A handful of Chinese soil has brought two Japanese giants to a standstill

Two Japanese companies have brought a special electronic gas to the forefront of the world, and even TSMC and Samsung have to heed their wishes.

Then, overnight, they announced permanent production suspension. It wasn't because of a lack of technology but because the raw materials ran out. And they had been buying those raw materials entirely from China.

Running out of supplies

On January 6, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce issued Announcement No. 1 for this year. There was no press conference and no interpretive articles. It was just quietly posted on the official website.

The Japanese didn't notice. Kanto Denka didn't notice. Central Glass didn't notice.

They still had inventory. High-purity tungsten powder was piled up in the warehouse, enough to last for several months. The purchasing department placed orders as usual. The emails were sent out, and tons of products arrived. It was cheap and the supply was stable.

No one thought it was a risk.

In February, the customs data showed: the export of tungsten carbide powder and tungsten powder to Japan was zero.

In March, it was zero. In April, it was still zero.

According to Kyodo News, citing data from the General Administration of Customs, China's tungsten powder exports to Japan were zero for three consecutive months from February to April 2026.

The inventory of Kanto Denka fell below the safety line. Central Glass was looking for alternative suppliers everywhere. Mitsubishi Materials invested 10 billion yen to step up the recycling of waste tungsten.

If they switched to buying from other countries, the price was three times higher. As for the purity, it was far from reaching the 6N level.

These two Japanese companies together accounted for nearly a quarter of the global high-end tungsten hexafluoride production capacity. Junichi Hasegawa, the president of Kanto Denka, and Kazuhiko Maeda, the president of Central Glass, now had to face a cruel reality:

The raw material for producing high-end tungsten hexafluoride - 6N high-purity tungsten powder - could no longer be bought. And almost all of this powder was in China.

The Achilles' heel

Let's first talk about what tungsten hexafluoride is.

The soul of AI chips is HBM high-bandwidth memory. Dozens of storage chips are stacked together. Inside these chips, there are densely packed nanoscale contact holes, thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

Although other metals can also be used for the contact holes, tungsten is still the absolute mainstay at present. And the special electronic gas that can deposit tungsten into these micro-holes, tungsten hexafluoride, is the most crucial.

Without tungsten hexafluoride, there would be no HBM. Without HBM, NVIDIA's GPUs would be a pile of scrap metal.

The Japanese used to be the best in the world at producing this special electronic gas. Kanto Denka could achieve a purity of six nines, which means only one impurity was allowed to be mixed in among one million molecules.

But a gas of six nines requires 6N powder.

In the past decade or so, the Japanese bought Chinese tungsten powder by the ton. It was cheap and the supply was stable. In the eyes of the Japanese, the rectification tower was the moat, and the powder was nothing. To some extent, it was just like dirt.

But at a critical moment, it was precisely this "dirt" that choked the Japanese.

The Japanese weren't without a struggle.

They tried to use low-purity coarse powder and forcefully purify it with the rectification tower. But the most troublesome thing in the coarse powder was molybdenum - molybdenum and tungsten are in the same group in the periodic table, and their chemical properties are like twins.

Once they enter the reaction kettle and react with fluorine gas, they both turn into gas, and their boiling points are so close that they can't be separated at all.

You have money, policies, and a sense of crisis, but you're helpless against the limits of chemical engineering.

Perseverance

The Chinese didn't achieve this overnight either.

To purify tungsten powder, impurities need to be removed, and one of the most difficult impurities to remove is molybdenum.

Molybdenum and tungsten have similar chemical properties and dissolve in water in the same way. Separating molybdenum from tungsten is as difficult as separating salt and monosodium glutamate from a pot of soup.

The solution is to add a sulfurizing agent to the solution. Molybdenum has a stronger affinity for sulfur than tungsten and will grab onto the sulfur first, while tungsten remains unchanged. At this moment, molybdenum can be removed.

It sounds simple.

How narrow is this moment? If the pH is off a little, molybdenum will let go and mix with tungsten again. The parameter window is as narrow as walking on a tightrope at high altitude.

There is no shortcut to making a breakthrough. The only way is the most stupid one:

Adjust the pH, change the adsorbent, and modify the extraction solution. Test them one by one, and even the adsorbent itself needs to be remade.

It took several generations and decades to reduce the amount of molybdenum in the solution to an acceptable level.

Huang Changgeng, the chairman of Xiamen Tungsten, joined the company in 1987 and never left until he retired not long ago.

During this period, he went from the workshop to the management. For 39 years, he only did this one thing, leading the team to persevere from producing coarse powder to 6N powder, pushing Chinese tungsten powder to the global peak.

Source: Xiamen Tungsten

In addition to Xiamen Tungsten, there is also China Tungsten High - tech.

So far, these two are among the very few companies in the world that can mass - produce 6N high - purity tungsten powder on a large scale.

China has high - purity tungsten powder. The Japanese buy the powder, produce tungsten hexafluoride, and then resell it to Samsung and TSMC at double the price.

This business seems to be extremely profitable.

Then, the Japanese broke their own door.

Turning the tables

According to reports from multiple media, Kanto Denka and Central Glass have officially notified major customers such as Samsung and SK Hynix:

The last batch of goods will be delivered on June 30. Production will be permanently suspended starting from July 1.

Since January 2026, the import of high - purity tungsten powder from China has basically dropped to zero. The two Japanese companies managed to hold on with their inventory for five months, but it finally ran out.

Not only was the raw material supply cut off, but what was even more fatal was the uncertainty. Even if they managed to get the tungsten powder and restart the production line, what if the supply was cut off again next time?

During the shutdown period, the tungsten hexafluoride remaining in the pipeline will hydrolyze when it comes into contact with water, and hydrogen fluoride will corrode the valves and welds. The cost of restarting and overhauling is high.

Repeatedly starting and stopping is equivalent to suicide.

When the news reached Seoul, Samsung and SK Hynix were in a hurry. These two South Korean semiconductor giants had previously sourced most of their tungsten hexafluoride from Japan. Samsung's inventory wouldn't last until June.

Without tungsten hexafluoride, there would be no HBM, and NVIDIA's orders would also be gone.

The certification cycle, which used to be a headache for Chinese companies, suddenly wasn't a problem anymore. Chinese tungsten hexafluoride suppliers have become the darlings of leading wafer fabs.

The door is open, and the players have changed.

Thirty years ago, China mined the ore while others counted the money. Low - purity coarse powder was sold by the ton. Others purified it, made it into gas and target materials, and the value increased dozens of times.

Thirty years later, the Chinese have persevered to increase the purity from 3N to 6N. The most humble "dirt" has overturned the most exalted throne.

On July 1, the tungsten hexafluoride production line at Kanto Denka's Shibukawa Factory is about to be shut down.

Meanwhile, in Chinese high - purity tungsten powder production lines and tungsten hexafluoride factories, domestic materials are pouring out continuously and then being loaded onto trucks and sent to the port.

But this time, Japanese manufacturers are no longer on the destination list.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Huashang Taolue" (ID: hstl8888). The author is Huashang Taolue. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.