The Gold That Gets Used Up

Almost all the gold ever mined is still with us. It sits in vaults and jewellery boxes and coin cabinets, and owning it does not consume it. There is one exception, and it is the subject of this piece: gold in electronics and medicine. This is the working gold, the fraction that is spread so thinly through the world's machinery that most of it is never seen again. It is the least understood use of the metal, and it is the only one where gold is genuinely spent.

It is also, in the language of the trade, the only place where gold has to compete on merit. Nobody puts gold inside a microchip out of sentiment. It goes in because the engineer costed every alternative first.

Seven per cent

Start with the size of it, because the size is the surprise. The United States Geological Survey publishes an annual breakdown in its Mineral Commodity Summaries, and the 2026 edition puts it plainly. Estimated global gold consumption, excluding exchange traded funds and similar investments, was "in jewelry, 40%; physical bars, 24%; central banks and other institutions, 21%; official coins and medals and imitation coins, 7%; electrical and electronics, 7%; and other, 1%."

Seven per cent, and one more for everything industrial that is not electronics. Against world mine production the USGS estimates at 3,300 tonnes for 2025, that is a narrow seam.

The World Gold Council counts the same ground in tonnes. Its Gold Demand Trends for the full year 2025 gives technology demand of 322.8 tonnes, down 1 per cent on 2024's 326.2. Inside that, electronics took 270.4 tonnes, flat on the year. Other industrial uses took 44.2 tonnes, down 5 per cent. Dentistry took 8.2 tonnes, down 7 per cent. In the second quarter of 2026 the same series reports technology at 80.4 tonnes, up 2 per cent, with electronics up 4 per cent to 68.3 tonnes.

Our own arithmetic, offered as ours: 270.4 tonnes is about 8 per cent of a year's mine production, and the whole technology category is under 10 per cent. At the price our own markets feed returned at 07:06 UTC on 23 September 2026, $4,330.80 an ounce or £104.60 a gram, a year of the world's technology gold is worth roughly £34 billion. That is a large number and a small share. It is also, unlike the rest, the share that does not come back to the market as somebody's necklace.

Why gold, and not something cheaper

The reason is the same reason this series has been circling for thirty articles, turned inside out. The Royal Society of Chemistry's entry for element 79 states it without romance. Gold "is chemically unreactive". Gold "is ideal for protecting electrical copper components because it conducts electricity well and does not corrode (which would break the contact). Thin gold wires are used inside computer chips to produce circuits."

That is the whole case. A copper contact that tarnishes is a contact that fails, and it fails after the product has left the factory, inside something a customer has already paid for. Gold is bought to prevent a future event. Silver conducts better and corrodes. Aluminium is cheap and oxidises. Gold does neither, and the price of that is paid once.

The Council's own reporting shows where the demand is now coming from. The artificial intelligence boom, it writes, "continued to drive demand for gold in electronics (the dominant category of demand in this sector), with high-speed computing accelerating the use of bonding wire and contact and interconnect materials." Bonding wire is the fine thread that joins a silicon die to the legs of its package. It is measured in microns, and there are billions of them.

Two further notes from the same RSC entry, both worth having. Gold nanoparticles "are increasingly being used as industrial catalysts", including in the making of vinyl acetate, the feedstock for PVA glue and paint. And gold "has no known biological role, and is non-toxic", which is the sentence that opens the second half of this story.

Fifty grams, a million miles away

The most famous gold object of the last decade holds less gold than a heavy bracelet.

NASA's own overview of the James Webb Space Telescope records that "each mirror segment is coated in a thin layer of gold roughly 100 nanometers (0.000004 inches) thick, or roughly 1/1000 the thickness of a sheet of paper", and that "the total amount of gold on the mirrors is only about 50 grams (less than 2 ounces, or about the mass of a golf ball)". The reason is optical rather than decorative: "Gold is used instead of aluminum or silver because it reflects red to mid-infrared light extremely well."

We checked that figure rather than repeating it. The agency gives the primary mirror a collecting area of 25.37 square metres. A layer 100 nanometres thick over that area is 2.537 cubic centimetres of metal, and at gold's density of 19.3 grams per cubic centimetre that is 49 grams. NASA says about 50. The arithmetic and the agency agree, which is what proves we read the same numbers they published.

At this morning's price those 50 grams are worth about £5,230. The telescope cost billions. NASA also notes that a thin layer of glass goes on top "to protect it from scratches in case of handling or if particles get on the surface and move around (the gold is pure and very soft)." The most expensive telescope ever built carries a golf ball of gold, beaten to a thousandth of the thickness of paper, and then has to be protected from being touched.

The medicine whose own label says nobody knows

Gold has been given to human beings as a drug, and it still is. The licensed American label for RIDAURA, the oral gold compound auranofin, is published in full on the National Library of Medicine's DailyMed. It states that "auranofin contains 29% gold", that the drug is indicated in the management of adults with active rheumatoid arthritis who have not responded to anti inflammatory drugs, and that the gold stays a long time: "the mean terminal body half-life was 80 days".

Then it says something a medicine label very rarely says. "The mechanism of action of RIDAURA (auranofin) is not understood." And, a paragraph later, "there is no substantial evidence, however, that gold-containing compounds induce remission of rheumatoid arthritis." The practice even has its own name in the label, chrysotherapy, gold therapy, which tells you how old it is.

In Britain the injected form is gone. An NHS shared care information sheet for injectable gold, sodium aurothiomalate, sold as Myocrisin, carries the notice at the top of the page: "DISCONTINUED: Manufacture of Myocrisin (Sodium aurothiomalate) injection has ceased." No new patient is to start it, and existing patients are to be moved to something else. The sheet's own summary of the drug ends with four flat words: "This drug is now rarely used."

The modern work is different in kind and is nowhere near a conclusion, and we report only that it exists. The public registry at ClinicalTrials.gov records a gold nanocrystal suspension, CNM-Au8, taken through a Phase 1 study in 86 healthy volunteers and through a Phase 2 and 3 regimen of the HEALEY ALS Platform Trial with 161 participants, both recorded as completed. Nothing in this article is a medical claim of any kind. A registry entry is a record that a trial happened, and that is all we are saying.

The use that is vanishing

One column of the table only ever goes down. Dentistry was 8.9 tonnes in 2024, 8.2 tonnes in 2025, and 1.9 tonnes in the second quarter of 2026, falling 6 per cent year on year. The Council gives the reason in six words: "alternative materials continued to dominate." The USGS series agrees, putting dental consumption down 8 per cent across the first nine months of 2025.

Eight tonnes is a quarter of one per cent of a year's mining. A use that ran for centuries is closing quietly, replaced by ceramic, and nobody outside the trade has noticed.

The engineers paid to remove it

Here is the honest half, and it is the half a gold dealer has least reason to write down. In the one sector where gold is actually consumed, a great deal of skilled effort is being spent on using less of it.

The Council's own words: "The rising gold price continues to pressure component manufacturers; fieldwork suggests increased R&D into thrifting and substitution of gold across all sectors." Thrifting is the industry's term for using less of a material to do the same job. In lighting, it reports that newer mini and micro LEDs "generally require less gold" and in some cases none at all, and are taking share from the older mass market parts. In printed circuit boards, manufacturers have "accelerated thrifting measures and are increasingly exploring alternative materials".

So the working gold is under attack from two directions at once: from its own price, and from cleverer engineering. And after all that, in the year just counted, electronics demand did not fall. It came in flat at 270 tonnes, and rose again in the second quarter of 2026. Every year somebody sets out to design the gold out, and every year the total holds, because the alternatives lose contact and gold does not.

What the working gold tells you

This series has spent thirty articles on gold as money, and the argument has always been the same: what fails is never the metal, it is the promise written against it. The working gold is that argument tested somewhere nobody is arguing about money at all.

A telescope a million miles from any repair, a contact inside a chip that has to survive twenty years in a hot box, a compound sitting in human tissue with a half life of eighty days. In each case an engineer or a chemist looked for a material that would not change, priced every substitute, and came back to element 79. They are not making a point about central banks. They are buying the one property gold has always had, and they are paying a record price for it because nothing else does the job.

The rest of it, the 99 per cent that is not used up, is the same metal making the same guarantee to whoever holds it. Most of the working gold is scattered too thinly to recover, which is the other half of the story of the gold that comes back. The gold that does come back is the kind you can hold: the chain, the ring, the bracelet, whose guarantee is struck into its surface rather than printed in a specification. If you have some and you want to know what it is, you can read the marks yourself, or bring it to us.

This article is history and reporting, not financial or medical advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any asset, and nothing here is a statement about the safety or effectiveness of any medicine. Figures are stated as at the dates given, and the gold price moves.

Sources: United States Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (Gold); World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025 and Q2 2026, Technology sections; Royal Society of Chemistry, Periodic Table, Gold; NASA, James Webb Space Telescope, Telescope Overview and Webb's Mirrors; US National Library of Medicine, DailyMed, RIDAURA (auranofin) label; NHS Nottinghamshire Area Prescribing Committee, Injectable Gold information sheet; ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02755870 and NCT04414345.