Who makes sputtering targets for AI data centers

Sputtering targets are the source material for physical vapour deposition. A target is a disc or plate of high-purity metal that gets bombarded in a vacuum chamber so its atoms land on the wafer as a thin film — the barrier, seed and interconnect layers that wire a chip together. The target is consumed as it erodes, so a fab buys them continuously, matched to the specific chamber and process. What makes this a real supply chain rather than a metals purchase is purity and microstructure. The metal has to be refined far beyond commercial grade and formed with a controlled grain structure, because both determine how evenly the film deposits; the same element at commodity purity is a different product entirely. Several of the metals involved sit close to the critical-minerals group in Layer 10, which is where this part's upstream risk actually lives. AI demand arrives through advanced-node wafer starts and through packaging, where redistribution layers and interposers add deposition steps. What to look for is the refining step rather than the target-making step: forming targets is a specialised but reproducible operation, while ultra-high-purity refining for some of these metals has a short supplier list and a concentrated geography. Reclaim matters too, since spent targets retain most of their metal and go back through the same refiners.