Another place where the global economy could have a single point of failure: Spruce Pine, North Carolina, which produces about 70% of the world’s highest-purity quartz, a key input in chip manufacturing. It’s only accessible by a narrow, landslide prone road, which means if something happened to it like, say, a hurricane, much of the semiconductor industry would falter and the pivot to smaller quartz mines in Quebec, Australia, the Arabian Shield, and Russia would be painfully slow.
Another place where the global economy could have a single point of failure: Spruce Pine, North Carolina, which produces about 70% of the world’s highest-purity quartz, a key input in chip manufacturing. It’s only accessible by a narrow, landslide prone road, which means if something happened to it like, say, a hurricane, much of the semiconductor industry would falter and the pivot to smaller quartz mines in Quebec, Australia, the Arabian Shield, and Russia would be painfully slow.