Gallium Price ($US/KG)
31 May 2024 : Price $805.90
1 January 2024: Price $755.80
THE DATA IS IN
In July 2023, when China announced they would apply export restrictions to Gallium, the market’s first response was 3x fold.
- It was international politicking at best and would never last.
- Expect quote cheating, thus gallium would find its way to market.
- Exports would be reinstated after a proper amount of time had passed.
As we approach the 12-month anniversary of that announcement, the gallium price is up 40% and rhetoric appears to be ramping up not down. Some high-level export data reveals the extent of the issue.
CHINA EXPORTS
2023: 30.8 t of gallium, 55% less than 2022.
Exports to Germany shrank from 26.4 t (2022) to 10.6 t (2023). Down 60%.
January – April, 2024: 3.27 t of gallium exported, 72% less than during the same period 2023.
Exports to Germany fell from 5.2 t to zero.
We at G50 Corp are happy to have sensible evidence-based conversations, preliminary data would suggest that China will honour their export policy controls over gallium. As fundamental capitalists, we also believe that the commodity price is giving the best indication, yet that scarce gallium metal will remain just that. Scarce. Infineon’s new PSU’s highlighted in the article below provides great context in how gallium and GaN will remain in hot demand over the remainder of the decade.
For those wanting exposure to gallium, there is no way of buying the metal (China controls 98% of the supply), no screen traded ETF’s, and we can think of only 2x listed equities with gallium discoveries and only 1 listed company with a gallium discovery, close to infrastructure on patented claims in the lower 48 states of the USA. G50 Corp. (ASX:G50)
CHINA GOES BANG!
China has set up a $47.5 billion semiconductor investment fund as it renews its pursuit of self-reliance in the age of artificial intelligence.
China’s flagship National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (aka the Big Fund) just created the largest-ever chip investment vehicle in the country. The goal? To develop a standalone supply chain that’s impervious to US trade curbs.
It’s a strategically vital goal for President Xi Jinping’s government. China’s watching the rest of the world securing top-notch American silicon, such as Nvidia Corp.’s H100 GPU, that it has no access to. The new Big Fund III seems aimed squarely at ensuring China has the resources to develop and build AI-capable semiconductors without outside help.
China’s advantage is that it can throw all possible forms of support into the mix. The financial ones include direct investments and tax breaks for the most promising chip companies in the country. But it can also leverage the powers of a managed economy that are beyond the reach of rivals like the US.
Prior to this record-breaking fund, the country incorporated two similar vehicles in the past decade or so with a combined investment of roughly 300 billion yuan ($41 billion). That speaks to how much more expensive chip development has gotten, but the approach is also more targeted now.
Many local government funds like Chengdu, Chongqing and Wuhan chipped in previously. In Big Fund III, however, only Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong have pledged investment, according to company registration information. In other words, they’re the chosen ones.
Source: Bloomberg Technology: Gau Yuan
A US PERSPECTIVE
- Imports of gallium metal and gallium arsenide (GaAs) wafers were valued at about $5 million and $220 million, respectively (2022)
- Circa 77% of the gallium consumed in the United States was in GaAs, GaN, and gallium phosphide wafers
- Uses of Integrated Circuit’s included defense applications, high-performance computers, and telecommunications equipment
- No US Government Stockpiles
WORLD RESOURCES
- The average gallium content of bauxite is 50 parts per million (50 ppm or 50 g/t)
- Some domestic zinc ores contain up to 50 parts per million gallium and could be a significant resource, although no gallium is currently recovered from domestic ores (US)
- Gallium contained in world resources of bauxite is estimated to exceed 1 million tons, and a considerable quantity could be contained in world zinc resources.
- However, less than 10% of the gallium in bauxite and zinc resources is potentially recoverable
GALLIUM SUPPLY
WORLD PRIMARY LOW-PURITY GALLIUM PRODUCTION
- China is the leading global producer of low-purity Gallium
- Globally, most of primary Gallium is recovered as a byproduct of processing bauxite and, the remainder produced from zinc-processing residues
- No domestic primary (low-purity, unrefined) Gallium has been recovered in the US since 1987
Estimated 2. U.S. Geological Survey, 2023, Mineral commodity summaries 2023: U.S. Geological Survey, 210 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/mcs2023
INFINEON PROMISES 12kW PSUs FOR NEXT GENERATION OF POWER HUNGRY AI SERVERS
How else are you going to feed all those 1,000-plus watt GPUs? Tobias Mann
Not long ago an entire rack of systems might consume 10kW or less of power. Today, that’s barely enough to run a single GPU server, and those systems are only expected to get hotter and greedier for power amid the AI boom. To keep those GPUs adequately fed, Infineon is developing new, high-efficiency power supply units (PSUs) capable of delivering up to 12kW of energy to the system, up from around 3.3kW today.
To do this, Infineon says it’s using a combination of silicon, silicon-carbide, and gallium-nitride technology. You may recognize gallium nitride, or GaN, as the material that’s helped to shrink consumer chargers in recent years. Silicon-carbide (SiC) on the other hand, has gained widespread attention amid the proliferation of electric vehicles. Generally speaking, SiC is more efficient at higher voltages, making it a prime choice for the traction and DC-to-DC inverters commonly found in EVs. However, as Infineon notes, that technology also makes sense in high-wattage PSUs needed to fuel hotter and hotter GPUs and AI accelerators.
The German giant says its next-gen PSUs will be capable of achieving 97.5 percent efficiency, when they start shipping early next year. Infineon contends these will help to drive down carbon emissions and power losses. The first of these PSUs will be an 8kW unit that Infineon says will be able to support AI racks up to 300kW or more. Meanwhile, its 12kW power supplies are set to follow sometime later.
The power demands of modern AI systems have proven to be quite the headache for datacenter operators. For instance, as The Next Platform previously reported, Digital Realty has faced challenges with power as it worked to support larger deployments of Nvidia’s DGX platform, which packs four 10.2kW servers into a single rack. But while eight and even 12kW power supplies will no doubt simplify designs by reducing the number of PSUs required, power is likely to remain an ongoing challenge. As Schneider Electric wrote in a report last summer, PSUs aren’t the only limiting factor, we’re also going to need beefier power distribution units (PDU).
According to Schneider, at 120/208 volts it would require five 60 amp circuits to power an 80kW rack with single failure redundancy. This, they note, poses a variety of challenges and could impede airflow. Because of this, they recommended switching to 240/415 volt PDUs, and even at these voltages, Schneider warned this may not be enough. But even if you can sort out rack power delivery, that doesn’t do you much good if your local utility isn’t up to the task. Amazon is reportedly rationing resources at its Dublin datacenters due to power constraints, a factor that previously led Microsoft to build a 170 megawatt gas plant to even out disruptions to the grid. Meanwhile, in the UK, National Grid CEO John Pettigrew warned in March that datacenter power consumption could rise by as much as 500 percent over the next decade and would require major infrastructure improvements to support that growth. ®
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/05/28/infineon_psu_ai/
EU, AUSTRALIA SIGN CRITICAL MINERALS PACT TO DIVERSIFY SUPPLY CHAINS
(Bloomberg) – Australia and the European Union have struck an agreement to boost cooperation and investment in critical minerals, part of a drive by Western nations to loosen China’s grip on supply chains of materials essential to high-tech and green manufacturing.
Ministers in Canberra and Brussels signed a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday, which will be followed by the joint development of “concrete actions” over the next six months to improve collaboration on critical minerals projects.
“Australia is a like-minded partner and a global leader when it comes to critical raw materials,” EU Commissioner for Trade Valdis Dombrovskis said in a statement. “This partnership marks a major step forward in our efforts to secure a more sustainable supply of critical raw materials for the EU, whilst fostering investment in Australia.”
The US and its allies have been working in recent years to establish alternative sources of critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, which are used in the manufacturing of equipment including computer chips, solar panels and military hardware. China currently controls much of the supply, leaving the US potentially exposed to export restrictions given intensifying strategic competition between Washington and Beijing.
Access to critical materials has become a serious concern for the EU due to the potential for China to “weaponize” its dominance of the sector. Australia has vast, largely untapped deposits of several critical minerals and has been attempting to build up its domestic industry through financing vehicles and tax incentives, including new measures announced in its May budget.
MORE OF EVERYTHING? MORE OF EVERYTHING!
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) released a white paper analyzing data consumption from AI and data centers. The following is a summary of the EPRI report. In the United States, increasing electricity demands are driven by data centers, clean energy manufacturing, industrial onshoring, and transportation electrification. Data centers, in particular, are growing rapidly, with the electricity usage of major cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google more than doubling between 2017 and 2021. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, especially generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is significantly contributing to this growth.
AI applications, while currently using 10%-20% of data center electricity, are much more energy-intensive than previous data retrieval and communication applications. For example, each ChatGPT request consumes approximately 2.9 watt-hours, ten times that of a traditional Google query.
- EPRI has developed scenarios predicting that data centers could account for 4.6% to 9.1% of U.S. electricity generation annually by 2030, up from 4% today. The geographic concentration of data centers poses significant challenges, with 80% of the national data center load concentrated in fifteen states. Virginia, for example, sees data centers comprising a quarter of its electric load. Globally, Ireland anticipates data centers will account for nearly one-third of its electricity demand by 2026;
- New data centers are increasingly larger, with capacities ranging from 100 to 1000 megawatts, equivalent to the load of 80,000 to 800,000 homes. This growth requires one to two years of connection lead times, highly reliable power, and non-emitting generation sources, posing local and regional electric supply challenges. EPRI suggests three strategies to support this expansion: improving data center efficiency and flexibility, close coordination between developers and electric companies, and better modelling tools for long-term grid investment planning.