What is it?
A hard platinum-group metal used in tiny quantities inside hard drives and increasingly in chip interconnects.
Why does it matter?
As copper wiring inside chips shrinks below a certain width, ruthenium starts to conduct better than copper does.
Deeper written sections for this material have not been published yet. Everything below is drawn straight from the source datasets and is complete.
Read the numbers correctly.
A by-product of platinum mining.
Powder, targets, and chlor-alkali electrode coatings.
Price
dollars per troy ounce: Ruthenium
Annual averagedollars per troy ounce
Basis: dollars per troy ounce: Ruthenium. Annual averages as published in USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 · source ↗. These are reference annual averages, not a live market quote.
Where it is processed and refined
| Plant | Kind | Stage | Country | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rustenburg Base & Precious Metals Refineries | Refinery | Refining | South Africa | Output |
What it is used for
All end markets →| End market | What it does there | Importance |
|---|---|---|
| Semiconductors | Interconnect at the smallest nodes | Important |