Apple iPhone 14 may feature Chinese chips with military links

The tiny chips that store data in Apple’s gadgets normally come from the likes of South Korea’s Samsung and Japan’s Kioxia. But the memory or NAND chips that help power the forthcoming iPhone 14 may have a more controversial supplier. Apple is currently evaluating products made by Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), a Chinese state-owned business with ties to the military, according to a Credit Suisse report obtained by Light Reading. To critics, YMTC’s presence in the best-selling smartphone would look about as welcome as a Gazprom pipeline through Germany does to opponents of Russia.

For similar reasons, too. Having suckled at the teat of Russian gas for years, governments are suddenly desperate to find alternative energy supplies following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But there was already unease about reliance on Chinese technology. A backlash against Huawei, a Chinese vendor of 5G networks, came after it had muscled aside international rivals and turned Western clients into near dependents. With effective control over their networks, China would be able to cripple technology infrastructure, warned critics.

YMTC has been under scrutiny for years. In a December 2020 written by James Mulvenon, a China expert at SOS International, it was identified as a rising Chinese power in memory chips, propelled – like Huawei – by a massive program of state subsidies. With the support of China’s government, YMTC did not have to worry about profitability and could expand capacity beyond supply demands, said Mulvenon at the time. The risk, he noted, was that non-Chinese vendors might collapse, leaving Western companies more reliant on YMTC.

YMTC’s state owners include companies like Tsinghua Unigroup that cater to the Chinese military, according to Mulvenon. His report also says that senior YMTC executives and board members have worked for companies or served in government offices tied to China’s military modernization program.

Alarm was raised by the White House in its own report on supply chain vulnerabilities last June. YMTC, it said, “is focused on rapid expansion and has received an estimated $24 billion in subsidies from Chinese government sources.” The same report went on to argue that YMTC might be able to produce “as many as 200,000 wafers per month by 2022, over twice Intel’s current NAND production capacity, representing a potential low-cost threat to US-based memory companies.”

Competing interests

US hawks have pushed for the inclusion of YMTC on the Entity List, a trade blacklist of companies barred from doing business with US entities or procuring US-origin technologies. Despite those lobbying efforts, YMTC and other Chinese chipmakers “continue to enjoy access to US markets,” said Roslyn Layton of Strand Consult, a Danish advisory company, in a Forbes article published late last year.

To read the complete article, visit Light Reading.