Congress last week approved legislation aimed at helping the United States compete with China by investing billions of dollars in domestic chip production.Ĭhipmakers that take money under the measure would be prohibited from building or expanding manufacturing for certain advanced chips, including advanced memory chips at a level to be determined by the administration, in countries including China.Īccording to Walt Coon of the consulting firm Yole Intelligence, YMTC accounts for about 5% of worldwide NAND flash memory chip production, almost double from a year ago. Reuters reported on July 8 that Biden's administration is also considering restrictions on shipments to China of tools to make advanced logic chips, seeking to hamstring China's largest chipmaker, SMIC. Tensions between China and the United States over the tech sector deepened under Biden's predecessor Donald Trump and have continued since. Samsung, Applied Materials Inc., YMTC and Western Digital Corp did not immediately respond to requests for comment. LAM Research Corp, SK Hynix and Micron declined to comment on the U.S. smartphone maker with flash memory chips, according to a Bloomberg report. export controls by selling chips to Chinese telecoms company Huawei, is in talks with Apple Inc.
YMTC, already under investigation by the Commerce Department over whether it violated U.S. The report described YMTC as China's "national champion" and the recipient of some $24 billion in Chinese subsidies.
YMTC's expansion and low-price offerings present "a direct threat" to Micron and Western Digital that report said. Micron and Western Digital are under pressure from YMTC's low prices, as the White House wrote in a June 2021 report. YMTC, founded in 2016, is a rising power in manufacturing NAND chips. LAM Research Corp and Applied Materials, both based in Silicon Valley, are the primary suppliers of such tools.Īll the sources described the administration's consideration of the matter as in the early stages, with no proposed regulations yet drafted.Īsked to comment on the possible move, a spokesperson for the Commerce Department, which oversees export controls, did not discuss potential restrictions but noted that "the Biden administration is focused on impairing (China's) efforts to manufacture advanced semiconductors to address significant national security risks to the United States." Fast-growing company officials would ban the export of tools to China used to make NAND chips with more than 128 layers, according to two of the sources. How many gigabytes of data a phone or laptop can hold is determined by how many NAND chips it includes and how advanced they are. NAND chips store data in devices such as smartphones and personal computers and at data centers for the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google. memory chip producers, Western Digital Corp and Micron Technology Inc., which together represent about a quarter of the NAND chips market. The move also would seek to protect the only U.S. bid through export controls to target Chinese production of memory chips without specialized military applications, representing a more expansive view of American national security, according to export control experts. chipmaking equipment to factories in China that manufacture advanced NAND chips. The crackdown, if approved, would involve barring the shipment of U.S. Samsung has two big factories in China while SK Hynix Inc is buying Intel Corp's NAND flash memory chips manufacturing business in China. and SK Hynix Inc., the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. If President Joe Biden's administration proceeds with the move, it could also hurt South Korean memory chip juggernauts Samsung Electronics Co. (YMTC), according to four people familiar with the matter, part of a bid to halt China's semiconductor sector advances and protect U.S. The United States is considering limiting shipments of American chipmaking equipment to memory chip makers in China including Yangtze Memory Technologies Co.
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