- China is introducing new export controls on rare earth elements
- Those elements are used to make a large number of PC components.
- This could put further pricing pressures on manufacturers of those components, in addition to existing market forces that drive up the cost of drives and RAM.
If you don’t want to hear any more negativity about increased price pressures on PCs and related components like SSDs, then get ready: there’s a new danger on the horizon.
Tom’s Hardware reports that China is introducing new export controls on rare earth elements that are used in the manufacturing of many important PC components.
This measure will take effect from December 2025 and is actually an extension of rules introduced in April, which extend China’s export controls to elements such as holmium, thulium, erbium, ytterbium, europium, terbium and more.
China says that the distribution of these rare earth elements is being strictly monitored as a matter of national security, and that the export of these materials for uses in semiconductors or the defense industry will be denied.
Not only that, but the new standards also apply to the associated technical knowledge of how items are turned into magnets.
Magnets are vital for storage products, as are the rare earth elements involved in building motors for hard drives and also cooling fans. Monitors will also be affected, with LCD panels and backlights using phosphor compounds containing these rare earth minerals.
Tom’s Hardware notes that even silicon chips may feel some pressure in terms of restrictions around cerium oxide slurries, which are used to polish the large wafers that become processors.
Analysis: the only way is to go up, in terms of prices
So there could be some seriously widespread effects, especially since China is by far the largest supplier of these rare earth elements.
If they become more difficult to obtain and if prices increase for manufacturers (or delays in obtaining these materials affect production lines), the end result for consumers will not be good. As always, whenever price increases occur in the manufacturing process, those costs are passed on to the buyer of the product, so profit margins can be maintained.
There are a couple of thorny issues here, the first being that there aren’t a variety of alternatives other than China to source these items (particularly some of them). Although some companies have already been exploring different avenues, and as Tom’s Hardware points out, Western Digital, which makes a wide range of storage products, launched a plan to extract and recycle rare earth minerals from old drives earlier this year.
The second major issue for potential PC buyers is that this is due to a lot of recent bad news about the rising cost of SSDs and hard drives, and also system RAM. With the price of various components constantly rising, the overall bill for buying (or building) a new PC could start to get considerably more expensive as the year 2026 begins.
This year’s Black Friday sales could be even busier than usual on the PC front, as people try to score a bargain ahead of these various pricing pressures.
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