Millions of people across the US South have gone without power or have been forced to evacuate following days of extreme downpours brought on by Hurricane Helene. North Carolina has borne the brunt of the devastation, with the state accounting for a third of all recorded fatalities to date. And as relief operations get underway, the eyes of the world are on a small town of about 2,000 in the western part of the state.
Spruce Pine sits about an hour northeast of Asheville, Mitchell County, and is home to the world’s biggest known source of ultra-pure quartz—often referred to as “high-purity quartz,” or HPQ. This material is used for manufacturing crucibles, on which global semiconductor production relies, as well as to make components within semiconductors themselves.
Semiconductors are the fundamental building blocks of modern IT. Transistors, a type of semiconductor device, are the small electronic switches that perform computation functions in every tech gadget from smartphones to electric scooters, data centers, and military aircraft. They make possible the processors that power most of the world’s smart gadgets.
HPQ is the raw material for the high-grade quartz products and high-end products that sit at the heart of these devices. Its chemical and physical properties—including high temperature and corrosion resistance, low thermal expansion, high insulation, and light transmission—mean it can be used in optical communication and electronic light sources technology. HPQ drives a $500 billion microchip industry that is core to the $3 trillion global tech sector.
Spruce Pine supplies around 70 percent of the naturally occurring HPQ that is needed for computing devices and products. The site’s market position and significance were underlined in 2019 when a manager for Quartz Corp, one of the two main mining companies that works the deposit, told the BBC: “Inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you’ll find quartz from Spruce Pine.”
Quartz is the second-most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust, but while it can be found across the world, quartz reserve properties—including a deposit’s size and type—vary by region. It is rare to find economically viable deposits of HPQ—aside from Spruce Pine, the largest are found in India and Brazil.
Another silicon material, so-called “silicon metal”—a lower-grade and more easily accessible material that is largely sourced in China—is also listed as a critical raw material for the silicon industry by the European Commission, the UK, India, and South Korea. But it is unclear what percentage of it is refined for use in computing. “HPQ from Spruce Pine is, in a way, more critical and valuable because of its purity,” says Jonnie Penn, an associate professor of AI ethics and society at the University of Cambridge.
“Its unique purity emerges out of processes that unfold over geological rather than human timescales,” Penn says. “This purity requirement matters most for advanced computing systems in areas like the military, healthcare, and quantum computing.”
The two main companies at the Spruce Pine pegmatite complex—roughly 40 km long by 16 km wide, according to a 1962 survey—are Quartz Corp and Unimim, a subsidiary of the global industrial minerals company SCR-Sibelco, based in Belgium.
A spokesperson for Sibelco said: “As of September 26th, we have temporarily halted operations at the Spruce Pine facilities in response to these challenges.
“We are working closely with our local team to safely restart operations as soon as we can and are actively coordinating with local authorities and other partners to manage the situation. Our top priority remains the health, safety, and wellbeing of our employees, as well as ensuring the security of the Spruce Pine facility.”
Quartz Corp did not reply to an immediate request for comment from WIRED.
Viral social media posts have claimed that due to the flooding, global production of semiconductors could halt. This doomsday scenario is unlikely, but experts are gravely concerned about the impact the flooding could have on the tech industry and the economic ramifications of prolonged supply chain pressures caused by the shutdown of the site.
“The key thing will not be just the floods, as bad as they are,” says Chris Hackney, a researcher in human geography at Newcastle University in the UK. “The damage to infrastructure—roads, transport, power, and mining equipment—will stop production for a while. There’s potential for landslides.”
Hackney adds that “any disruption to supply chains will have an impact on prices and production of high-ended electronics and tech.”
Tom Bide, a senior scientist at the British Geological Survey, believes it’s possible the disaster will prove minimally disruptive due to stockpiling and other kinds of contingency work.
“The impact on the tech industry will very much depend on how long it takes them to get operations running again,” he says. “It is likely most manufacturers have some level of stockpiles so there will be some ‘slack’ in the system. If the issues are temporary this may have no discernible effect.”
Bide estimates it would take around a month for any serious impacts to be felt.
Other researchers, however, warned that serious costs are likely to be incurred as a result of the disaster. Penn says he “would be surprised if there were not a flinch felt, if not more.”
“Any rippling impact on the global tech sector will depend on the scale of the damage. There is little publicly available data on HPQ reserves globally. The physical products that Spruce Pine produces do not remain there. They are shipped to other countries—often Norway—for the processing and refining stages before distribution around the world.”
Penn, who has coauthored a forthcoming paper on Spruce Pine alongside independent researcher Fran Baker Kurdi, tells WIRED that the episode is likely to trigger interacting climate impacts.
“I’d imagine that industry would turn to the use of lower purity material if indeed there is a rippling shortage,” he says. “This is a shame as the industrial processes required to purify silicon are energy intensive and ecologically damaging. In other words, this tragic encounter with climate instability in North Carolina could have a knock-on effect that exacerbates climate instability elsewhere. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Penn also cites a number of serious chemical pollution cases that Quartz Corp has been at the center of in recent decades.
Between 1981 and 2018, he notes, Quartz Corp faced six violation cases for contamination offenses, including toxic chemical leakages. In 2018, the company leaked hundreds of gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a nearby river basin. The discharge caused a fish kill and was one of a number of water rules violations Quartz Corp has committed over the last decade, some of which have resulted in fines.
“One lesson to take from this is that an ‘AI’ future is not inevitable,” Penn adds. “Even if Spruce Pine persists intact, the damage done to local communities is a stark reminder of the need to make infrastructural commitments that sync with ecologies rather than working against them.
“I fear that AI investments and climate instability are on a collision course. This may be the first domino to fall.”
Source : Wired
