Automated Fabs and Quartz Mines: Where Chip Capacity Really Comes From

IBM ran a fully automated wafer fabrication line in 1970 that produced integrated circuits in less than one day. IEEE Spectrum described it in a December 2024 feature on Project SWIFT. Bill Harding led the project at the company's East Fishkill, New York site. Each layer of the fabrication process took 5 hours on average.

The fastest modern fabs need 19 hours per processing layer. The industry average is 36 hours, according to the same article. IEEE Spectrum notes that today's chips use more layers and larger wafers, and that those factors do not fully close the gap. The history matters because most coverage of semiconductor capacity treats the problem as a question of money and buildings. The record points to harder constraints elsewhere: process design, materials, and how quickly wafers move between steps.

Money is moving, but not evenly

India unveiled a ₹625 billion (about $6.5 billion) Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme on 15 July 2026. The scheme runs five years and offers incentives of 2.25% to 5% of eligible sales, plus an extra 1.5% for sourcing key components locally, TechCrunch reported. New Delhi also committed a further ₹1.28 trillion (around $13.3 billion) to domestic semiconductor manufacturing. That expands a $10 billion chip incentive program launched in 2021.

The scale challenge is blunt. China accounted for 63% of global smartphone production in 2025, against India's 18%, according to Counterpoint Research figures cited by TechCrunch. Apple makes about 25% of its iPhones in India, the report says.

Malaysia is taking a different route. Its second finance minister, Amir Hamzah Azizan, told CNBC at the IMF spring meetings in Washington on Wednesday that "the semiconductor space is now in the upcycle, and Malaysia will be a beneficiary of that." He said the country does not see China, its largest trading partner, as a rival: "I think the reality of it all is, there is enough growth that will go around." Malaysia holds 13% of the global market for chip packaging, assembly and testing services, according to a Malaysian Investment Development Authority report dated 18 February. The government wants to move up the value chain from that back-end work.

The quartz problem did not go away

Capacity also depends on materials that no incentive scheme can conjure quickly. Spruce Pine, North Carolina holds the only facilities producing ultra-pure quartz in the world, Tom's Hardware reported on 1 October 2024, after Hurricane Helene brought over two feet of rain to the town.

Sibelco has confirmed a suspension of operations, that report says. The Quartz Corp told The Verge it was too early to determine whether its high-purity quartz production facility was affected. Roads and communications were cut, which made damage assessments difficult.

Brian Potter's analysis for Construction Physics, published in November 2024, pushes back on the more apocalyptic versions of this story. Quartz crucibles are necessary for most semiconductor manufacturing, and Spruce Pine supplies most of that quartz. It is not quite an irreplaceable linchpin. Alternatives are, in his words, not yet developed, not quite as good, and not quite as cheap.

The numbers he cites are specific. High-purity quartz costs on the order of $10,000 a ton. Crucibles cost several thousand dollars each and last around 400 hours of operation. A Czochralski furnace consumes on the order of 20 to 25 crucibles a year. One paper he cites estimated that 30% of the manufacturing cost of monocrystalline silicon ingots came from the crucibles.

Spruce Pine is estimated to produce 180,000 to 200,000 tons of high-purity quartz per year, up from around 30,000 tons of total high-purity quartz output in 2015, according to Potter. Two companies mine there: Covia, a subsidiary of Belgian mining company Sibelco, and the Quartz Corp, a Norwegian mining company.

Tool makers are expanding too. Texas Instruments said on 24 October 2024 that it had begun GaN power semiconductor production at its factory in Aizu, Japan, quadrupling its internal GaN capacity across its US and Japanese sites. Mohammad Yunus, TI's senior vice president of Technology and Manufacturing, said the company aims to grow internal manufacturing to more than 95% by 2030. TI also said it successfully piloted GaN manufacturing processes on 300mm wafers.

None of this resolves the gap IBM closed in 1970. A fab can be built and funded, and a mine can be repaired. Getting a layer through in five hours is a design problem, and the record shows it has been solved before.