China is moving to break the U.S. chip and AI boom, which is bad for American tech stocks and for Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese chipmakers, and good for Beijing.

• Chip stocks are now the most overbought since the dotcom bubble and make up 14% of the S&P 500, a bubble inside the AI bubble.
• The Iran war cut off a quarter of global helium and most of the bromide needed to make chips, pushing prices and chipmaker profits higher.
• Korea, Japan, and Taiwan get most of their energy from Middle East oil and gas, so their production costs are jumping while China runs cheap on coal and renewables.
• China is flooding the world with cheap memory chips, and Chinese chips from CXMT are already showing up inside Western brand-name computer RAM.
• Huawei claims a new chip design that could reach 1.4nm without the Dutch machines the U.S. blocked, which would make years of export controls useless.
• Beijing is blocking sales of Chinese AI startups to U.S. buyers and restricting overseas travel for top AI staff at Alibaba and DeepSeek to keep talent at home.

Outlook: If China keeps gaining on chips while energy costs stay high for U.S. allies, the AI stock bubble looks increasingly fragile and Beijing gains real leverage over the global tech supply chain.