This July, our students, faculty and researchers had the opportunity to tour Broadcom’s semiconductor manufacturing campus here in Fort Collins. Broadcom has deep roots in the city, tracing back to Hewlett-Packard’s original decision to land in Fort Collins in 1978. Today, Broadcom is one of the region’s largest tech employers, and it recently announced a $1.5 billion manufacturing agreement with Apple.

This visit wasn’t so much about the chips themselves, but more about everything it takes to keep the rooms where those chips are made stable enough to work in the first place – the mechanical systems behind it all. What struck us most was the sheer scale and size of the infrastructure and mechanical systems dedicated to these efforts. Seeing this up-close was a reminder why facilities like this are treated more like small power utilities than typical commercial buildings. It was also interesting to hear how much of the site’s recent work has focused on efficiency, cutting emissions significantly since 2015, largely by captured emissions generated during the manufacturing itself. For a facility this energy-intensive, improvements like this take a long list of changes that include both mechanical and electrical systems.

It was genuinely an eye-opening visit, and a reminder for those that spent our time thinking about energy systems, that it isn’t just about generation and grids, but also what happens on the demand side. Seeing it firsthand, at a scale like Broadcom’s Fort Collins campus, gave us a much better appreciation for the invisible infrastructure that makes modern chipmaking possible.

Huge thanks to the Broadcom team for hosting us and walking us through it all.