Since October 2022 the United States has required a licence to ship top-end AI accelerators to China. Nvidia’s A100, H100 and later chips, and the servers built around them, can’t legally go to Chinese buyers without one, and for most of that period licences were rarely granted. Demand didn’t go away. A grey market grew to fill it, and since 2025 US prosecutors have brought a run of cases showing how servers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and in one case billions, were rerouted.

The US can block exports of American chipmaking tools, but it does not make all the tools that matter. The world’s only maker of EUV lithography machines is ASML in the Netherlands. Japan’s Tokyo Electron is a top supplier of the coating, etching and deposition systems found in every advanced fab. Without the Netherlands and Japan on board, US equipment controls on China would leak badly. Both countries did sign on, starting in 2023.

The Entity List is the US Commerce Department’s register of foreign companies, institutes and people that need a special license before they can receive items subject to US export rules. It is run by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and it has become the main tool Washington uses to slow China’s progress in chips, supercomputing, AI and surveillance technology. Since 2019, BIS has added many hundreds of Chinese entries.

Huawei is the company the US has spent the most effort trying to contain. In 2019 it was the world’s largest telecom equipment maker and was about to pass Samsung as the biggest smartphone vendor. Seven years of US measures later it is still huge, still profitable and now building its own chips, operating system and AI accelerators. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the timeline below shows how.

A neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnet is the strongest permanent magnet you can buy at scale. It sits inside most electric vehicle motors, many wind turbines, missile guidance fins, drones, hard drives and phone speakers. Getting one made takes four separate industrial steps: mining the ore, separating it into individual rare earth oxides, turning those oxides into metal and alloy, then pressing and sintering the alloy into a finished magnet. China leads every one of those steps, and its lead gets bigger the further down the chain you go.

Since 2023 China has built a licensing system around the minerals and metals it dominates. The controls started with gallium and germanium and now cover rare earths, graphite, battery materials and the technology used to process them. This page lists each measure by date, notes what is suspended and what still applies, and gives a status table at the end. Last updated: 15 September 2026. Why these minerals matter China leads in refining for most strategic minerals.

This page tracks the main US rules that limit China’s access to advanced chips, AI accelerators and chipmaking equipment. It starts with the October 2022 package and runs to the guidance Washington issued in 2026. Entries are in date order, and each one says what changed and who felt it. Last updated: 15 September 2026. How the controls work The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) sits inside the US Commerce Department and writes the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).

Semiconductor headlines run on a small vocabulary that most readers use interchangeably and almost nobody uses correctly. The difference between a company being added to the Entity List and a company being sanctioned is the difference between a licensing requirement and an asset freeze. The difference between the de minimis rule and the Foreign Direct Product Rule is the difference between a control that stops at the US border and one that reaches into a Dutch or Taiwanese factory.

A report that a Chinese state-backed company has begun manufacturing deep ultraviolet lithography machines took ASML down more than seven percent, Applied Materials down six and a half, and Lam Research down seven. By the time Korean markets opened, Samsung Electronics was off more than eleven percent, SK Hynix more than twelve, and the KOSPI more than nine. The sequence looks like one story propagating outward from a single headline. It is at least two stories, and the market priced them as if they were the same one.

I generally treat “confidential IPO filing” stories as noise — every ambitious Chinese tech company floats a Hong Kong listing rumor at some point, and most of them either stall or get quietly repriced down before they ever ring a bell. I don’t think MetaX’s filing is noise, and the reason has nothing to do with MetaX’s chips. The Shanghai-based GPU maker confidentially filed for a Hong Kong listing targeting a year-end IPO, part of what reporting describes as a surge of fundraising from rivals in the same window China’s vice premier reportedly warned domestic AI companies that resisting local chips made them traitors to the state.

The technology relationship between the United States and China did not break in a single moment. It eroded through a decade of escalating restrictions, retaliatory measures, investment screenings, and legislative maneuvers — each move accelerating the next. What began as targeted actions against individual companies has become a structural reorganization of the global technology supply chain. This timeline documents that process from its earliest institutional signals through the present. 2015 January — The Obama administration’s Department of Commerce adds CETC (China Electronics Technology Group Corporation), a state-owned defense electronics conglomerate, to the Entity List, citing its role in supplying military electronics.