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.