China bans exports to US of gallium, germanium, antimony in response to chip sanctions

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.

Long story short, they're silicon doping agents that change the properties of semiconductors. China produces like 90% of these rare earth elements.

Gallium for example is used in the new smaller USB power supplies marketed as GaN gallium nitride, in this case used instead of silicon due to the better thermals at high power and smaller physical size.

I recognize gallium at least as a dopant material (what transforms the pure sillicon, which is an isolator, in the the n-side or the p-side of a semiconductor junction, where gallium specifically is used in light emitting junctions such as in LEDs) and a quick search showed that antimony is also a dopant.

(For the curious, here's the Wikipedia article)

As you might have noticed, even my short explanation of what a dopant is actually requires people to understand to an advanced level what semiconductors actually are made of, so I can see why an AP article which is targetting the average person wouldn't go into that specific rabit hole of explaining stuff that requires more stuff to be explained which in turn requires even more stuff to be explained and so on.

Also, I would be surprised if there are more than a handful of journalists in the World with even the most basic understanding of how semi-conductors work.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA240992

Germanium, one of the most important of the advanced electronic materials, is used in semiconductor devices, fiber optic systems, and infrared sensors for ships, aircraft, missiles, tanks and anti-tank units. Because of its importance in these applications, germanium was added to the National Defense...

Can't see more really.

Antimony applications

Antimony is a strategic critical mineral that is used in all manner of military applications, including the manufacture of armor piercing bullets, night vision goggles, infrared sensors, precision optics, laser sighting, explosive formulations, hardened lead for bullets and shrapnel, ammunition primers, tracer ammunition, nuclear weapons and production, tritium production, flares, military clothing, and communication equipment.

Hope that helps.

the AP has some weird style guides where they're supposed to put the newest info first and context last. it's good for reporting certain fast developing major stories, but for the intricate and mundane stuff that actually moves the world, they're kind of a disaster

They also skipped how production of these metals occurs, for Gallium for example, it's a byproduct of aluminum production. China became the main gallium (and later, LED) producer because they mandated (and sourced relevant equipment) for bauxite refining operations to harvest it, despite being non-economical to do so at the time, as part of a project that was consuming ~5% of their national budget in the late 80s.

America produces 1/36th of the aluminum China produces so even if Trump took the same step (I'm sure he could use the Defense Production Act or something), the numbers don't add up.

Others require the blighting of huge swaths of land and a lot of future work to prevent contamination of ground water (see West Virginia).

I don't believe America has the capacity to build local production with its current political system.

per Wikipedia: Gallium is mostly used in cell phone production and higher frequency lasers (eg blueray, UV)

Gallium is a metal, the other 2 are metalloids (have both metallic and non-metallic properties). Anyway, they are semiconductor materials or used to create semiconductors ("doping" materials which means to introduce impurities to a often crystal-structure to influence the conductive properties) and you need them for basically everything in modern electronics. Widely used compounds are gallium arsenide (GaAs is used in many displays, LEDs and other light emitting stuff), Indium antimonide (InSb is often used in infrared cameras or imaging components), germanium is often used in solar panels.

I think Russia also exports them (which is why China has its eyes on Siberia where most of the natural resource wells for those materials are), so a full ban from China is bad news.

I think antimony is what the last CEO of Intel used /s

If you don't get it antimony kinda looks like anti-money which would be like the opposite of money and intel lost a bunch of money recently.

At a much higher price. Between things like this, the tariffs, and playing populist politics with the interest rates, US inflation graphs might start coming in logarithmic scales.

It will shift manufacturing desire. It will become cheaper to manufacture in Europe and ship to the US, costing jobs and tax dollars to the US economy. Otherwise, it will cause prices to increase in the US. You're dismissing it as non consequential, but that couldn't be further from the truth.