China Controls 98% of the World's Gallium. Its Promise Not to Cut Off Exports Expires in 71 Days.
Gallium turns ordinary silicon into radar, satellite links and fast chargers, and nearly all of it is refined in China. Beijing banned selling it to the US outright in 2024, then paused the ban for a year. That pause runs out on November 27 — and in the meantime, the identical metal costs eight to nine times more once it clears China's export gate than it does at home.
The toll booth: what the same gallium costs at each checkpoint
Step a shipment of 99.99%-purity gallium from a Chinese refinery to a Western buyer with Next / Back. Prices are September 2026 benchmarks (Shanghai Metals Market domestic and FOB China; Rotterdam warehouse spot through 2026) — real cargo prices vary by contract and purity, but the shape of the toll holds.
Gallium is skimmed from bauxite-refining liquor and purified to 99.99% (4N) domestically — close to the metal's raw production cost.
The plain version
Picture a metal that barely exists on its own — gallium isn't mined directly, it's skimmed off as a byproduct when China processes bauxite into aluminum. Refine it, and it becomes the guts of gallium-arsenide and gallium-nitride chips: the parts that make a phone's 5G radio work, a satellite talk to the ground, an EV fast charger push more amps, or a fiber-optic laser send data across an ocean. There's no easy substitute for most of these jobs.
Here's the problem: China refines somewhere around 98% of the world's supply of the stuff. For years that didn't matter much, because gallium was cheap and abundant. Then in late 2024, as the US tightened its own chip export rules, China banned selling gallium — along with germanium and antimony — to America outright. A year later, as part of a trade truce, Beijing agreed to pause the ban. But only for a year, and it kept a licensing system in place that lets it slow-walk approvals whenever it wants.
You can see that leverage sitting right in the price. Gallium sells for about $234 a kilogram inside China. The identical metal, once it clears China's export paperwork and lands in a Western warehouse, has traded for $2,100 to $3,050 a kilogram this year — eight or nine times more. That gap isn't about mining costs. It's a toll.
The pause expires November 27. In the meantime, the US and its allies are racing to build a plan B: the Pentagon just put $174 million into an Australian refinery that, once running at full tilt, would make roughly a tenth of what the world needs. A plan B, not yet a plan A.
The expert version
Gallium and germanium are both byproduct metals: gallium is recovered from the Bayer-process liquor during bauxite-to-alumina refining, at very low concentration; germanium is recovered mainly from zinc-sulfide ore processing and some coal fly ash. Neither has a dedicated mine of scale, so supply tracks the base-metal industries they ride along with — which is exactly why China's dominance in aluminum and zinc smelting translates into dominance of these two "byproduct" critical minerals: an estimated 98% of primary refined gallium, and more than half — some estimates put it near 80% — of refined germanium.
Both feed compound semiconductors silicon can't easily replace: gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN) for RF power amplifiers, radar and high-frequency, high-voltage switching, with GaN now standard in fast chargers and moving into EV inverters and grid-scale power electronics; germanium for infrared optics, fiber-optic dopants, and some photovoltaic and radiation-detection applications.
China's Ministry of Commerce banned exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and certain superhard materials to the United States effective December 3, 2024, invoking its dual-use export control law in response to expanded US semiconductor equipment restrictions. On November 9, 2025, following the Trump-Xi meeting in Busan, China suspended that prohibition through November 27, 2026, while leaving the general licensing requirement for gallium and germanium exports — in force since August 2023 — intact. Licensing friction, not scarcity, now sets the marginal price: Shanghai Metals Market pricing put China's domestic 4N gallium price at roughly $234/kg and its FOB export price at $433/kg on September 3, 2026, while 4N gallium landed in Rotterdam warehouses has priced between roughly $2,100/kg (March 2026) and $3,050/kg (July 2026) — an eight-to-nine-times premium over the domestic price for physically identical metal. Germanium shows a similar but narrower gap between its Chinese domestic and Western indicative prices.
The Pentagon's $174 million equity stake in Alcoa's Wagerup alumina refinery, alongside Export Finance Australia, Japan's government and Sojitz Corp, targets roughly 100 tonnes/year of gallium metal — about 10% of estimated global demand — with an initial phase of roughly 60 tonnes/year possible in H1 2027. Non-Chinese gallium supply currently totals only around 5 tonnes/year.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: a licensing pause with an expiration date isn't security — anyone designing radar, EV chargers or satellite links around gallium-based chips is one bureaucratic delay away from an 8x price shock, deadline or not.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: byproduct-metal monopolies don't show up in mine-count risk models the way rare earths do, but they set the marginal cost and lead time for every GaN/GaAs design win — and unlike a depleted mine, a licensing regime can be turned back on overnight.