A Sibelco spokesperson said: “As of September 26, we have temporarily paused operations at the Spruce Pine facility in response to these challenges.
“We are working closely with our local team to safely restart operations as soon as we can and are actively coordinating with local authorities and other partners to manage the situation. “Our top priority remains the health, safety and well-being of our employees, as well as ensuring the safety of the Spruce Pine facility.”
Quartz Corp did not respond to an immediate request for comment from WIRED.
Viral posts on social media claim that due to flooding, global semiconductor production could come to a halt. This doomsday scenario is unlikely, but experts are gravely concerned about the impact the flood could have on the tech industry and the economic ramifications of prolonged supply chain pressures caused by the site closure.
“The key will not just be the floods, no matter how bad they are,” says Chris Hackney, a human geography researcher at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom. “Damage to infrastructure (roads, transportation, power and mining equipment) will halt production for a time. “There is a possibility of landslides.”
Hackney adds that “any disruption to supply chains will have an impact on prices and production of high-end technology and electronics.”
Tom Bide, senior scientist at the British Geological Survey, believes the disaster is likely to be minimally disruptive due to storage and other contingency work.
“The impact on the tech industry will largely depend on how long it takes them to get operations back up and running,” he says. “Most manufacturers are likely to have some level of reserves, so there will be some ‘slack’ in the system. If the problems are temporary, this may not have any noticeable effect.”
Bide estimates it would take about a month for serious impacts to be felt.
Other researchers, however, warned that serious costs are likely as a result of the disaster. Penn says he “would be surprised if you didn’t feel a shudder, if not more.”
“Any knock-on impact on the global technology sector will depend on the magnitude of the damage. There is little publicly available data on HPQ reserves globally. The physical products that Spruce Pine produces don’t stop there. They are sent to other countries (often Norway) for processing and refining stages before distribution around the world.”
Penn, co-author of a forthcoming paper on Spruce Pine with independent researcher Fran Baker Kurdi, tells WIRED that the episode is likely to trigger interactive climate impacts.
“I imagine the industry would resort to using lower-purity material if there really were a growing shortage,” he says. “This is a shame, as the industrial processes required to purify silicon consume a lot of energy and are harmful to the environment. In other words, this tragic encounter with climate instability in North Carolina could have a knock-on effect that exacerbates climate instability elsewhere. “It’s a vicious circle.”
Penn also cites a series of serious chemical contamination cases that Quartz Corp has been at the center of in recent decades.
Between 1981 and 2018, he notes, Quartz Corp faced six violations cases for pollution crimes, including toxic chemical leaks. In 2018, the company filtered hundreds of gallons of hydrofluoric acid to a nearby river basin. The discharge caused fish deaths and was one of a series of water rule violations Quartz Corp has committed over the past decade, some of which have resulted in fines.
“One lesson we can learn from this is that an ‘AI’ future is not inevitable,” adds Penn. “Even if Spruce Pine persists intact, the damage done to local communities is a stark reminder of the need to make infrastructure commitments that synchronize with ecologies rather than work against them.
“I fear that investments in AI and climate instability are on a collision course. “This may be the first domino to fall.”