China dominates global critical mineral refinement, controlling approximately 70% of rare earth processing and significant shares of other semiconductor-essential materials.
Upstream materials that gate chipmaking, packaging, and data-center buildout. The structural bottleneck is typically refining and processing capacity, not extraction.
AI hardware pulls demand from a narrow set of inputs: rare earth elements for magnets, gallium and germanium for compound semiconductors, cobalt and lithium for storage and power systems, and high-purity copper and aluminum for electrical and thermal management.
Processing and separation steps concentrate in a small number of jurisdictions. This makes export controls and permitting delays systemically important.
Semiconductor-grade materials require stringent purity and consistency. The constraint is often qualification and process integration, not only tonnage.