By Solomon Cefai<\/p>\n
SINGAPORE, June 19 (Reuters) – China is stepping up scrutiny over exports of indium, leading some buyers to fear the niche metal, sought after for next-generation \u200cdata centers, may be added to the export control regime that has become \u200cone of Beijing’s most potent trade weapons.<\/p>\n
China produces nearly 70% of the world’s indium, a byproduct of zinc refining mostly used \u200bin displays and solder but also the raw material for making indium phosphide, used to make high-speed optical chips for AI data centers.<\/p>\n
Beijing put indium phosphide on an export control list in February 2025 and the restrictions have become enough of a hurdle for next-generation data centers that the \u200cCEO of Nvidia-backed chipmaker Coherent \u2060traveled to Beijing with President Donald Trump in May to raise the issue.<\/p>\n
While indium metal is not on the export control list, two buyers told \u2060Reuters about growing scrutiny over their purchases from Chinese customs. For the first time this year, a European buyer was asked to disclose information about end users, including where they were based.<\/p>\n
A major buyer \u200bin \u200bNorth America said approvals had gone from same day \u200bto several days, which they attributed \u200cto more scrutiny of paperwork and described as “tense”. This buyer had not been asked for extra information by customs.<\/p>\n
China’s Ministry of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment on a public holiday.<\/p>\n
All the buyers declined to be named owing to the sensitivity of the topic.<\/p>\n
The extra due diligence is not uniform and two other buyers told Reuters they had heard \u200cof extra scrutiny but not faced it themselves. So \u200bfar, Reuters has not identified any shipments that have \u200bbeen blocked.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless there is some concern in \u200bthe small industry that this is a prelude to tighter controls or \u200cthe end-user disclosures which China, and other \u200bcountries with export control \u200bregimes, use to chart global supply chains and chokepoints.<\/p>\n
Indium has been identified as a potential vulnerability for the U.S., whose Defense Logistics Agency earlier this year released a request \u200bfor proposals to stockpile up \u200cto 403 tons of the material over three years.<\/p>\n
Another North American buyer said they \u200bsuspected that the reporting requirements were “a precursor to restrictions or outright bans on \u200bexports.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Solomon Cefai; Editing by Sonali Paul)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Solomon Cefai SINGAPORE, June 19 (Reuters) – China is stepping up scrutiny over exports of indium, leading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,144,7258,63096,308261,308260,942,74],"class_list":["post-715044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-china","tag-data-centers","tag-export-control","tag-indium-metal","tag-indium-phosphide","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}