Spruce Pine Powers the World's Electronics

We have already identified some key resources involved in AI development that could be restricted. The economic bottlenecks are mainly around high energy requirements and chip manufacturing.

Energy is probably too connected to the rest of the economy to be a good regulatory lever, but the U.S. power grid can't currently handle the scale of the data centers the AI labs want for model training. That might buy us a little time. Big tech is already talking about buying small modular nuclear reactors to power the next generation of data centers. Those probably won't be ready until the early 2030s. Unfortunately, that also creates pressures to move training to China or the Middle East where energy is cheaper, but where governments are less concerned about human rights.

A recent hurricane flooding high-purity quartz mines made headlines because chip producers require it for the crucibles used in making silicon wafers. Lower purity means accidental doping of the silicon crystal, which means lower chip yields per wafer, at best. Those mines aren't the only source, but they seem to be the best one. There might also be ways to utilize lower-purity materials, but that might take time to develop and would require a lot more energy, which is already a bottleneck.

The very cutting-edge chips required for AI training runs require some delicate and expensive extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to manufacture. They literally have to plasmify tin droplets with a pulsed laser to reach those frequencies. ASML Holdings is currently the only company that sells these systems, and machines that advanced have their own supply chains. They have very few customers, and (last I checked) only TSMC was really using them successfully at scale. There are a lot of potential policy levers in this space, at least for now. LessWrong (...)

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High-quality quartz is the cornerstone of the semiconductors operating nearly every tech gadget worldwide. Cellphones, solar panels and artificial intelligence all rely on this resource.

However, such pure quartz is rare—it can only be found at a handful of places on Earth. And a North Carolina town home to the world’s biggest deposit of the mineral was just hit by Hurricane Helene.

Sitting an hour northeast of Asheville, the small town of Spruce Pine, also known as Mineral City, is home to about 2,000 people. It also contains a crucial supply of the natural high-purity quartz required for the computers and devices that run our modern world.

When Hurricane Helene struck, Spruce Pine was doused in more than two feet of rain, flooding its downtown, knocking out power and forcing businesses to shutter. The quartz mines in Spruce Pine, owned by Belgian mining company Sibelco and the local Quartz Corp, supply 80 to 90 percent of all high-quality quartz in the world, per CNN’s Clare Duffy and Dianne Gallagher. But the two companies closed down operations a day before the storm crossed the region, with no word on when work would resume.

“I don’t think the nation really realizes how this little, small town is so critical,” Michael Vance, a local real estate developer who has been informally coordinating some relief efforts after the storm, tells the Washington Post’s Eva Dou. ~ Smithsonian

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Ultra-high-purity quartz is an essential component to semiconductor chips, and the only places in the world that can meet this need are two mines in a small North Carolina town. The mines' owner, Sibelco, is investing $700 million to expand capacity, but is that enough to keep up with AI-fueled chip demand?

Spruce Pine is a small town about two hours drive northwest of Charlotte, NC. You can get to the general area via a number of ways, depending on your point of origin, but for the last stretch of the trip, you need to travel down Fish Hatchery Rd. It's a two-lane rural highway, as depicted in Google Maps, set amid a pleasant scenic backdrop.

It's on this road that the modern economy rests, according to Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick, who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. That's because the road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

This is not the first time these mines – owned by Sibelco, which mines, processes, and sells specialty industrial minerals – have been highlighted as integral not only to the global semiconductor industry but also to the solar photovoltaic markets.

It is an alarming prospect to contemplate, and it is fair to wonder whether Mollick is indulging in a bit of hyperbole. But there is no denying the fact that digital devices around the world contain a small piece of Spruce Pine's unique ultra-high-purity quartz. "It does boggle the mind a bit to consider that inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you'll find quartz from Spruce Pine," Rolf Pippert, mine manager at Quartz Corp, a leading supplier of high-quality quartz, tells the BBC.~ TechSpot

by LessWrong, Smithsonian, TechSpot |  Read more: here, here and here.

Image: uncredited via

[ed. So of course, guess what: Trump calls for an end to the Chips Act, redirecting funds to national debt (TechSpot). And, for once, Republicans finally find a backbone and say NO.]