Pentagon's Missing Metal

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American West Metals (AWMLF) is an OTC-listed nanocap stock quoted ~$0.03/share and worth ~US$28M. It’s also a pre-revenue explorer with a going-concern note.

That doesn’t sound very promising until you learn:

Today’s valuation covers little more than the risked value of the copper project, meaning the indium asset and any government funding that follows are effectively priced as a free call option. While the primary downside risks are equity dilution at lower prices and thin OTC liquidity, the upside cases offer multi-bagger potential relative to current levels.

For context, this is the third US critical-minerals chokepoint I've written up:

Both showed the exact same pattern, where Washington hands out contracts and loans once a company owns a piece of a supply chain China controls. The key difference is that American West is years earlier and pre-revenue, which is what US$28M buys instead of the $577M and $4B those two commanded when I wrote them up.

Below, I cover the indium squeeze, what West Desert actually holds, the copper project that carries the current valuation, and the dilution you're signing up for. Then I conclude by discussing what the assets could be worth and whether I'm buying now.

Indium is a soft metal that has no mines of its own. It’s found inside zinc ore at a few parts per million and gets recovered as a byproduct when zinc concentrate (processed ore powder) is smelted into metal, so global supply is small, inelastic, and tied to whoever runs zinc smelters.

Refined production runs ~1,100 tonnes a year worldwide (per the USGS), plus an estimated ~1,000 tonnes recovered from recycled scrap. At today's ~$972/kg, the entire primary market is worth ~US$1.1B a year (1,100t × $972/kg).

That's a rounding error next to copper, where a single year of mine output is worth ~US$340B at today's price (23.5Mt × $6.61/lb), roughly 320x the indium market.

But don't mistake a small market for a dispensable one! Most indium becomes indium tin oxide (ITO), the transparent, conductive coating on touchscreens, TV and monitor displays, and solar cells. It also doubles as a stealth coating for military aircraft due to its low infrared emissivity and microwave absorption.

Beyond ITO, the fastest-growing demand driver is indium phosphide (InP), the semiconductor material behind the lasers that move data as light inside AI data centers (via silicon photonics).

In March, Nvidia invested $2B into Coherent and another $2B into Lumentum, the two big US makers of InP lasers, to secure optical supply for its data center roadmap.

By July, Lumentum's CEO said customers were asking for at least 30% more InP lasers than the industry's five fabs can currently produce, and Rosenblatt Securities reported Nvidia asked suppliers for 20x more InP laser capacity through 2030.

So who supplies the metal all of that hardware depends on? Mostly China, which refines 70% of global supply. Meanwhile the US produces zero indium and imports 100% of what it consumes:

The US gets most of its indium supply from South Korea, Japan, China, and Canada. But those Korean and Japanese refiners sit downstream of Chinese raw feed, leaving the US heavily exposed to China.

And China is no stranger to restricting exports:

Washington is now pushing back across the board:

All of this supply tightening and policy panic is already hitting physical prices. Indium runs ~$972/kg, up 22.8% y/y, and gallium runs ~$2,269/kg, up 141% since the start of 2025:

So the setup for the US is a metal with no domestic production, no domestic mine, rising AI and defense demand, and a dominant supplier that has started restricting it.

There’s exactly one US deposit with a modern, code-compliant indium resource, and a US$28M company owns 100% of it, and that company is American West Metals (AWMLF).