The Trump administration is huddling with eight global allies this week in Washington to shore up little-known minerals and materials that China controls but are needed to feed the coming AI boom.
Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, a former adviser at Palantir Technologies, is scheduled Friday to meet with counterparts from Australia, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, which are home to AI giants like Google DeepMind, Sony and Hitachi, the State Department said.
Data centers are proliferating across the U.S., and that technology is reliant on materials like gallium, germanium, indium, palladium, tantalum and silicon that are largely mined and processed abroad.
The AI boom also hinges on a host of lesser-known elements for high-performance chips at the heart of data centers, yet Beijing has a lock on many of those materials. China currently controls the bulk of global gallium and germanium production, for example, and has recently throttled markets with moves to ban exports of those materials.
