WASHINGTON, Aug 1 (Reuters) – The United States is considering limiting shipments of American equipment to memory chipmakers in China, including Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), according to four people familiar with the matter, as part of a an attempt to halt the progress of China’s semiconductor industry and protect American companies.
If President Joe Biden’s administration goes through with the move, it could also hurt South Korea’s two memory chip giants, Samsung Electronics 005930.KS and SK Hynix 000660.KS, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. . Samsung has two large factories in China, while SK Hynix is in the process of buying Intel INTC.O’s NAND flash memory chip manufacturing business in China.
This would be the first attempt by the United States, through export controls, to target Chinese production of NAND memory chips without specialized military applications.
This approach would also aim to protect the only American producers of electronic chips, Western Digital
WDC.O and Micron Technology MU.O, which together account for about a quarter of the NAND chip market.
NAND chips store data in devices like smartphones and personal computers, as well as in the data centers of companies like Amazon AMZN.O, Facebook FB.O, and Google GOOGL.O.
Under the proposed measures, US authorities would ban the export to China of tools used to make NAND chips with more than 128 layers, according to two of the sources. LAM Research LRCX.O and Applied Materials
AMAT.O, both based in Silicon Valley, are the main providers of these tools.
All sources described the administration’s consideration of the matter as being in the initial stages, with no regulatory proposals yet to be drafted.
Asked about the possibility of such a move, a spokesperson for the Department of Commerce did not speak about potential restrictions, but noted that “the Biden administration is focused on hindering (China’s) efforts to manufacture advanced semiconductors to address significant risks to the national security of the United States”.
(Report Alexandra Alper, Karen Freifeld and Stephen Nellis, French version Augustin Turpin, edited by Kate Entringer)
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