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That was such a frustrating article. Basically no information on why those metals (minerals?) are needed to manufacture chips and then you get to the end and find out that the U.S. gets half of them from China (but doesn't say where the other half comes from), and they just say that antimony is used in a wide range of products but not where it is also sourced from or how much is from China.
I assume this is not good news, but that was just not very helpful in explaining it.
More on gallium and its uses:
https://techiescientist.com/uses-of-gallium/
AP did not attempt to explain why all of these rare and exotic minerals and metals and compounds are used in manufacturing...
...because there a bunch of them, explaining all the reasons for using just one of them would basically be the equivalent of a crash course in applied chemistry / manufacturing / physics / engineering, and if you want to get into why these materials are used in lieu of others, well throw logistics and economics into that pile of course work as well.
AP is reporting the news, not being an industry specific journal, or a comprehensive policy impact study.
I agree with you that it was a frustrating read... but having worked as a copy editor, and having provided many different executive reports to various businesses and non profits, I also sympathize with the writer.
This is the kind of topic where you can either do a broad level overview, or you can write a tome for those who really want to dive into all the details to fully understand it... there's no effective way to do a middling approach on such a vast and complex topic.
In my personal experience, even wholly within a professional domain when an expert is trying to give an overview to non-experts (for example to mid-level managers for the purpose of decision making) a lot of things end up having to be axioms (i.e. "trust me this is how it works/this is what's needed/this is how its done" as fully trying to explained things to them would requires explanations of the explanations of the explanations.
This is with same-industry expert-domain-adjacent professionals, so I can see how much worse it would be when explaining stuff to average whose understanding of an industry is zero.