The Bromine Chokepoint: How Strife Could Halt Production of World’s Memory Chips

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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.

The vulnerability sits in plain sight, within missile range and outside any meaningful policy response. A disruption would be immediate and global. Within weeks, shortages would propagate across everything from consumer devices to military systems.

Bromine’s role in semiconductor manufacturing is specific and non-substitutable. Its primary derivative, hydrogen bromide, is consumed at the polysilicon etching stage foundational to both DRAM and NAND flash production. Each DRAM memory cell requires a polysilicon gate electrode etched with extreme precision over a silicon oxide layer as thin as 20 angstroms. Hydrogen bromide gas plasmas achieve a polysilicon-to-oxide selectivity ratio of 100 to 1, while chlorine-based alternatives achieve roughly 30 to 1. At advanced DRAM node geometries, that is the difference between a functional transistor and a destroyed one. Bromine also appears in chemical vapor deposition processes and chip packaging. There is no viable near-term substitute in any of these applications.

Three structural realities determine why the gap cannot be bridged through market reallocation. First, bromine already converted for industrial use such as flame retardants and drilling fluids cannot be reconverted. Those processes are chemically irreversible at any industrial scale and the resulting compounds cannot meet the parts-per-billion purity specifications that fabrication facilities require. The two supply chains draw from the same raw material but diverge permanently at the point of conversion. Second, converting raw bromine to semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas requires dedicated purification infrastructure, specifically gas-phase distillation columns capable of lowering trace metals to parts-per-billion contamination levels. That infrastructure does not exist at scale outside the existing semiconductor chemical supply chain, and building more facilities requires permitting, equipment procurement, testing, and fabrication qualification measured in years. Third, producers such as Resonac, Air Liquide, and Adeka manufacture semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas outside Israel, but their combined capacity is already committed to existing customers: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s dominant contract chipmaker; Samsung, the leading producer of DRAM and high-bandwidth memory; and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s largest state-backed foundry. Critically, those customers are not holding steady: AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating demand across the board, meaning outside producers are stretched thin against a growing baseline. Even if outside producers could expand output, South Korean facilities would be competing for that capacity with Taiwan, Samsung’s own logic plants, and China, all of whom face the same accelerating demand.

The Dead Sea is among the most bromine-rich bodies of water on earth. ICL Group, which extracts at the lowest cost of any producer globally, dominates a supply that Israel and Jordan together account for roughly two thirds of globally. Critically, ICL’s hydrogen bromide gas production, including the semiconductor-grade output supplied to South Korean fabrication plants, is manufactured at the same Sodom facility where extraction occurs, meaning extraction and conversion infrastructure are co-located in the same vulnerable corridor. Iranian missiles have already penetrated Israeli air defenses in the Negev on multiple occasions, wounding nearly 200 people in Dimona and Arad, both in the same geographic corridor as ICL’s production and conversion sites.

The mechanism of disruption does not require a direct hit on an ICL facility. War risk insurance for vessel calls at Israeli ports has already risen from 0.2 percent to between 0.7 and 1.0 percent of vessel value per seven-day call, adding up to $500,000 in costs per voyage on a mid-sized cargo ship. Even for ships routed through the Mediterranean rather than the Red Sea, those insurance costs apply the moment a vessel calls at an Israeli port. The war risk premium follows the port, not the route. ZIM, Israel’s primary shipping line, has implemented a “war risk premium surcharge” on all cargo to and from Israel. Haifa oil refinery — the country’s largest — was shut down after its power station was damaged in an Iranian attack, demonstrating that critical industrial infrastructure does not require a direct strike to be forced offline. The downstream consequences of even a partial disruption to that corridor would propagate immediately across the global memory supply chain.

Samsung and SK hynix together dominate approximately 70 percent of the global DRAM market. SK hynix alone holds roughly 57 percent of the high bandwidth memory market. Since DRAM and NAND underpin every modern computing device, a supply disruption would propagate across the full consumer and industrial electronics stack, not only AI infrastructure. High bandwidth memory — a specialized form of DRAM stacked vertically to deliver the data speeds that AI accelerators such as Nvidia’s graphics processing units require — is sold out through 2026, and DRAM suppliers hold only two to three weeks of inventory. A shortage would force both companies to allocate scarce hydrogen bromide gas to their highest-value lines — high bandwidth memory for AI accelerators — at the expense of commodity DRAM and NAND used in phones, personal computers, laptops, and data storage. The consequences fall hardest across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, where memory already accounts for 15 to 20 percent of the bill