Hurricane Helene disrupts critical chip mining operations in North Carolina

Companies mining high-purity quartz successful Spruce Pine, North Carolina, person paused operations successful the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The quartz is simply a captious constituent of the chip-making process — and it’s lone recovered successful Spruce Pine.

The 2 mining companies successful the area, Sibelco and The Quartz Corp, confirmed that flooding, powerfulness outages, and worker displacement person led them to halt their work. In a connection connected its website, Sibelco confirmed that it has “temporarily halted operations astatine the Spruce Pine facilities successful effect to these challenges” since September 26th:

The Quartz Corp besides posted a statement online saying the institution paused operations connected September 26th, and that it has “no visibility connected erstwhile they volition restart.” Last week, Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of rainfall connected Spruce Pine and caused catastrophic harm passim the upland towns of occidental North Carolina.

Spruce Pine has the lone people occurring quartz that’s axenic capable to service arsenic a crucible to melt polysilicon. The polysilicon is past utilized to make silicon wafers — the instauration of the semiconductors recovered successful phones, laptops, star panels, and more. In 2008, a Spruce Pine occurrence halted mining operations, “sending shivers” done the spot industry, according to a study from Wired.

It’s excessively aboriginal to archer what benignant of interaction the paused operations volition person connected the chip-making proviso chain, but arsenic we’ve seen successful the past, it doesn’t instrumentality overmuch to disrupt it.