Artificial intelligence is being built out of concrete, copper and silicon — and one scarce metal that almost nobody outside a semiconductor fab thinks about. Here is what the next decade of AI means for gallium, and why Nimy Resources is positioned in it.
The build-out is a physical build-out
Global investment in data centres nearly doubled between 2022 and 2024, reaching half a trillion US dollars in 2024 alone. McKinsey puts the cumulative capital requirement for the global data centre build-out at roughly US$7 trillion by 2030. That money does not buy code. It buys land, steel, switchgear, transformers, cabling, chillers and chips.
The clearest measure of the scale is electricity. The International Energy Agency estimates data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, about 1.5% of world electricity, having grown roughly 12% a year since 2017. On the IEA’s base case that more than doubles to 945 TWh by 2030 — slightly more than Japan’s entire electricity consumption today — and reaches about 1,200 TWh by 2035, within a scenario range of 700 to 1,700 TWh. In advanced economies, data centres account for more than 20% of all electricity demand growth to 2030. In the United States they account for nearly half of it.
Every one of those megawatts has a bill of materials attached. The World Economic Forum estimates that a megawatt of data centre capacity carries 60 to 75 tonnes of minerals, concentrated not in the servers but in the power and cooling systems that keep them alive. Installed capacity is expected to pass 100 GW by 2030, almost double today’s base, and the share of that capacity which is AI-optimised — denser racks, heavier electrical systems, more aggressive cooling — is forecast to rise from about 25% today to more than 60% by 2035.
Where the AI boom becomes a gallium problem
Most of that tonnage is copper, steel and aluminium. The binding constraint, however, is rarely the metal you need most of. It is the metal you cannot substitute and cannot buy.
Gallium is that metal. Gallium nitride (GaN) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors sit at exactly the points where the AI build-out is hardest pressed: high-efficiency power conversion feeding the rack, radio-frequency and optical components in the network layer, and the thermal headroom that lets a facility push more compute through the same electrical envelope. GaN devices switch faster and waste less energy as heat than silicon equivalents — which is precisely the trade a power-constrained data centre wants to make.
The IEA projects that data centre demand for gallium alone could reach more than 10% of today’s entire global supply by 2030. FP Analytics, drawing on IEA projections, puts total gallium demand growth at roughly 85% by 2033 — the steepest increase of any AI-exposed mineral, well ahead of germanium at 37%, rare earths at 3% and copper at 2%.
The percentages look modest next to copper’s absolute volumes. They are not. Global gallium demand sits under 700 tonnes a year. A market that small has no shock absorber.
A supply chain with one supplier
China produces approximately 98% of the world’s primary gallium and close to 99% of refined supply. For comparison, its share of germanium is 68% and antimony 48%. Gallium is the most concentrated critical mineral supply chain in the world, and since 2023 Beijing has been actively using it.
- July 2023 — China introduces export licensing for gallium and germanium.
- December 2024 — a full export ban targeting the United States takes effect.
- January 2025 — gallium extraction technologies are added to the export control list, including the chelating resins used to recover it. One Chinese producer, Sunresin, supplies roughly 90% of the world’s high-performance chelating resin.
- May 2025 — a coordinated enforcement crackdown is launched across more than ten ministries.
The exposure is not theoretical. More than 11,000 individual US Department of Defense parts require gallium, and close to 85% of gallium-containing defence supply chains include at least one Chinese supplier. GaN transistors power the AN/SPY-6 naval radar, the Marine Corps’ G/ATOR and the F-35’s AESA array. The USGS has estimated that a full Chinese gallium embargo would cost the United States around US$8 billion of GDP; FP Analytics puts the impact of even a 30% disruption at US$600 billion, or more than 2% of GDP, once semiconductor knock-on effects are counted.
The price is already telling the story
Gallium has repriced accordingly. From roughly US$298 per kilogram at the start of 2020, it reached US$2,269 per kilogram in September 2026 — more than a seven-fold increase, with the sharpest leg occurring after the export controls began to bite. More telling than the level is the split. The market has bifurcated into two prices for the same metal: as at September 2026, gallium inside China was trading around US$247/kg while Western buyers were paying roughly US$2,100/kg — about eight and a half times as much. Rotterdam quotes had already reached US$687/kg in May 2025, over 150% above pre-control levels.
The structural point
Two prices for the same metal is not a market anomaly. It is the market pricing sovereignty. Western buyers are paying a premium for supply that does not require a Chinese export licence — and that premium is the commercial opportunity for non-Chinese producers.
The West’s answer is thin — and it is being built in Western Australia
The response so far is measured in tens of tonnes. In 2025 CSIS counted a combined non-Chinese pipeline of roughly 170 tonnes per year, and only if every project is delivered as planned. Alcoa’s Wagerup decision has since lifted the Australian contribution to around 100 tonnes a year, bringing announced ex-China capacity to roughly 245 tonnes a year against global demand of under 700 tonnes — in a market the IEA expects to tighten materially by 2030.
The single largest line in that chart is in Western Australia. In 2026 the governments of Australia, Japan and the United States joined Alcoa in a final investment decision for a gallium project at the Wagerup alumina refinery, targeting around 100 tonnes a year. That decision does more than add capacity. It establishes Western Australia as a gallium jurisdiction — with refining infrastructure, allied government backing and, critically, customers who have already decided where they want their gallium to come from.
Where Nimy Resources fits
Nimy’s Mons Project sits on approximately 3,167 km² of the Yilgarn Craton, 370 km north-east of Perth. In November 2025 the Company delivered a maiden JORC Inferred Mineral Resource at its Block 3 East gallium discovery:
“We’re not speculating. It’s in the drill, or it’s in the gravity, or it’s in the electromagnetics.”
Luke Hampson, Managing Director, Nimy Resources
The demand side is already engaging. On 27 February 2026 Nimy announced it would join the Western Australian Government’s Critical Minerals and Energy Partnerships Trade Mission to New York and Washington DC, led by WA Mines and Petroleum Minister David Michael and conducted under the Australia–United States critical minerals framework signed in October 2025. Managing Director Luke Hampson travelled with the delegation to meet industry representatives, investors, financiers and potential offtake partners.
“I look forward to establishing relationships and creating opportunities which will help Nimy unlock the immense value of our Mons Gallium Block 3 project.”
Luke Hampson, Managing Director, on joining the US trade mission
Four markets, not one
The United States is the loudest buyer, but it is not the only one — and for a project of Block 3’s scale that matters, because a few hundred tonnes a year of non-Chinese gallium has several credible homes.
- United States — more than 11,000 defence parts depend on gallium, and in August 2026 the Department of Defense committed US$174 million to gallium production at Alcoa’s Wagerup refinery. American federal money is now underwriting Australian gallium.
- Europe — gallium is one of 17 strategic raw materials under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, adopted in March 2024. Its 2030 benchmarks require 40% of EU consumption to be processed within the bloc and cap any single third country at 65% of supply at any processing stage, with EU gallium dependency targeted to fall from 71% to 17%. Refining capacity is being built at Metlen in Greece (50 t/yr by 2027) and Stade in Germany (40 t/yr by 2027) — and refineries need feedstock.
- Japan — a partner government in the Wagerup investment decision, and the most acutely squeezed buyer in the market. After China linked export curbs to Tokyo’s Taiwan position, Japan received no gallium or germanium shipments in January and February 2026, a single gallium shipment in May and none in June. In August 2026 the government moved to let JOGMEC invest in critical minerals projects on its own account.
- South Korea — sources roughly 98% of its gallium from China, and has set a national target of cutting overall Chinese critical minerals dependence from 70% in 2023 to 60% by 2027 and 50% by 2030, backed by a strategic stockpile rising from 54 to 100 days and KOMIR funding of up to half of project costs. Seoul has signed critical minerals MOUs with Western Australia in both 2021 and 2024.
- Australia — the domestic opportunity is the processing chain itself. Wagerup establishes gallium refining in Western Australia; a second feedstock source strengthens the case for building more of that chain onshore.
What to watch
- Block 3 Scoping Study — the first economic framing of the deposit, incorporating the 2026 metallurgical results.
- Flowsheet optimisation — continued MRIWA–Curtin work on beneficiation, reagent consumption and product specification.
- Resource growth — drilling into the 4 km magnetic trend and the five additional gallium targets identified by SRK.
- Partnership and offtake progression — conversion of the relationships opened by the February 2026 US trade mission, and engagement with European, Japanese and South Korean buyers.
The decade ahead will add roughly 800 terawatt-hours of new data centre load, tens of millions of tonnes of metal, and a compounding strategic premium on anything the West cannot currently source for itself. Gallium sits at the intersection of all three. Nimy holds a high-grade, surface-outcropping, non-bauxite gallium resource with demonstrated extraction, in the jurisdiction the allied world has chosen as its answer to Chinese supply concentration. That is a useful place to be standing.
Sources
- International Energy Agency, Energy and AI — Executive Summary (2025) — https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary
- International Energy Agency, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 — https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025/overview-of-outlook-for-key-minerals
- CSIS, Beyond Rare Earths: China’s Growing Threat to Gallium Supply Chains (2025) — https://www.csis.org/analysis/beyond-rare-earths-chinas-growing-threat-gallium-supply-chains
- FP Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and the Critical Minerals Crunch (2025) — https://fpanalytics.foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/18/artificial-intelligence-critical-minerals-supply-chains/
- World Economic Forum, Scaling metals to secure the data centre materials backbone (2025) — https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/securing-data-centre-materials/
- McKinsey & Company, The $7 trillion race for AI data center infrastructure — https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-7-trillion-dollar-data-center-build-out-how-industrials-can-capture-their-share
- Alcoa, Australia, Japan, the United States and Alcoa Announce Final Investment Decision for Gallium Project in Western Australia (2026) — https://news.alcoa.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2026/Australia-Japan-the-United-States-and-Alcoa-Announce-Final-Investment-Decision-for-Gallium-Project-in-Western-Australia/default.aspx
- Strategic Metals Invest, gallium price series (accessed 18 September 2026) — https://strategicmetalsinvest.com/gallium-prices/
- Stockhead, Gallium in pole position as Nimy Resources targets multi-metallics across Mons Greenstone (9 September 2026) — https://nimy.com.au/stockhead-gallium-in-pole-position-as-nimy-resources-targets-multi-metallics-across-mons-greenstone-belt/
- Nimy Resources, Nimy to join WA Government’s Critical Minerals and Energy Partnerships Trade Mission (27 February 2026) — https://nimy.com.au/nimy-to-join-w-a-critical-mineral-delegation-to-the-u-s/
- Asia Times, US, Japan race to secure chip-grade minerals as China curbs exports (September 2026) — https://asiatimes.com/2026/09/us-japan-race-to-secure-chip-grade-minerals-as-china-curbs-exports/
- Council of the European Union, Critical raw materials act — strategic raw materials and 2030 benchmarks — https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/critical-raw-materials/
- Observer Research Foundation, The Policy Edge of Japan and South Korea in Securing Critical Minerals — https://www.orfonline.org/research/the-policy-edge-of-japan-and-south-korea-in-securing-critical-minerals
- Nimy Resources, Block 3 project page and company announcements — https://nimy.com.au/block-3/
Important information. This article has been prepared by Nimy Resources Limited (ASX: NIM) for general information purposes only. It contains commentary on third-party market research and forecasts, which are the views of those third parties and not of Nimy Resources. It is not financial product advice and does not take account of any individual’s objectives, financial situation or needs. Statements regarding future events, including market forecasts, exploration plans and study outcomes, are forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. Mineral Resource and exploration results referenced in this article were reported in the Company’s ASX announcements and, in respect of those announcements, the Company confirms it is not aware of any new information or data that materially affects the information included in the original market announcements. Exploration targets referred to are conceptual in nature; there has been insufficient exploration to estimate a Mineral Resource in respect of them and it is uncertain whether further exploration will result in the estimation of a Mineral Resource.