A Sibelco spokesperson said: “As of September 26, we have temporarily suspended operations at the Spruce Pine facilities in response to these challenges.
“We are working closely with our local team to safely resume operations as quickly as possible, and are actively working with local authorities and other partners to manage the situation. Our top priority remains the health, safety and well-being of our employees, and 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 global semiconductor production may be halted due to flooding. This doomsday scenario is unlikely, but experts are seriously concerned about the impact the flooding could have on the technology industry and the economic consequences of prolonged supply chain pressures caused by the plant closure.
“The key issue will not be the floods themselves, no matter how bad they are,” says Chris Hackney, a human geography researcher at the University of Newcastle in the UK. “Damage to infrastructure – roads, transport, energy and mining equipment – will halt production for some time. There is a risk of landslides.”
Hackney adds that “any disruption to supply chains will impact prices and production of high-end electronics and technology.”
Tom Bide, a senior scientist at the British Geological Survey, believes the disaster could prove minimally disruptive due to stockpiling and other emergency work.
“The impact on the technology industry will depend largely on how long it takes for it to resume operations,” he says. “It’s likely that most manufacturers will have some level of inventory, so there will be some slack in the system.” If problems are transient, they may not have a noticeable effect.”
Bide estimates it will take about a month before any grave effects are felt.
Other researchers, however, warned that there would likely be significant costs as a result of the disaster. Penn says he “would be surprised if there wasn’t a noticeable flinch, if not more.”
“Any significant impact on the global technology sector will depend on the scale of the damage. There is little publicly available data on HPQ reserves worldwide. The physical products produced by Spruce Pine do not remain there. They are shipped to other countries – often to Norway – for processing and refining before distribution around the world.
Penn, who co-authored a soon-to-be-published paper on Spruce Pine with independent researcher Fran Baker Kurdi, tells WIRED that the episode is likely to trigger climate reciprocal impacts.
“I imagine the industry would turn to using lower purity materials if there were indeed increasing shortages,” he says. “This is a great pity because the industrial processes required to purify silicon are energy-intensive and harmful to the environment. In other words, this tragic encounter with climate instability in North Carolina could have a domino effect that exacerbates climate instability elsewhere. It’s a vicious circle.”
Penn also cites a number of serious chemical pollution cases that have brought Quartz Corp into the spotlight in recent decades.
It notes that between 1981 and 2018, Quartz Corp experienced six breaches matters for pollution-related crimes, including leaks of toxic chemicals. In 2018, the company leaked hundreds of gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a nearby river basin. The discharge resulted in fish deaths and was one of a string of water violations made by Quartz Corp over the past decade, some of which resulted in financial penalties.
“One of the lessons to be learned from this is that the future of artificial intelligence is not inevitable,” Penn adds. “Even if the spruce pine remains intact, the damage to local communities is a stark reminder of the need to make infrastructure commitments that are compatible with ecology, not against it.
“I fear that AI investment and climate instability are on a collision course. This could be the first domino to fall.”