What Uses Nickel?
· ₹1,317.73/kg today
Still mostly a stainless-steel metal, despite years of headlines making it sound like it belongs entirely to the EV battery story — and the metal behind one of the most chaotic single weeks any exchange on this site has seen.
Where Is Nickel Used?
Real, sourced demand-share figures. Sectors with a full reference page are clickable for the deep breakdown.
Stainless Steel's Backbone
Stainless steel remains the largest single use for nickel by a wide margin, even as EV battery chemistries (nickel-rich cathodes) have grown fast enough to reshape expectations for future demand — the two markets pull on the same metal for very different reasons.
The Week the Market Broke
In March 2022, a short squeeze more than doubled nickel prices within hours, forcing the LME to suspend nickel trading for the first time in decades and cancel a full day of trades — still one of the most debated episodes in modern metals-market history.
Indonesia Rebuilt the Battery-Nickel Map
Indonesia's rapid build-out of High Pressure Acid Leach (HPAL) processing plants — a technology that lets lower-grade nickel ore be refined into the battery-grade nickel EV makers actually need — has been one of the more consequential supply-chain shifts in any metal tracked here, turning a country once known mainly for stainless-steel-grade ore into a major battery-materials supplier within the space of a few years.
Did You Know?
Indonesia's rapid rise as a nickel producer and processor over the past decade has reshaped global supply more than almost any other single-country shift in this dataset — despite Indonesia not being one of this site's 22 tracked countries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Stainless Steel is the largest identified use, at 64% of demand, followed by Batteries at 15%.
The Nickel price in India today is ₹1,317.73 per kilogram as of October 16, 2026. See the live price and chart.
Metal Applications™ is an informational reference built from public data and named sources. See the methodology page for how figures are sourced and confidence-rated.
