Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? (2024)

construction-physics.com

81 pointscolinprince29 comments

This topic has come up several times on HN [1][2] and no, the industry does not because there are other source, although more expensive. Other customers had to switch to Russian/Chinese sources due to the disruption but HPQ customers did not.

I figured at the time that other vendors would have a chance to take some HPQ market share but when Spruce Pine went down, Quartz Corp just shifted their refining operations to another plant in Drag, Norway and used existing feedstock and reserves to maintain supply to their customers. Sibelco restarted operations within a few weeks [3].

It was all a non-event in the semiconductor industry, especially compared to real disruptions like the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that took out a fifth of 300mm wafer supply leading some fabs to shut down entire product lines.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701862

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818248

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/11/24267697/north-carolina-...

Hunterbrook did a great piece about this after Hurricane Helene last year.

https://hntrbrk.com/essential-node-in-global-semiconductor-s...

Spruce Pine quartz that doesn’t quite make the purity cut gets used for sandtraps in high-end golf courses.

It’s interesting that the North Carolina quartz deposits are mined by two foreign interests. That despite the size of the US there was no company that could do it as economically as the Belgians and Norwegians. Presumably due to lack of expertise?

Belgium and Norway are firmly in the US' orbit. They're not going anywhere.

... assuming the Trump administration doesn't fuck things up even more than it already did. Europe is fast divesting from the US.

> Presumably due to lack of expertise

Nope. The American entities used to be independent companies but faced financial troubles when the mining industry died in the US during the 2010s due to a mix of a commodity glut, lack of state support, and competitors like Norway and China infusing state originated capital into their players

So Norway had a longer view on the commodities market? Or wanted to prop up its own industry?

Historically it's been the latter as a stabilization fund [0], but is increasingly moving to the former because due to political pressures Norway has had to push for ESG, which has begun to degrade some of the political power a fund like the GPFG has, because China, India, the UAE, KSA, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian and EMEA countries are spinning up SWFs and SDFs that do not really care about ethical concerns.

It's not like 20 or 30 years ago when the only pension funds with massive amounts of dry powder were the Ontario Teachers Fund, CalPERs, or the GPFG.

There are alternative capital markets now because it has become easier to raise capital outside the West. For example, look at the IPO boom happening in India todau - a number of Silicon Valley startups that would have listed on the NYSE decided to list on the NSE instead because it's easier for a company with $50-100M in revenue to IPO in India versus the US today, which is what Freshworks trailblazed in 2021. The same thing happened in China and HK in the 2010s, which helped build the domestic capital market needed to trickle down into VC funding that helped spawn companies like DeepSeek and Biren.

In Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the gold standard for SWFs and SDFs is Temasek in Singapore and what became the Master Trust in Japan - they are entirely focused on developing new industries by coordinating state capital and SoEs with private sector capital, and are driven by the primary goal of developing industry - not moral or ethical considerations. National security and sovereignity is the overarching goal.

Western funds have become heavily politicized due to the rise of activist investors along with the fact that the majority of capital at this point is a mix of private sector capital and very large (think billions of dollars of AUM) family offices where a heir or group of heirs wants to leverage their fortune for their pet project (eg. Actual Communism and extreme far left politics like Fergie Chambers [yes I recognize the irony] or extreme far right politics like Timothy Mellon)

[0] - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/sovereignwealth/files/...

This is similar to the "rare earths" myths floating around. Its a prepper story for sure.

"Rare Earths" are literally everywhere but require large open mines which are not environmentally acceptable and cost effective in the US (depending). The existing mines are still here but shut down decades ago.

Ask Apple how it feels about paying a pretty big chunk of money to reopen one. That guys mine was worth more closed than open.

Like so many things we sent that task to China a long time ago.

AFAIK the mine is less of a problem than the refinery and its waste.

> "Rare Earths" are literally everywhere but require large open mines which are not environmentally acceptable and cost effective in the US (depending). The existing mines are still here but shut down decades ago.

The problem is, "cost effective" has different meanings depending on if one includes externalities such as geopolitical risks into the cost.

Not all rare earths are equally distributed. Lithium sure, but not a number of other REEs like Neodymium, Dysprosium, Molybdenum, and others are only found in unequally distributed concentrated deposits.

You might consider looking up what a “rare earth” is. Your list is rather confused.

Fair enough.

Neodymium and Dysprosium are REEs.

Molybdenum is not but it is a critical element that is also commonly brought up in the same conversations as REEs.

I think recentering the convo to "critical minerals" would solve the issue.

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