The Chinese government on Thursday announced that it was escalating its curbs on exports of rare earth metals, as Beijing claims broader jurisdiction over global manufacturing of semiconductors and other technology.
The new rules are the latest step by Beijing as it tries to tighten the reins on rare earths and exploit China’s dominance in the sector.
The changes could scramble the supply chains of some of the world’s biggest companies, including Nvidia and Apple. Rare earths are essential for the production of chips, which are used in everything from smartphones to automobiles and artificial intelligence systems.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement that the measures were needed to prevent rare earth metals from being used in technologies with possible military applications. But foreign governments and businesses have said that most rare earths are used for civilian purposes in devices like computer servers and gasoline-powered cars.
The rules bar the transfer from China of any equipment or information that would help other countries establish their own production of rare earths or rare earth magnets.
China mines and processes most of the world’s rare earths. Companies in the United States and Europe have been working to set up factories for the production of rare earth magnets, but it can take up to three years for such factories to ramp up to their maximum production capacity.
The new rules come as President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, are expected to meet soon for talks that are likely to include their countries’ many trade disputes.
Chinese government inspectors this summer ordered factories in the rare earth industry not to transfer any manufacturing equipment out of the country. Many industry technicians in China have been required to surrender their passports to prevent them from leaving the country.
For the past year, China has been gathering information on how companies around the world use rare earths. Since last October, exporters have been required to provide the authorities with detailed tracings of how shipments are used in Western supply chains.
China refines 99 percent of the world’s dysprosium, a kind of rare earth that is used in chips to preserve magnetic stability even when they become hot.
In the last few years, Nvidia and other semiconductor manufacturers have changed the material used in electricity management devices, called capacitors, on chips to make them more heat-resistant. The capacitors are made from ultrapure dysprosium, which is extremely difficult to refine. A single refinery in Wuxi, near Shanghai, produces the entire world’s supply of ultrapure dysprosium.
That mine is controlled by Shenghe Resources, a Chinese company whose biggest shareholder is China’s Ministry of Land Resources.
The United States has been aware of its vulnerability on rare earth metals since China imposed a two-month embargo in 2010 on rare earth exports to Japan. But progress on developing alternatives has been slow.
“China has cornered the market for processing and refining of key critical minerals,” then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration said in a statement last year.
In April, China imposed export controls on seven of the 17 kinds of rare earths as well as magnets made from them. The rules issued on Thursday are much broader, covering all rare earths.
The new rules would require businesses that make most chips to get an export license to sell them anywhere in the world. That means they could apply to companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which makes most of the world’s advanced logic chips, and SK Hynix and Samsung, the South Korean makers of memory chips.
Both kinds of chips are crucial components of the computers that power advanced A.I. systems. They are also technologies that Chinese companies have struggled to manufacture as well as foreign competitors do.
The rule’s sweeping scope mirrors how Washington has used export controls to control chip production anywhere in the world that uses American software or machinery.
The timing comes as A.I.-related sales have become the primary growth engine for the global economy. This week, the World Trade Organization said A.I. goods accounted for nearly half of the annual increase in global trade growth this year.
Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company by selling to companies around the world advanced A.I. servers that contain technology manufactured in Taiwan, South Korea and elsewhere. But the U.S. government has curtailed the sale of those chips to foreign countries because of concerns that China and others could use them to develop new weapons or leap ahead of American companies in developing A.I. technology.
Now, Nvidia could be in the unenviable position of needing licenses from Washington and Beijing to sell its chips.
Tripp Mickle contributed reporting from San Francisco.