Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:
Kamwendo: South Africa’s platinum group metals are poised to be boosted by China’s Five-Year Plan.
Creamer: This is the 15th Five-Year Plan of China and it is near term, because it ends in 2030. What is so remarkable is that platinum group metals are fundamentally key to China’s latest Five-Year Plan. Just looking at two aspects of it, starting off with AI, artificial intelligence, China is going to invest $300-billion in AI infrastructure expansion. Now you say, well, what is AI’s link to platinum group metals? We have thought of datacentres. Of course, that can happen, but there are so many other product lines that are linked to it. We are talking about silicon production, hard disk drives, thin film coatings on semiconductors, electronic grade sensors on printed circuit boards and you can go on and on with crucibles and other things. So, this is not expected that we would be so well linked to artificial intelligence. But then, if we look at the thing that we have always been mentioning, the hydrogen side of it, platinum group metals and hydrogen, China is moving faster on hydrogen and fuel-cells that are both directly linked to platinum group metals than anywhere else on the planet. We are the biggest supplier of platinum group metals and China is already the biggest consumer. We can only see long term good news there.
