US President Joe Biden’s administration is weighing sanctions on several Chinese tech companies, including memory chipmaker Changxin Xinqiao Memory Technologies Inc (CXMT, 長鑫新橋) in a fresh bid to restrain Beijing’s development of advanced semiconductors, people familiar with the matter said.
The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is considering adding CXMT to its so-called Entity List, which restricts companies’ access to US technology, the sources said.
The BIS is also considering restricting five other Chinese firms, they said, adding that the list is not final.
Photo: Reuters
CXMT makes chips used in a wide range of products, including computer servers and smart vehicles. It competes with US-based Micron Technology Inc and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc. Micron funded an advocacy group that has long pushed for CXMT to be restricted.
The BIS and White House National Security Council declined to comment.
“We actively endorse and promote free and fair competition,” CXMT said in a statement. “Our commitment to this principle is demonstrated by our strict compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, including US export regulations.”
The company said that its chips were used in “everyday consumer products, with a specific focus on civilian and commercial applications.”
The potential sanctions are a response by the Biden administration to a chip breakthrough that Huawei Technologies Co (華為) made last year, US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said in an interview last week.
The US department is weighing a sanctions package on multiple firms, McCaul said, without naming CXMT.
Huawei launched a 5G phone last year with an advanced 7-nanometer semiconductor made in China. It was lauded as a significant breakthrough considering that the administration of former US president Donald Trump cut off Huawei’s access to leading global chipmakers in 2020 over national security concerns. The handset signaled that the country’s chip industry was further along than expected.
The Biden administration has stepped up use of the department’s Entity List to keep Chinese companies from obtaining the latest US technologies. US suppliers are blocked from selling certain advanced products, equipment and components to customers on the list unless they obtain a special license from the US Department of Commerce.
Several key Chinese tech companies are already subject to those sanctions, including Shenzhen-based Huawei, its chipmaking partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (中芯國際) and lithography machine maker Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group (上海微電子). In 2022, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (長江儲存科技) was added to the list.
Beyond the blacklisting, the US is urging allies to work more closely together to contain China’s rise. The Biden administration is pressing the Netherlands, Germany, South Korea and Japan to further tighten restrictions on China’s access to semiconductor technology.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since