Tech war: China’s memory chip champion YMTC stays mum amid threat of US sanctions
- Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp has yet to respond publicly to calls by US lawmakers to put the Chinese company under sanctions
- The US is targeting YMTC because officials are worried that the Chinese company could undercut the market by pushing down prices, an expert says
China’s top memory chip maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) has yet to publicly comment on the possibility it might come under US sanctions, as Chinese technology firms keep a low profile amid geopolitical risks.
In a letter to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo dated July 28, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and a half-dozen other senators from both parties described the “growing threat” posed by Chinese semiconductor manufacturers like YMTC to national security and US chip companies.
It is not the first time that YMTC, which is currently not on any US trade blacklist, has faced sanction threats from US politicians.
However, the silence of YMTC, which denied ties to the Chinese military last year, comes as the US ups its efforts on multiple fronts to contain China’s growing semiconductor industry over national security concerns.
The US is also trying to build a chip alliance with South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to exclude China from global semiconductor supply chains, while pressuring Dutch chip equipment giant ASML to stop selling more lithography systems to wafer fabs in China.
The rising hostility coincides with technological breakthroughs attained by major chip makers in China, which have refrained from revealing too much about their achievements.