Storm Threatens Crucial Chip-Grade Quartz
Key Points
- Hurricane Helen’s damage to Spruce Pine, North Carolina, threatens the world’s only source of ultra‑pure quartz sand needed for the SHI process that converts silica into the crystalline silicon used in chips.
- The chip‑making supply chain relies on exceptionally pure silicon—about 11 nines purity, meaning only one atom out of billions can be impure—making the material one of the purest humanity has produced.
- While China supplies poly‑silica (high‑purity but disordered silica) for many semiconductor steps, it cannot replace the ordered quartz from Spruce Pine required for the final crystalline silicon wafers.
- The rarity of suitable quartz sand and the extreme purity requirements mean that any disruption, such as flooding from the hurricane, can have outsized impacts on global semiconductor production.
- Understanding this fragile supply chain highlights why a seemingly ordinary natural resource like sand is actually a critical and vulnerable component of modern technology.
Full Transcript
# Storm Threatens Crucial Chip-Grade Quartz **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0_0HczCN_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0_0HczCN_g) **Duration:** 00:11:05 ## Summary - Hurricane Helen’s damage to Spruce Pine, North Carolina, threatens the world’s only source of ultra‑pure quartz sand needed for the SHI process that converts silica into the crystalline silicon used in chips. - The chip‑making supply chain relies on exceptionally pure silicon—about 11 nines purity, meaning only one atom out of billions can be impure—making the material one of the purest humanity has produced. - While China supplies poly‑silica (high‑purity but disordered silica) for many semiconductor steps, it cannot replace the ordered quartz from Spruce Pine required for the final crystalline silicon wafers. - The rarity of suitable quartz sand and the extreme purity requirements mean that any disruption, such as flooding from the hurricane, can have outsized impacts on global semiconductor production. - Understanding this fragile supply chain highlights why a seemingly ordinary natural resource like sand is actually a critical and vulnerable component of modern technology. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0_0HczCN_g&t=0s) **Hurricane Impacts Critical Silicon Sand** - The speaker explains how Hurricane Helen threatens Spruce Pine—the world’s only source of ultra‑pure quartz sand needed for the ultra‑high‑purity silicon that underpins modern semiconductor chips. ## Full Transcript
so hurricane Helen has devastated North
Carolina parts of Georgia and has made
landfall in Florida why is that on a
tech Focus Channel well one you should
care as a human and two it's going to
affect the Tech Supply Chain Spruce Pine
is the only place in the world where
there is scaled pure quality quartz sand
that is usable for what is known as the
schi process which is what we use to
make special crystals that you can turn
into Wafers that you can turn into chips
now if that all sounds like a lot and
you're like oh gosh there's sand
everywhere why on Earth is this hard I'm
going to explain that we are going to go
on a little tour through the entire chip
making process and at the end of it
you're going to understand better why
it's so amazing that we have chips at
all all right so first off you think to
yourself what is a chip made of it's
made of silicon silicon is everywhere
because sand is everywhere it can't be
that hard pick up some sand and make a
chip that's not how it works I want you
to start by understanding the Purity
grade that's required to make the chips
that are running your computer we are
now at a point where we expect 11 nines
of Purity so to give you a sense of what
that is that is roughly one atom being
incorrect In billions and billions of
atoms 10 billion atoms or
more that's how pure that silicon has to
be it's one of the purest substances
we've ever made as a species how do you
get that you don't get that by like
picking the sand up and like walking
into a mill with it and no it doesn't
work that way I'm going to walk you
through it you're going to be amazed we
ever get chips at all so first off you
have to have good quality silica
deposits China has some China makes it
you think to yourself okay that's it so
it comes from China like everything else
it does not there's other crucial
components without which you could not
make chips that do not come from China
so China makes the silica China turns
the silica into what's called poly
silica poly silica is very very pure
silica but it's not crystalline
structured silica so there's a
difference electrically between silica
that is all jumbled at the chemical
level and silica that is orderly as you
would imagine if you're building
circuits you want orderly
silica but it doesn't just magically
appear that way so this poly silica is
already at 8 n of purity it's extremely
pure and it's still disordered so it's
not good enough for chips yet but it's
good enough for a lot of other things so
China makes that that's just one input
Spruce Pine North Carolina which is
currently underwater makes another
crucial ingredient it's also sand but
it's for quartz and the quartz
matters because you need High Purity
quartz for What's called the shoski
process and I did work on pronouncing
that so I hope I got it right uh the Shi
process is a special process that we've
invented to take very pure poly silica
which is 89 Purity and turn it into
polycrystalline silica which is actually
an ordered chemical structure that's
suitable for wafers and Wafers are what
we use to make the chips and so poly
crystalline silica actually
grows like a crystal they stick a seed
Crystal about the size of a pencil Into
The Crucible which is made of the quartz
from Spruce Pine and they actually
rotate it the opposite direction that
The Crucible is rotating and it sort of
draws out a crystalline structured
extremely pure silicon Ingot and the
reason why these sort of have to be the
same material because you're like sand
and sand is because if you don't have
very very pure uh
Crucible around the silica you are going
to get impurities from The Crucible into
the silica now for like almost every
application no one cares if a few atoms
get in but if you are making chips that
are down almost to the atomic level
already you do care about the impurities
of one or two atoms and so you have to
have extremely pure crucibles and that's
why Spruce Pine North Carolina matters
and that's why I personally am somewhat
concerned that it is underwater the
human cost is absolutely awful I have
friends I have family in in
Appalachia no one expected this right no
one expected a hurricane to make
landfall in Florida and then dump like
the worst rain that Western North
Carolina has ever
seen like hundreds of miles Inland it
anyway I will say I looked at the
Weather Service forecast they saw this
about 30 hours out but that was that was
about as good as they could do
we're going to move back to the Silicon
supply
chain so now you have polycrystalline
silica you've made it with your special
process the shulski process use that to
impress your friends who do you send it
to well you send it to
tsmc tsmc is a company in Taiwan that
makes Cutting Edge chips almost all of
The Cutting Edge 5 nanometer and 3
nanometer chips come from there and by
the way if you're like oh wow it's
actually three nanometers well
it's more of a marketing term than
anything it's basically the most
advanced two generations of Chip design
because there's not individual features
on the chip necessarily that are exactly
that dimension of five or 3 nanometers
it's just used by people who want to
talk about what generation were
on and so in this case tsmc makes those
Advanced chips they make the advanced
chips for gpus that are used to power
inference for large language models
among other things so you think to your
yourself okay they they get the they
have these these ingots and then they
can sort of work with them no that it's
the ingots are cut with diamond saws and
Polished and then they have to have a
special coating put on that enables them
to be etched because they're etched with
light to make the circuits and you might
think oh so tsmc has the light machine
well they do but they don't make the
light machine a Dutch company named asml
makes the light machine they are the
only ones as far as I can tell that make
the light Ma Mach that do Advanced ship
production there's a lot of they are the
only ones in this story and I think part
of that is because it is one very very
difficult to do this it is a
state-of-the-art it is a craft it is not
something you can pick up a textbook and
know how to do materials is really
difficult to work with like materials
are not software materials take
experience there uh is this is like a
very slight aside but there's actually
someone in um Germany who is renowned
for having fingers so sensitive that he
can out uh sense the scientific
instruments that are used to determine
smoothness and so he has like a
particular job at an industrial
application where he's like basically
like sensing smoothness with his
fingertips and I think of that because
craft is something that still relies on
human expertise and that is part of why
these bottlenecks exist in supply chain
Spruce Pine knows how to take a deposit
that they are sitting on and turn it
into high quality quartz that's a
bottleneck we are currently seeing that
right now tsmc knows how to produce
chips not design them produce them they
are a bottleneck asml knows how to make
photo lithography machines that tsmc can
use to etch those chips they are a
bottleneck because of the craft because
it's really difficult to know how to
make these
things okay moving on now we have the
chips where did you get the design well
the design comes from the companies you
know and love so Nvidia is the one that
sends the design to T TMC for new
gpus and then tsmc makes them so Nvidia
for example launched the Blackwell
architecture which it appears uses the 3
nanometer uh level of Chip
fabrication although that's a little bit
obscure right now uh but I think we
think it's 3
nanometer and is called the b00 it's
going to be used in the next generation
of inference for LLS
s and they're trying to make them buy
basically as many as people can buy
there was a there was news that broke of
a dinner that uh Elon Musk and Larry
Ellison of Oracle had at noou with
Jensen hang the CEO of Nvidia where they
basically sat down at this fancy dinner
at noou and begged him for computer
chips and that's really the level that
we're at billionaires begging each other
for chips uh and Jensen has the chips he
has the gpus necessary for llms and
everyone wants them then you wonder how
do they get to us well as an example
Oracle is going to be buying piles of
these ships because they are building a
billion data center hundred billion
dollar Data Center and that is going to
be powered by three nuclear reactors
it's going to be like sucking a gig
gigawatt of power we're getting to a
world of like much much bigger data
centers because llms are requiring them
and that means more chips and that means
more tsmc and more tsmc means more
demand for the materials that make these
chips and so this entire conversation is
about understanding that our world
effectively depends on very specific
expertise located in a few companies
distributed around the world in North
Carolina in Amsterdam or well in the
Netherlands in
Taiwan and the people who are smart
enough to design the chips themselves
which who are located often in the us uh
and who like actually architect the
chips Korea also does good chip
architecture
so the reason I call this out is because
right now with the Spruce Pine situation
we are seeing the
consequences of the tip of the spear
innovation in the fragility of our
supply chains if you want to get to a
point where you're at 3 nanometers if
you want to get to a point where you're
that
advanced you're going to be fra
there's only a few companies that know
how to do it and that's one of the
things we're all sort of living with
today we will see when Spruce Pine comes
back online I am hoping that the town of
Spruce Pine comes back online and the
people who are there the hospital that's
there comes back online first because
that's more important um but in the
meantime if you can find folks to donate
to if you can find folks to
support people in Western North Carolina
need your support and help um and if
this story helps you to recognize like
how we're all interconnected that's
great because it's true all right cheers