The bromine chokepoint: How strife in the Middle East could halt production of the world’s memory chips

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, now in an unstable ceasefire, has exposed a structural failure in the global semiconductor memory supply chain, and it is not the one analysts seem to be tracking. The story receiving attention is helium: Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility went offline, a 45-day inventory clock started running, and spot prices doubled within days. The story receiving almost no attention is bromine, and it is potentially the more dangerous one. Bromine is the raw material from which specialized chemical suppliers produce semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas, the etch chemical that South Korean fabs use to carve the transistor structures in every Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) and NAND flash chip on earth. A DRAM chip powers active computation and loses its contents the moment power cuts. A NAND chip retains data without power and underlies every form of digital storage. Together they underpin every modern computing device, from the phone in your pocket to the data center running your AI applications.

South Korea sources 97.5 percent of its bromine imports from Israel. Beyond that vulnerable concentration, converting bromine into semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas requires dedicated purification infrastructure, and producers outside Israel are already fully committed to existing customers and stretched too thin to absorb additional demand. Building new conversion capacity takes years of permitting, equipment procurement, and fabrication qualification.

ICL Group, the Israeli multinational formerly known as Israel Chemicals Ltd., currently continues Dead Sea operations. Israel routes most trade through Mediterranean ports at Haifa and Ashdod, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely. But Iran has been striking the Negev — Israel’s southern desert and the heart of its defense and industrial infrastructure — with ballistic missiles for three weeks, hitting Dimona and Arad, both within 35 kilometers of ICL’s Dead Sea extraction and conversion complex. If Israeli bromine production is displaced, there are no conversion facilities outside Israel capable of immediately producing semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas at the scale required to replace it, and policymakers have not yet acted on that fact.

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