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.

For years US export controls stopped American chips and tools from reaching Chinese military-linked users, while American venture capital could still fund the Chinese startups building rival chips and AI models. The outbound investment rules close that gap. Since January 2, 2025, US persons have been barred from some investments in Chinese semiconductor, quantum and AI companies, and must report others to the Treasury Department. This is a different tool from export controls.

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.

Sanctions are legal restrictions that stop people and companies from dealing with a named target: a government, a company, a ship, an individual. Four systems matter most for anyone doing business across borders. The United States runs the most powerful one, because so much of the world’s money moves in dollars. The EU and the UK run their own regimes, which overlap with Washington’s but are written and enforced differently. The UN Security Council sits above all three in law but has no enforcement arm of its own.

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.

US export controls and sanctions come with a thick layer of acronyms. News stories about Nvidia, Huawei or chip tools often use them without explanation. This glossary defines the terms that come up most, grouped by the agency or rulebook they belong to, with a note on how each one shows up in practice. Last updated: 15 September 2026. The agencies BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security) The part of the US Commerce Department that runs export controls on commercial and dual-use items, meaning goods, software and technology with both civilian and military uses.

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.

AI sovereignty is the capacity of a state to develop, deploy and govern artificial intelligence systems without depending on infrastructure, models or rules controlled by another state. The term entered mainstream policy vocabulary around 2023 and has since been applied to national compute programmes, domestic model development, data residency law and regulatory regimes. It is used loosely, and that looseness matters: the phrase bundles together at least four distinct claims with radically different price tags and success rates.

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.

The same carbon fiber that stiffens a racing bicycle frame can reinforce a ballistic missile’s nose cone. The nickel superalloys machined into jet turbine blades are equally at home in the combustion chambers of cruise missiles. Dual-use materials — substances whose physical properties make them valuable in both civilian industry and military hardware — sit at the intersection of commerce, science, and national security in ways that no clean regulatory line has ever fully resolved.

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.