The Great American Microchip Mobilization

It took nearly two years of planning to get here. This is one of about two dozen “superloads”—pieces of highway cargo that weigh more than 120,000 pounds—that will be lumbering across Ohio for Intel. Today’s load, number 13, is 280 feet long, 23 feet tall, and 20 feet wide. The gargantuan apparatus, weighing nearly 1 million pounds, is called, very anticlimactically, a cold box. It was made by a European company, shipped to New Orleans, brought by barge up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and offloaded at a rudimentary -purpose-built port near here—and now it needs to get transported overland to the site that Intel hopes will one day become the largest source of AI chips in the world.

To do that, it turns out you need seven days, a bunch of trucks, a lot of permits, all these dudes—from cable companies, power companies, hauling companies—plus a handful of local cops and highway patrol officers. All along the route, you need to physically move power lines and traffic lights just so the load can make it through. And because it’s so disruptive to the people who live along the route, the biggest superloads need to be delivered before the school year starts.

A cold box, by the way, is part of something called an air separation unit. To make microchips, your factory floor needs to be a cleanroom, because even a microscopic speck of dust can wreck a silicon wafer. So you need to separate air into its component gases and use the nitrogen to remove any other gases, moisture, and particles from all supplies and tools. (Other air components are also used in the manufacturing process.) Eventually, four of these cold boxes will be stood up vertically, like skyscrapers, at Intel’s new, 1,000-acre site.

Along the route, the superloads have a following. People watch for updates from the Ohio Department of Transportation on Facebook. In the comments, many are supportive—one woman offers the crew blackberry cobbler—some are mad about getting stuck in traffic, some are psyched about the logistics of moving something so large. Some want to watch it all go by.

Emily Stone brought her camp chair. Her friends call her the Load Chaser. This is her second superload. “Small town America—this stuff doesn’t happen,” she says. She was born here, grew up here, loves it here. Back in the day Portsmouth had shoe factories, a steel mill, a brickyard. A big plant nearby used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons—back when that was the technology that superpowers competed over. Stone’s dad worked there for 35 years. He died of leukemia after the plant stopped enriching uranium in 2001. A middle school nearby later closed after testing positive for radioactive material. Stone has been protesting the plant operator’s refusal to take public responsibility.