Tungsten Hexafluoride Supply Cut-off, Gripping the "Throat" of Global Chips
In the vast material library of the semiconductor industry chain, tungsten hexafluoride (WF6) has long been just a marginalized "niche specialty gas". However, in the summer of 2026, this chemical substance, which has rarely attracted public attention, forced global chip giants to the brink of a supply chain breakdown in an almost violent way.
Since April this year, the price of tungsten hexafluoride has skyrocketed, with a year-on-year increase of over 200%. What's even more fatal is that two Japanese giants, Kanto Denka and Central Glass, which account for a quarter of the global production capacity, have issued an "ultimatum" to core customers such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC: Starting from July 1st, the production of tungsten hexafluoride will be permanently stopped.
Tungsten hexafluoride is currently the only commercial precursor gas used in the chemical vapor deposition process to uniformly deposit a tungsten metal film on silicon wafers. In the microscopic world of chips, billions of transistors need to be connected to each other through metal wires to work together. Tungsten hexafluoride is the key material used to fill tiny contact holes and interlayer vias, building a conductive bridge between transistors and external circuits. The tungsten metal film has characteristics such as high electrical conductivity, excellent step coverage, and high temperature resistance, making it indispensable in the manufacturing of advanced logic chips below 7 nanometers, HBM, and 3D NAND flash memory. Although the academic and industrial circles have invested a lot of resources in researching alternative solutions, from the comprehensive perspective of yield and electrical characteristics, no technology has emerged so far that can completely replace tungsten hexafluoride in the chemical vapor deposition process and achieve large-scale mass production.
For this reason, although tungsten hexafluoride accounts for a small proportion of the total cost of chip manufacturing, it has extremely high strategic importance. Once the supply is cut off, the advanced wafer production lines worth tens of billions of dollars will have to be shut down.
01 Supply Collapse, Coupled with Soaring Demand
Let's first look at a set of data.
According to the statistics of the General Administration of Customs of China, in April 2026, the average export price of tungsten hexafluoride in China reached $149.79 per kilogram, a month-on-month increase of 203.83%. In the domestic market, the price of 5N (99.999%) tungsten hexafluoride has soared from 523 yuan per kilogram in the same period last year to 1,810 yuan per kilogram, an increase of 246%. The quoted price of 6N-grade products is as high as 2.2 million to 3 million yuan per ton, with an increase of over 190% compared to the beginning of April; the long-term contract price of 7N-grade products has even exceeded 3.3 million to 3.6 million yuan per ton.
The out-of-control price is rooted in the structural collapse of the supply side. In the production cost of tungsten hexafluoride, 60% to 70% comes from high-purity tungsten powder. More than 80% of the world's tungsten resources are concentrated in China, and Japan has almost no tungsten ore resources on its own. The raw materials of Kanto Denka and Central Glass are highly dependent on imports. Since this year, affected by geopolitical factors, the external supply of high-purity tungsten powder has been significantly tightened. According to data from Nikkei Asia, the amount of tungsten imported by Japan from China in April this year plummeted by 50% compared to the monthly average level in 2025.
Facing the dilemma of raw material supply interruption, after exhausting their remaining inventory for several months, Kanto Denka and Central Glass were forced to make a decision: Starting from July 1st, 2026, they will permanently shut down their tungsten hexafluoride production lines. These two companies together account for about 25% of the global high-end tungsten hexafluoride production capacity (about 2,200 tons per year). For a market with an annual global total demand of 8,000 to 9,000 tons, the sudden evaporation of a quarter of the production capacity is a devastating blow. According to industry estimates, the global market will directly face a supply gap of about 2,000 tons in the second half of 2026.
Meanwhile, the demand side is expanding at an exponential rate.
The explosion of generative AI has completely changed the demand curve for semiconductor materials. The extreme demand for data transmission speed in AI computing chips has directly led to the prosperity of HBM technology. HBM vertically stacks multiple layers of DRAM chips through through-silicon via (TSV) technology, and tungsten hexafluoride is the core material for TSV deep hole filling and tungsten plug processes. Compared with ordinary logic chips, the complex wiring structure of AI chips increases the consumption of tungsten hexafluoride by about three times. SK Hynix plans to significantly increase its wafer production capacity in the next five years to meet the demand for HBM. Each advanced production line will continuously consume 150 to 300 tons of tungsten hexafluoride per year.
In the field of NAND flash memory, the number of stacking layers of 3D NAND is moving from 128 layers to 300 layers or even 500 layers, and the number of deposition cycles is increasing exponentially. According to TECHCET's calculations, after the upgrade of the stacking layers, the consumption of tungsten hexafluoride per wafer has increased by about 37 times. Data shows that the global demand for tungsten hexafluoride has increased from over 4,500 tons in 2020 to nearly 9,000 tons in 2025, with an average annual compound growth rate of up to 14%.
Caught between the sharp reduction in supply and the soaring demand, downstream wafer fabs have almost no bargaining power in the face of skyrocketing prices. The current technological direction of the semiconductor industry - miniaturization and three-dimensionalization - is based on the premise of large-scale consumption of tungsten hexafluoride. Even if the price soars, it is difficult to easily reduce the usage.
02 The Dilemma of the Giants
In this supply disruption crisis, the first to be affected are the two South Korean memory chip giants, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as well as TSMC, the world's largest wafer foundry.
According to industry disclosures, previously, about 80% of Samsung and SK Hynix's tungsten hexafluoride purchases came from Japan. When the production suspension notices from Kanto Denka and Central Glass were delivered in April this year, the South Korean industry immediately sounded the highest-level alarm.
SK Hynix has shown strong supply chain resilience. Since it had previously started to build a diversified procurement channel, SK Hynix quickly transferred its orders to South Korean local suppliers SK Specialty and Foosung, as well as CSSC Special Gases in China. SK Specialty has urgently signed a long-term supply agreement of 150 tons per month to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of Japanese production capacity. However, South Korean local suppliers are also facing the pressure of soaring prices of imported high-purity tungsten powder. They have officially notified customers such as Samsung and SK Hynix that they will significantly increase the price of tungsten hexafluoride in the second half of 2026, with an expected increase of 70% to 90%. This means that even if the supply chain is not broken, the significant increase in chip manufacturing costs is already a foregone conclusion.
Samsung's situation is even more severe. All along, Samsung has been extremely dependent on the stable supply of high-quality gases from Japan. This time, it was forced to find alternative solutions in a very short period of time. Usually, the introduction of suppliers for core semiconductor materials requires a strict certification cycle of 18 to 24 months to ensure that trace impurities will not have a fatal impact on chip yield and long-term reliability. However, under the threat of supply disruption, wafer fabs such as Samsung have to break the rules and compress the verification process at an unprecedented speed, competing to snap up products from new suppliers - even though this may bring the risk of yield fluctuations in the short term.
TSMC also faces long-term challenges. Its advanced 3-nanometer and 2-nanometer processes are highly dependent on tungsten hexafluoride. Although its supply chain is relatively more diversified and its existing inventory can provide some buffer, if the global supply chain cannot be reconfigured before the new production capacity is put into operation in 2027, the capacity expansion plan for advanced processes will surely be substantially restricted.
It is worth noting that Sumitomo Electric Industries of Japan announced on May 12th that it has completely stopped purchasing tungsten from China and is turning to the United States for procurement and recycling. Mitsubishi Materials plans to invest about 10 billion yen to expand its tungsten recycling capacity in Europe and Japan. Although these measures can partially relieve the pressure in the industrial tungsten field, the purity and scale of recycling and reuse are still far from meeting the demand for semiconductor-grade 6N to 7N ultra-high-purity tungsten powder. South Korea's Almonty Sangdong Tungsten Mine is expected to be put into operation in 2026, but the processing chain from ore to semiconductor-grade high-purity tungsten powder is long, and it is difficult to form an effective supply in the short term.
03 Tungsten Retreats, Molybdenum Advances: A Material Revolution Above 300 Layers
The supply disruption crisis of tungsten hexafluoride has accelerated the exposure of the physical limit problem of tungsten materials themselves. When the number of stacking layers of 3D NAND exceeds 300 layers, the tungsten material that has been used for more than a decade has finally hit the ceiling.
In the nanoscale microscopic world, the resistivity of tungsten will experience a cliff-like increase as the line width decreases, leading to serious signal delay and heating problems. What's even more fatal is that when tungsten is deposited as a word line metal gate, an additional layer of titanium nitride (TiN) barrier layer must be laid to prevent metal diffusion. In a stacking structure of hundreds of layers, this barrier layer mercilessly squeezes the precious vertical space, directly locking the upper limit of storage density improvement.
Global memory giants have begun to turn their attention to molybdenum (Mo). Compared with tungsten, the resistivity of molybdenum at the nanoscale is only about 60% of that of tungsten, which can significantly reduce power consumption and improve read and write speeds. Molybdenum does not require a barrier layer, which can save 30% - 40% of the effective structure thickness, and it is perfectly compatible with atomic layer deposition technology, and the contact resistance can be reduced by about 56%.
An industrial wave of "replacing tungsten with molybdenum" has begun. Samsung Electronics was the first to introduce molybdenum materials into the word line metal gate in its ninth-generation 286-layer 3D NAND mass-produced in April 2024. SK Hynix plans to mass-produce 375-layer molybdenum-based NAND flash memory at its Cheongju M15 factory by the end of this year. Micron Technology is deploying the application of molybdenum in both the NAND and DRAM fields. Lam Research has clearly stated that the technological switch from tungsten to molybdenum is the only feasible path for the evolution of high-layer 3D NAND.
In the HBM field, the penetration of molybdenum is also rapid. Since HBM requires extremely high vertical stacking density, the consumption of molybdenum targets per HBM is about 3 to 5 times that of ordinary DRAM, and the penetration rate of molybdenum in the next-generation HBM4 is close to 100%. In terms of market scale, Samsung's molybdenum procurement was about 4 tons in 2025, is expected to increase to 10 tons in 2026, and is expected to reach 80 tons in 2030; SK Hynix will start large-scale introduction from 2027, with an initial annual demand of about 4 tons. The global market for electronic-grade high-purity molybdenum targets is expected to grow from 7.752 billion yuan in 2025 to 13.2 billion yuan in 2032, with an annual compound growth rate of 7.9%.
However, it must be clearly recognized that at present, "replacing tungsten with molybdenum" is still a partial replacement rather than a complete subversion. Molybdenum mainly replaces the tungsten metal film in the word line of NAND flash memory, but in the CVD processes such as TSV deep hole filling, contact holes, and vias of logic chips, the position of tungsten hexafluoride remains stable. In addition, the large-scale mass production of molybdenum still faces extremely high barriers: semiconductor-grade molybdenum precursors need to reach an ultra-high purity of 6N to 7N, are mostly solid at room temperature, require special equipment for high-temperature heating, and the cost of transforming existing production lines is extremely high.
In the next three to five years, tungsten hexafluoride and molybdenum will form a "coexisting and complementary" pattern: Molybdenum will gradually take over the role of tungsten in the high-stacking storage field, while tungsten hexafluoride will continue to play an irreplaceable role in logic chips and medium- and low-layer storage.
04 Conclusion
From the supply disruption and skyrocketing price of tungsten hexafluoride to the accelerated rise of molybdenum materials, the semiconductor material market in 2026 has sent a clear signal: In today's highly competitive advanced process race, "material security" has risen to an industrial proposition as important as "equipment security".
The tungsten hexafluoride crisis has exposed the fragility of the globalized supply chain - when a "niche material" that accounts for less than 5% of the chip manufacturing cost suddenly experiences a supply disruption, the production capacity worth hundreds of billions of dollars on the entire value chain may be paralyzed. For wafer manufacturing giants such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC, the Sword of Damocles of material supply disruption will hang over their heads for a long time. They must pay a high cost to establish a more diversified and redundant supply system. From a technical perspective, although the replacement of tungsten by molybdenum provides a way out, its maturity and large-scale production still need time.
Before the new production capacity is truly released and the alternative materials are completely mature, the global semiconductor industry will have to struggle forward in the face of high costs and a volatile supply chain. And this supply chain earthquake triggered by a "niche gas" may only be the prelude to more similar crises in the future - as the demand for chips in the AI era grows exponentially, any neglected material link may become the invisible hand that chokes the throat of the entire industry.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Semiconductor Industry Insights" (ID: ICViews), author: Junxi. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.