The technology that really gets protected is how to manufacture and the materials needed to manufacture the hardware that is needed to manufacture the chips.
China with their hold on neodymium could be issue. We saw during Covid, the global JIT supply chain is extremely fragile.
China has been cornering the market on rare earth metals for well over a decade now and they are well ahead of us in that department. I fully expect to see regular news soon about shortages of the rare metals. Its going to be a weird time when you start hearing folks casually use the words molybdenum, neodymium, and the other long named metals around the office lunch table. .
