I just hope this doesn't mean Big Tech is incentivized to buy up lots of beach sand from poor cities already dealing with hurricanes.
Beach sand, if you didn't know, is an important barrier between the land and oceans and greatly affects the size of waves that come crashing into the coast. Big rocks and other substrates just don't calm waves like ocean-eroded sand can.
The problem for chipmakers is not the sourcing of materials itself, but the purity of the sourced material. So don’t worry about public beaches disappearing into Intel’s hopper-feeder.
I really don't think we have a shortage of sand. And you also have to consider how small computer chips are. Compare how much sand you need for a glass window versus a few CPUs.
Besides that, they wouldn't take sand from public beaches..