Critical materials—the collective term for metals and minerals essential for all kinds of advanced technology and clean energy—are vital to the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), which has become pervasive in everyday life. AI hardware relies on familiar elements like aluminum, silicon and copper, and unfamiliar elements like gallium, germanium, palladium and neodymium to support the computational power, data transmission, and cooling systems required to process vast amounts of data at high speeds.
