The Metal Nobody Talks About | Gallium

Gallium is not rare in the way gold is rare. It is rare in a more modern, more dangerous way: it is everywhere, and almost nowhere you can actually buy it.

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A piece of gallium will melt in your hand at roughly room temperature. That party trick is real, and it hints at what makes this element so strange. Gallium behaves like a metal, sneaks into the semiconductor world like a chemist, and shows up in places most investors never think to look: radar arrays, satellite links, fast chargers, LEDs, and high frequency chips that keep modern communications standing.

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What makes it even more scarce is that gallium is not mined the way most people imagine. It is collected like a residue. It is a byproduct, mostly recovered when bauxite becomes alumina, and when zinc processing leaves behind certain residues. In other words, gallium production is tied to other industrial flows. If you want more gallium, you cannot just “open a gallium mine.” You have to essentially control the pipes it runs through.

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And those pipes are heavily concentrated in one country: China.

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Gallium Is a Supply Chain Weapon

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If gallium were just a chemistry curiosity, none of this would matter. But gallium sits inside a class of chips that do things silicon struggles with: higher power, higher frequency, better performance in harsh environments, smaller systems for the same output.

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The two big families are:

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Gallium nitride (GaN): the workhorse for power electronics and advanced radio frequency systems. It shows up in radar, and it is increasingly used in high efficiency power conversion, including data centers and fast charging. Just to be clear, few things are bigger business than data centers, the backbone of AI and cloud workloads. According to a McKinsey Quarterly report, The cost of compute: A $7 trillion race to scale data centers:

"Our research shows that by 2030, data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion worldwide to keep pace with the demand for compute power."

‍Gallium arsenide (GaAs): a long time staple for radio frequency front ends and optoelectronics. It has been widely used in devices that move signals cleanly at high frequencies.

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The strategic point is not simply that these materials are useful. It is that the world’s ability to source the underlying metal is lopsided.

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China’s Dominance in Primary Gallium

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USGS reported that China accounted for 99 percent of worldwide primary low purity gallium production. An astounding statistic.

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That single number changes how you should think about gallium. This is not a normal commodity market. It is a critical mineral waiting to be weaponized.

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What Gallium Actually Does in the Real World

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1) Defense, radar, missile tracking

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When militaries talk about better range, better discrimination, and better resilience, they are often describing improvements that come from materials like GaN.

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Defense News described an upgraded AN/TPY 2 radar using a GaN populated array. In RTX delivers first radar to MDA that can track hypersonic weapons, Jen Judson quotes John Norman, company vice president of requirements and capabilities for Raytheon Air and Space Defense Systems, who said in respect to the radar systems:

“You have twice the sensitivity, twice the range. It’s just incredibly efficient.”

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This matters because defense procurement does not behave like consumer electronics. When the strategic environment tightens, demand becomes less price sensitive. Supply risk becomes the headline. In a war, cost is secondary.

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2) Chips, communications, and high frequency electronics

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GaAs and GaN are used across semiconductors and optoelectronics, and USITC’s briefing highlights how central gallium based semiconductors are to devices people take for granted.

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3) Clean energy and power conversion

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Gallium based devices also show up in renewable energy systems and in the power electronics stack that connects electricity to useful work. Even when the end market is “green,” the inputs can be brutally geopolitical.

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The Price Story: Not a Smooth Line

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Gallium’s price history is not as widely followed as copper or uranium, but the recent pattern is clear: export controls and fear of availability can send the price soaring.

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USGS documented a sharp move in China’s low purity gallium prices: about $240 per kilogram in June 2023, rising to an average of $380 per kilogram in June 2024, and reaching $420 per kilogram by October 2024 as stocks outside China tightened. But, that was just the beginning. According to Strategic Metals Invest,

"At today’s price of $2,101.60 per kg, gallium changed +22.00% since Jan 1st 2026, and +123.46% since the start of last year. It is up +397.18% from its price of $422.70 per kg on Jan 1st 2021 and has increased +604.76% since Jan 1st 2020..."

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In other words, gallium is easily one of the most valuable and best performing metals in the world. This has been a major wake up call for the global markets. The price was not simply responding to demand. It was responding to the realization that availability is not gauranteed, policy sensitive and that people will pay over $2k per kilo to secure it.

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Export controls: the policy lever

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China’s Ministry of Commerce framed gallium and germanium controls as standard practice for dual use items. In mid-2023, China introduced export controls requiring licences for gallium and germanium shipments, tightening the flow of these critical metals used in semiconductors and high-tech manufacturing.

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In December 2024, Beijing went further and banned exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States before later suspending that ban through 2026, underscoring how strategic metals have become leverage in trade and technology competition.

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And in November 2025, Reuters reported that China suspended its ban on exports to the US, but controls and licensing remained.

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That sequence is the story: restrictions, tightening, price sensitivity, then partial relaxation without removing the underlying leverage.

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Who Produces Gallium, and Does North America Produce Any?

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Here is where the topic gets misunderstood.

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Primary low purity gallium production: USGS lists no primary low purity gallium production for the United States in recent years, while China dominates and a handful of others produce smaller amounts.

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High purity refined gallium: USGS lists Canada and the United States among the known principal producers of high purity refined gallium, and notes recovery from new scrap in both countries.

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So yes, North America has activity, but it is mostly in the refining and recycling chain rather than large scale primary production or processing.

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The most important North American development: Quebec potential production

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Reuters reported that Rio Tinto extracted its first primary gallium in collaboration with Indium Corporation, and that commercial production at Rio Tinto’s Quebec refinery could reach up to 40 tonnes annually, described as about 5 to 10 percent of current global production. In Reuters article Rio Tinto extracts first gallium under collaboration with Indium Rio Tinto executive Jérôme Pécresse, was quoted:

"Rio Tinto and Indium Corporation strive to strengthen the North American supply chain for gallium."

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The “Outside China” Rebuild Story

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Reuters also reported that Eurasian Resources Group planned to invest in Kazakhstan to produce gallium, with a goal of supplying OECD countries and scaling to 15 metric tons per year. Still, this is small potatoes.

Even if these projects succeed, notice what they are really doing: they are trying to create non China throughput for a metal that rides along other industrial processes.

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Why This Matters Strategically

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Gallium sits at the intersection of three forces:

• ‍1) Dual use reality
  Gallium is embedded in systems that are civilian on Monday and military on Tuesday. Export regimes follow that logic.
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• 2) The byproduct trap
  Because gallium is mostly recovered from bauxite and zinc related streams, supply expansion is not straightforward. You need processing, chemistry, and throughput.
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• 3) Concentration risk
  When one country dominates primary production, the market is not a free market in the classical sense. It is a managed chokepoint.

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Closing the Loop: The Real Revelation

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Most investors think critical materials are about mining. Gallium is a reminder that in the 2020s, control often sits elsewhere: in refineries, in waste streams, in purification capacity, in licensing regimes, and in the ability to turn residues into metal at scale.

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Gallium’s strategic value is not just its periodic table slot or its melting point. It is the way it quietly upgrades the hardware of modern power: the radar that sees farther, the charger that wastes less energy, the chip that handles higher frequency with less heat.

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And because the world is trying to rebuild supply chains outside a dominant producer, the next decade for gallium will not be defined only by technology adoption. It will be defined by industrial policy, refinery chemistry, and whoever controls the flow of critical minerals.

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