China vs. USA: Memory manufacturers are caught between fronts in the chip war

The conflict over China’s access to advanced chip technologies is escalating. China is currently trying to defend itself against the recent US sanctions with measures against the American memory specialist Micron, which is why the USA is now putting pressure on other memory manufacturers.

As the Financial Times reported, the US government has recently begun lobbying the government of South Korea to prevent Korean memory makers from making supplies to China should the government there decide to impose a sales ban on Micron.

If Micron fails due to a ban, the competitors step in – theoretically

The USA fears that the Chinese government may put a sales freeze on Micron, so that the Korean manufacturers Samsung and SK Hynix could step in. The two large memory providers would then have to take over the missing deliveries from Micron to Chinese device manufacturers.

Of course, the Korean manufacturers would benefit from this, after all, all storage providers have been struggling with massive sales difficulties for some time as a result of the sharp drop in demand for electronic products after the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. This is exactly what the USA wants to prevent. The Chinese government recently announced that it intends to carry out a security check on Micron’s products in order to rule out any possible threat to “national security” posed by the US supplier’s products. Micron has repeatedly confirmed that it is cooperating with the authorities and wants to meet all requirements to ensure that its own activities in China can continue to operate unhindered.

The background, of course, is the various attempts by the USA to slow down or even prevent the expansion and development of chip production in China. For some time now, it has been forbidden to export to China any systems for the production of ultra-modern chips if they were developed or produced with the help of or using US technologies. The Chinese actions against Micron are basically a form of revenge.

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