Hurricane Helene barreled through a crucial chip mining area in North Carolina
Flooding in Boone, North Carolina, about an hour northeast of Spruce Pine. | Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
Hurricane Helene brought historic rainfall and flooding to western North Carolina last week, leaving dozens dead and catastrophic damage stretching across the state’s mountain towns. The devastation also reached the small town of Spruce Pine, which is home to the purest quartz on Earth.
Spruce Pine’s high-quality quartz is an essential ingredient in the chipmaking process, as it’s the only naturally occurring source of the ultrapure mineral. The quartz mined from this area is used as a crucible to melt polysilicon, which is then used to produce silicon wafers — the base of a semiconductor.
Even though it’s possible to produce pure silicon from the quartz found in abundance elsewhere in the world, it takes a considerable amount of time...