Spruce Pine quartz that doesn’t quite make the purity cut gets used for sandtraps in high-end golf courses.
https://hntrbrk.com/essential-node-in-global-semiconductor-s...
"Rare Earths" are literally everywhere but require large open mines which are not environmentally acceptable and cost effective in the US (depending). The existing mines are still here but shut down decades ago.
Ask Apple how it feels about paying a pretty big chunk of money to reopen one. That guys mine was worth more closed than open.
Like so many things we sent that task to China a long time ago.
Neodymium and Dysprosium are REEs.
Molybdenum is not but it is a critical element that is also commonly brought up in the same conversations as REEs.
I think recentering the convo to "critical minerals" would solve the issue.
The problem is, "cost effective" has different meanings depending on if one includes externalities such as geopolitical risks into the cost.
I figured at the time that other vendors would have a chance to take some HPQ market share but when Spruce Pine went down, Quartz Corp just shifted their refining operations to another plant in Drag, Norway and used existing feedstock and reserves to maintain supply to their customers. Sibelco restarted operations within a few weeks [3].
It was all a non-event in the semiconductor industry, especially compared to real disruptions like the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that took out a fifth of 300mm wafer supply leading some fabs to shut down entire product lines.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701862
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818248
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/11/24267697/north-carolina-...
relaxing•4mo ago
HPsquared•4mo ago
mschuster91•4mo ago
alephnerd•4mo ago
Nope. The American entities used to be independent companies but faced financial troubles when the mining industry died in the US during the 2010s due to a mix of a commodity glut, lack of state support, and competitors like Norway and China infusing state originated capital into their players
relaxing•4mo ago
alephnerd•4mo ago
It's not like 20 or 30 years ago when the only pension funds with massive amounts of dry powder were the Ontario Teachers Fund, CalPERs, or the GPFG.
There are alternative capital markets now because it has become easier to raise capital outside the West. For example, look at the IPO boom happening in India todau - a number of Silicon Valley startups that would have listed on the NYSE decided to list on the NSE instead because it's easier for a company with $50-100M in revenue to IPO in India versus the US today, which is what Freshworks trailblazed in 2021. The same thing happened in China and HK in the 2010s, which helped build the domestic capital market needed to trickle down into VC funding that helped spawn companies like DeepSeek and Biren.
In Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the gold standard for SWFs and SDFs is Temasek in Singapore and what became the Master Trust in Japan - they are entirely focused on developing new industries by coordinating state capital and SoEs with private sector capital, and are driven by the primary goal of developing industry - not moral or ethical considerations. National security and sovereignity is the overarching goal.
Western funds have become heavily politicized due to the rise of activist investors along with the fact that the majority of capital at this point is a mix of private sector capital and very large (think billions of dollars of AUM) family offices where a heir or group of heirs wants to leverage their fortune for their pet project (eg. Actual Communism and extreme far left politics like Fergie Chambers [yes I recognize the irony] or extreme far right politics like Timothy Mellon)
[0] - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/sovereignwealth/files/...