Power outages struck IBM's computer chip fabrication plant in East Fishkill, N.Y., affecting production as key products for Nvidia and Apple ramp up.
The largest U.S. blackout ever struck New York on Thursday, leaving part of six U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ottawa without power, an area where an estimated 50 million people live.
That area included Dutchess County, N.Y., home of IBM's newest chip foundry in East Fishkill. IBM officials said Friday that the plant had been shut down by the blackout, halting the production lines for about two days.
"Our main fab in Burlington [Vermont] was unaffected; there was a power blip but that wasn't an issue," IBM spokesman Bill O'Leary said. "The Fishkill area was hit in fact, as you know, and the fab was affected."
When the power went down, the heavily-automated fab shifted into maintenance mode, halting the line and slowing down the production tools so that critical components in the semiconductor lithography tools weren't affected, he said. Even establishing the amount of time the fab is expected to be down was difficult, O'Leary said, because the power outage took down the company's voice mail system.
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