Will semiconductor production be derailed by Hurricane Helene?

The deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland since Hurricane Katrina has also drawn attention for its potential disruptions to the tech industry. Destruction from Hurricane Helene is threatening one of the industry’s major supply chains – a North Carolina mining town that supplies high-purity quartz crucial for manufacturing the chips found in smartphones and data centres worldwide.

The mining town of Spruce Pine is among the many US communities impacted by Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people in multiple states, displaced thousands and left more than a million homes and businesses without power. The storm pushed 900 kilometres inland from the Florida coast and inflicted deadly floods across a wide region, even reaching deep within the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where the Spruce Pine quartz mines are located.

Here is what you need to know about how Helene’s ripple effects could impact the tech industry.

Why is high-purity quartz so important?

High-purity quartz is used to make fused-quartz crucibles, cylindrical containers that are key to the chip-manufacturing process because they can endure the high temperatures required to melt silicon. The melting-point temperature for semiconductor-grade polysilicon is around 1425°C (2597°F), and quartz crucibles can typically withstand temperatures of up to 1650°C (3000°F), according to the website for The Quartz Corp.

In the chip manufacturing process, the fused-quartz crucibles are filled with molten silicon. A silicon seed crystal is dipped into the melted silicon within the spinning crucible so that it can grow into a significantly larger silicon ingot before being gradually drawn out. A fully grown ingot can weigh over 500 kilograms.

Those silicon ingots are then cut into silicon wafers, which in turn can be imprinted with the transistor patterns that form the foundation of modern computer chips, according to Vince Beiser’s 2018 book The World in a Grain.

Where does high-purity quartz come from?

The natural deposits of quartz found in Spruce Pine originated when North America and Africa collided to form the supercontinent Pangaea about 300 million years ago. That process created the Appalachian mountains and also forced part of Earth’s oceanic crust to sink beneath North America, where the intense heat and pressure near the planet’s mantle melted ocean sediment and rock.

The resulting lava slowly cooled over time to form pegmatite rock deposits containing large mineral crystals – including high-purity quartz. These pegmatite formations eventually became more accessible near the surface because of more geological upheaval and weathering, as described in Beiser’s book.

How did Hurricane Helene impact quartz mining operations?

The Spruce Pine mining district currently has quartz mining and refining operations owned by Belgium-based Sibelco and Norway-based The Quartz Corp. Both companies shut down operations on 26 September and have not yet said when they might restart.

The companies say they have confirmed the safety of their employees and contractors in the area – and they described relatively minimal direct damage to their facilities.

“The initial assessment indicates that our operating facilities in the Spruce Pine region have only sustained minor damage,” said Sibelco in a 3 October statement. “Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup and repair activities to restart operations as soon as we can.”

“We have been able to conduct the first visual inspections of our plants and it would appear that damage is mostly concentrated around ancillary units,” said The Quartz Corp in a statement on 2 October. But the company also cautioned that resumption of mining operations “will also depend on the rebuilding of local infrastructure” – many of the roads in the area were closed and damaged in the immediate wake of the storm.

Similarly, Sibelco referenced power outages from the storm as one challenge. “Restoring power remains crucial to resuming our operations,” said the company in its statement. “The repair of power lines leading to our plants has progressed significantly.”

The Quartz Corp also described having stockpiles of quartz in Norway that could be used in ongoing purification processing operations, along with additional “safety stocks of finished products” that could avoid any critical shortages for customers – including semiconductor manufacturers – in the short or medium term.

Will Helene disrupt the supply of semiconductors?

Major semiconductor manufacturers have said that they currently do not expect disruptions to their operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

TSMC, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s leading chip maker, described having “diverse global suppliers” to draw upon. “Through an effective risk management system and close partnerships with suppliers, we currently do not anticipate any significant impact on the company’s operations,” says a TSMC spokesperson. “We will keep monitoring the situation closely.”

Samsung Electronics, which ranks as the second largest chip maker and is headquartered in South Korea, told New Scientist that the company’s operations were not affected.

GlobalFoundries, the largest semiconductor manufacturer based in the US, described itself as having the “flexibility to leverage alternative sources for key supplies” with chip-making facilities on three continents. “We are in contact with our global suppliers and do not expect any disruption to our supply of quartz due to Hurricane Helene,” says a GlobalFoundries spokesperson.

Companies that produce raw silicon wafers currently have wafer stockpiles sufficient to last anywhere from three to eight months, said Dylan Patel at SemiAnalysis, an independent research firm, in a social media post.

Are there alternative sources of quartz for the global semiconductor industry?

Spruce Pine “has a near unique combination of purity, availability and price,” wrote Ed Conway, a journalist at Sky News and author of Material World, in a Substack post. But he also pointed to other high-purity quartz mines in China, Russia and Brazil.

Natural high-purity quartz deposits are “scarce”, but companies can use purification methods if needed or even synthetically produce pure quartz, said Patel. He also pointed to the company Ferroglobe, which acquired a high-purity quartz mine in South Carolina in October 2023. A company press release projected that mining operations could begin in the second half of 2024.