Every Advanced Chip Is Wired With Tungsten. China Just Cut the World's Legal Suppliers to 15 Companies.
Tungsten fills the microscopic vias that connect a chip's transistors to the metal wiring stacked above them — a job nothing else does at scale. China mines roughly 80% of the world's tungsten, and starting this year, only 15 Chinese companies hold a government license to export any of it. In 2025, US importers were approved for zero of those licenses.
Wiring a chip: watch tungsten make the vertical connections
A simplified 3-layer slice of a chip. Press Run to fabricate it: tungsten (amber) fills each via, bottom to top, linking the transistor layer up through the metal layers above it. Real chips have dozens of these layers and thousands of vias per square millimeter — this shows the same principle at readable scale.
Press Run to fill the contacts and vias in order, bottom to top — the same sequence a fab follows during middle-of-line processing.
The plain version
Think of an advanced chip as a multi-story parking garage built at a scale you can't see. The transistors live on the ground floor. Above them are several more floors of metal wiring that carry electricity around, layer stacked on layer. To get power and signals from the ground floor up to those wiring levels, you need ramps — millions of them, packed impossibly close together. Tungsten is the material that fills those ramps. It's the one metal that can be poured into holes a few dozen atoms wide, survive the intense heat of the manufacturing process, and still carry current reliably for years. Nothing else does that job at the scale a chip factory needs, for the vast bulk of the chips the world actually makes.
Here's the catch: China mines roughly 80% of the world's tungsten. For years, that mattered less because tungsten was cheap and easy to buy. That changed fast. In February 2025, Beijing put tungsten on its export-license list. Then, in late December, it narrowed the field further: starting in 2026, only 15 Chinese companies are legally allowed to export any tungsten at all, and every shipment still needs its own government approval, which can take one to two months.
The results showed up immediately. Chinese tungsten prices more than tripled over 2025. And American importers — who need the metal for everything from chips to drill bits to jet engines — got approved for exactly zero export licenses the entire year.
If you make electronics, weapons systems, or industrial tools, your supply chain now runs through a government-picked list of 15 phone numbers, each call subject to a permission slip.
The expert version
In middle-of-line (MOL) processing, after transistors are formed, contact holes are etched down to the source, drain and gate terminals and filled with tungsten via chemical vapor deposition (CVD), typically over a titanium/titanium-nitride liner that promotes adhesion and blocks diffusion. The same approach fills the vias connecting successive back-end-of-line (BEOL) copper metal layers at the layers closest to the transistor, where feature sizes are too small for copper's electromigration and gap-fill behavior to work reliably. Tungsten's appeal is a combination of excellent CVD conformality into high-aspect-ratio holes, high electromigration resistance, and a melting point (~3,422°C) and thermal stability that survive subsequent processing steps without reflow or voiding. At the most advanced logic nodes, fabs are piloting cobalt and ruthenium as tungsten replacements in the lowest, narrowest via layers — but tungsten remains the dominant contact/via material across the mainstream and trailing-edge nodes that still account for the large majority of global chip volume, plus in through-silicon vias for advanced packaging.
China's leverage sits upstream of the fab: USGS estimates put China's 2025 mined tungsten output at roughly 67,000 of the world's ~85,000 tonnes (≈80%), and its midstream position — converting ore to ammonium paratungstate (APT), tungsten oxides and cemented carbide — is even more concentrated, so non-Chinese mined ore often still passes through Chinese processing. On February 4, 2025, China's Ministry of Commerce added tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium and molybdenum to its dual-use export control list, requiring individual export licenses. In late December 2025, MOFCOM tightened the regime from a product-license system to a company-level whitelist for 2026–2027: only 15 named firms (including China Tungsten & Hightech Materials, a China Minmetals unit, and Xiamen Tungsten) may apply to export tungsten at all, versus 11 for antimony and 44 for silver under the same rules. Each order is still assessed case-by-case, with end-use and destination review adding roughly one to two months per shipment. The measurable effect: Chinese APT and ferrotungsten prices rose more than 200% over 2025 on the combination of licensing friction and fresh semiconductor-driven demand, while US importers were approved for zero tungsten export licenses across the year — a de facto embargo achieved without ever being labeled one.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: if you build electronics, drill rigs, or defense hardware, your tungsten supply now runs through 15 government-picked companies and a permission slip — not a market.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: a company-level export whitelist is a harder chokepoint than a product ban — it lets Beijing throttle volume, timing and destination shipment-by-shipment without ever declaring a formal embargo, and it sits underneath every fab's contact/via process, not just one exotic material niche.