- CFIUS
- The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency body that reviews foreign acquisitions of American businesses for national-security risk. Expanded by the FIRRMA reform of 2018, it screens investments in critical technology, infrastructure and sensitive personal data, and can recommend blocking or unwinding deals.
- Chip 4
- A proposed coordination grouping of the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the economies holding the indispensable pieces of advanced semiconductor production. Its aim is to align export controls and secure supply chains, though divergent commercial interests keep its cohesion a matter of ongoing negotiation.
- Conditional compute diplomacy
- The practice, exemplified by the U.S.-UAE framework, of granting a partner state access to advanced chips only in exchange for security conditions such as limits on Chinese involvement, hardware safeguards and diversion assurances. Compute access becomes an instrument of alliance management rather than neutral commerce.
- Gallium and germanium controls
- Export licensing requirements and later bans that China imposed beginning in 2023 on two byproduct metals essential to power electronics, radio-frequency components and fibre optics. Because refining is concentrated in China, the restrictions are cheap to impose yet disruptive downstream, illustrating asymmetric coercion.
- Investment screening
- Government review of inbound, and increasingly outbound, investment to protect national security. Regimes such as CFIUS, Australia's FIRB and the EU FDI framework sort capital by its geopolitical origin, determining which investors may own sensitive firms, minerals, data centres and AI assets.
- Outbound investment screening
- A newer control, introduced by the United States in 2023, that restricts domestic capital and expertise from flowing into an adversary's advanced-technology sectors such as semiconductors, quantum and artificial intelligence. It reflects the view that outbound money can itself accelerate a rival's capabilities.
- Processing chokepoint
- The midstream stage of a mineral supply chain, separation and refining, where capacity is concentrated in few facilities. Control of this step, rather than of the widely available ore, is what allows a state to restrict supply, set prices and impose costs on rivals.
- Rare-earth elements
- A group of seventeen metals, including neodymium and dysprosium, that are geologically abundant but difficult to separate. Their strategic value lies in the concentrated refining and magnet-making capacity, dominated by China, that turns ore into the high-performance magnets used throughout AI-related hardware.