From the New York Times via the Japan Times, October 27:
...One example of China’s growing power is dysprosium, a rare earth that sells for more than $100 a pound. Previously used mainly as an additive in powerful magnets for electric cars, dysprosium is highly heat resistant. That makes it an increasingly important component of advanced semiconductors.
In the past few years, Nvidia and other computer chip manufacturers have changed the material used in hundreds of tiny electricity management devices, called capacitors, on each chip. The capacitors are now made from ultrapure dysprosium. China’s refineries produce 99.9% of the world’s dysprosium, mostly at a single refinery in Wuxi, near Shanghai.
That refinery is one of the last two in China that are still in foreign hands, after the government’s purchase or nationalization of the rest of the industry. The longtime owner of both refineries is a Canadian company, Neo Performance Materials.
Neo recently announced that, by the end of the year, it would sell an 86% stake in the Wuxi refinery to Shenghe Resources, a Chinese company traded on the Shanghai stock market. Shenghe’s biggest shareholder is China’s Ministry of Land Resources. Neo is closing the other refinery, 400 miles north in Zibo, China, and transferring its equipment and personnel to Shenghe.
Neo CEO Rahim Suleman said his company would retain an ability to sell to foreign companies. It has the right to market rare earths to international customers from the Wuxi refinery for five years. In addition, Neo has another refinery in Estonia that processes some rare earths, although not dysprosium. It has built a new factory in Zibo to turn rare earths into catalytic converter chemicals for cars.
China’s ever-stronger reins on rare earth supply chains have accelerated efforts to set up supply chains in other countries.
Solvay, a Belgian company, refines tiny quantities of dysprosium in France and said it planned to increase production. An Australian company, Lynas, said it would start refining dysprosium in Malaysia next year. Work has begun on a refinery in Texas.
But all of these plans face obstacles. Few mines outside China and Myanmar, a restive nation on China’s southwest border, have commercially viable concentrations of dysprosium. Chinese companies have been buying stakes or rights to production in mines being developed in Tanzania, Greenland and Australia. And rare earth refineries often take years to get going.
Producing the ultrapure dysprosium required for the computer chips that run artificial intelligence programs is particularly difficult: It took Neo seven years of trial and error to master the 100-step chemical process at its Wuxi refinery. Solvay said its initial increase in dysprosium output early next year would be for magnets, a less demanding application....
....MUCH MORE
Also at the Japan Times:
Former yakuza office repurposed to become elderly care facility
Which is of a piece with a couple previous posts: