Silicon Security: Defending the American Quartz Advantage

The Spruce Pine Mining District in western North Carolina — a town of 2,000 people tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains — is the world's dominant source of high-purity quartz, the critical upstream material used to make the fused-quartz crucibles and furnace equipment that semiconductor manufacturing depends on. Despite sitting at the foundation of the global chip supply chain, HPQ has received remarkably little attention from policymakers. The U.S. government currently lacks the trade data, product classifications, and statistical visibility needed to monitor exports, apply targeted controls, or deploy industrial policy tools with any precision.

In this policy memo, Senior Fellow Daniel Bring traces HPQ's role in the semiconductor supply chain from raw ore to silicon wafer, examines the warning shot delivered by Hurricane Helene in 2024, and analyzes China's aggressive push to develop sovereign quartz supply. He also confronts an uncomfortable strategic reality: the two companies that mine Spruce Pine's quartz are foreign-owned, with established customer relationships in Asian semiconductor and solar markets, and the U.S. government has no clear picture of where American quartz ultimately ends up.

The memo outlines a concrete set of executive actions — from petitioning the interagency 484(f) Committee for HPQ-specific trade classifications to designating high-purity quartz as a named critical material under USGS — that would give policymakers the visibility they need before attempting to use Spruce Pine as a lever in strategic competition with China.