South Korean memory chip giant for putting this massive chip facility near residential areas, SK Hynix said the noise and pollution from such an advanced manufacturing site will be minimal, while the economic benefits will be huge, with 7,000 jobs created in the area. As Washington is determined to bring manufacturing, especially semiconductor production, back to America, local communities like the one in Indiana are caught in the conundrum of having more job opportunities but bearing the environmental cost of such projects.

While the energy consumption of artificial intelligence data centres and its impact on the environment have been making headlines for months, the environmental cost of manufacturing AI chips and servers is also too substantial to dismiss.