this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.
I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it's not going to be cheap.
Modern transistors aren't just silicon though. The silicon is doped with various materials, presumably gallium, boron, arsenic, phosphorus, and cobalt, among other elements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_%28semiconductor%29
But material costs don't matter much in computer pricing.
Exactly… the price of these new materials/CPUs isn’t in the amount of “exotic” elements, which is barely measurable on a per-unit basis, but in the production.