this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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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

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 day ago (12 children)

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.

[–] FlyingSquid 19 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Fair enough, that makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Maggoty 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Maggoty 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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

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