A Quiet North Carolina Town Finds Itself at the Center of Global Tech

Tucked deep in the Appalachian Mountains, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, sits a North Carolina town most Americans have never heard of. Fewer than 2,100 people live there. There are no tech campuses, no glass towers, no venture capital firms.

Yet Spruce Pine, North Carolina, has quietly become one of the most important places in the global technology supply chain.

A Hidden Resource with Global Reach

For decades, Spruce Pine has been home to one of the world’s most unusual and valuable natural resources: exceptionally pure quartz. Scientists identified the area’s unusually high-quality deposits in the late 1980s, discovering that the material found in these mountains was uniquely suited for producing silicon wafers.