A look at gallium nitride chips, which could replace silicon chips in a growing range of electronics and be produced in conventional fabs, unlike graphene chips
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @wsj , @amcafee , @raju , @wsj , and @gyude_moore Tweets: @wsj : Meet gallium, the weird metal that melts in your hand and is powering a revolution in electronics https://www.wsj.com/... Andrew McAfee / @amcafee : “you can now buy a GaN charger for $20 to $70 that is better in every way than the ones that came with your gadgets.” https://www.wsj.com/... #MorefromLess THREAD time! Raju Narisetti / @raju : On Gallium An industrial waste byproduct of extracting aluminum from rock, gallium has such a low melting temperature that it turns into a runny, silvery-white liquid when you hold it in your hand. On its own, it isn't terribly useful. https://www.wsj.com/...? @WSJ @wsj : Gallium, once an industrial-waste product, is transforming our increasingly electrified world https://www.wsj.com/... W. Gyude Moore / @gyude_moore : Not long ago GaN was a “mere laboratory curiosity. Then the Pentagon got interested... Beginning around 2000, funding from Darpa,...drove the experimentation required to overcome many of the hurdles to its commercialization...” https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece picks up a thread the coverage has been following since 2019 reporting on gallium nitride as key to miniaturizing 5G tech — with the added wrinkle that China controlled 95% of gallium's global supply even then. The differentiator against rival post-silicon bets is manufacturability: unlike graphene, whose champions have faced what experts call immense manufacturing hurdles and costs despite research showing graphene can act as a semiconductor, GaN runs through conventional fabs.
That fab-compatibility claim has since been stress-tested at scale — Infineon moved GaN onto 300mm wafers producing 2.3x more chips than 200mm — while the material's Achilles heel surfaced separately: after China restricted exports, gallium hit $595 per kilogram, its highest price since 2011.
First-order effects
- Consumer electronics buyers get the change first: GaN chargers now sell for roughly $20 to $70 and outperform the bundled silicon-based bricks they replace, turning an industrial waste byproduct of aluminum extraction into a consumer product category.
- Chipmakers can adopt GaN without greenfield plants — production in conventional fabs means existing capacity, not new construction, is the gating factor for scaling beyond chargers into 5G and AI applications.
Second-order effects
- Infineon's 300mm wafer push forces the rest of the power-semiconductor field to match larger formats or concede the cost curve, accelerating GaN adoption for AI workloads specifically.
- China's grip on raw gallium turns every GaN design win into a sourcing decision: the export-restriction-driven price spike gives non-Chinese aluminum producers and recyclers a reason to treat gallium recovery as a product line rather than waste handling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, post-silicon candidates sort into two tracks — materials that fit conventional fabs (GaN) scale commercially while superior-on-paper lab materials (graphene) stay stranded by process economics, making manufacturability, not performance, the selector.
- The DARPA funding from around 2000 that seeded GaN commercialization, paired with China's supply leverage over the feedstock, points toward semiconductor materials policy becoming a defense-industrial concern on both sides.
The trend: Silicon replacement is proceeding along the axis of fab compatibility, with GaN scaling inside existing plants while geopolitics of the gallium supply chain sets the ceiling on how fast it displaces silicon.