{
 "id": "10.08",
 "slug": "critical-minerals-gallium-germanium-indium-tungsten-beryllium",
 "url": "/parts/materials-and-upstream-inputs/critical-minerals-gallium-germanium-indium-tungsten-beryllium",
 "name": "Critical minerals: gallium, germanium, indium, tungsten, beryllium",
 "qualifiers": null,
 "layer": {
  "id": 10,
  "name": "Materials & upstream inputs"
 },
 "parent_id": null,
 "children": [],
 "summary": "A group of minor metals — gallium, germanium, indium, tungsten and beryllium — used in semiconductors, optics, thermal interface materials and specialty alloys, with supply concentrated in China and subject to export controls.",
 "description_md": "Each of these five elements plays a narrow but hard-to-substitute role somewhere in the chain: gallium in compound-semiconductor power devices and substrates, germanium in infrared optics and certain fiber and detector applications, indium in solder and thermal-interface materials used at the chip and cold-plate interface (Layers 1, 5), tungsten in high-density and high-melting-point alloys, and beryllium in specialty alloys and RF components. What ties them together for an investor is not end use but supply structure: production, and especially refining, of several of these elements is concentrated in China, and export licensing requirements have periodically restricted shipments, creating a supply risk that is geopolitical rather than geological.\nReserves of gallium, germanium and indium in particular exist more widely than current refining capacity does, so the near-term constraint is processing capacity and trade policy rather than resource scarcity. AI hardware is a small but growing draw on this group, mainly through power semiconductors, optics and thermal-interface-material formulations rather than bulk consumption. For investors, this is a policy-and-substitution watch: export-control announcements, the pace of non-Chinese refining capacity coming online, and how quickly device makers qualify substitute materials or alternative chemistries where possible.",
 "ai_delta": "AI hardware adds a growing draw on this group through compound-semiconductor power devices, optics and thermal-interface formulations, layering additional demand onto a supply base already concentrated and subject to export licensing.",
 "bottleneck_status": null,
 "scale_tiers": [
  "edge",
  "enterprise",
  "hyperscale_building",
  "ai_campus",
  "gw_class"
 ],
 "density_modes": [
  "any"
 ],
 "scale_notes": "These are chip- and component-level inputs rather than site infrastructure, so presence is uniform across site sizes; total draw scales with GPU, power-semiconductor and optics volume rather than with facility footprint.",
 "flow": [
  "supply"
 ],
 "companies": [
  {
   "company_id": "5n-plus",
   "name": "5N Plus",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "VNP.TO",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "almonty",
   "name": "Almonty",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "AII.TO",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": "tungsten",
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "materion",
   "name": "Materion",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "MTRN",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": "beryllium",
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "teck",
   "name": "Teck",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "TECK",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": "germanium",
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "umicore",
   "name": "Umicore",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "public",
   "ticker": "UMI.BR",
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "indium-corp",
   "name": "Indium",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "private",
   "ticker": null,
   "product_note": null,
   "note": null,
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "company_id": "nyrstar",
   "name": "Nyrstar",
   "role": "manufacturer",
   "confidence": "inferred",
   "ownership_type": "private",
   "ticker": null,
   "product_note": null,
   "note": "Trafigura",
   "source_url": null
  }
 ]
}