China announced Tuesday it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications, as a general principle, lashing back at U.S. limits on semiconductor-related exports.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry announced the move after the Washington expanded its list of Chinese companies subject to export controls on computer chip-making equipment, software and high-bandwidth memory chips. Such chips are needed for advanced applications.
The ratcheting up of trade restrictions comes as President-elect Donald Trump has been threatening to sharply raise tariffs on imports from China and other countries, potentially intensifyi
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1445285/gallium-share-of-production-worldwide-by-country/
As of 2022, China basically produces all (98.4%) of the world’s gallium.
… Statista has much more great info, but unless you want to pay for a subscription or spend a day hopping through proxy IPs… yeah, good luck.
They produce 98% percent of low-purity Gallium. We produce plenty of high purity Gallium, and Gallium, like Germanium, comes from Zinc mining. Which we still do plenty of in the US. So if we need more high quality Gallium, it’s not going to be hard to get.
Ah, so it’s not a matter of “that’s where the gallium is”, it’s “might as well buy it from China if they’re sellin’ it”, same as the dollar store
Edit: I wouldn’t be surprised if the places in the US producing high-quality gallium are using poor-quality Chinese gallium as feedstock though.
They are, but we have plenty of Zinc mining we can get it from ourselves. It’s just an economics matter, so we’d subsidize that. We only use enough to fill one truck load per year. So it’s likely we’d just get a defense contractor to do it and subsidize it
The previous article says: "The largest global producers of gallium are Russia, Germany, Australia, and France. "
Ok, looking at this: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/china-seltene-metalle-100.html
I can see that the reason China became this huge producer is because everyone else decided to stop and by from them instead, though that doesn’t mean they can only rely on China for it.
But indeed it is now the largest gallium and germanium producer.
And Gallium is combined to make late-factorio stuff, so him who controls the Gallium, controls the future.
That’s how we’re saying ‘high-tech’ now?
…fine, I dig it