US ‘won’t tolerate’ China’s ban on Micron memory sales

News | May 29, 2023

By Peter Clarke

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has said that the US “won’t tolerate” China’s decision to ban the sales of Micron memory chips into critical infrastructure, according to reports.

China’s cyberspace regulator announced on May 21 that products made by memory maker Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho) had failed its network security review and it had imposed a purchasing ban (see Micron hit with ban on sales into Chinese ‘critical infrastructure’).

The move was interpreted by some observers as being a tit-for-tat measure after the US had imposed numerous sanctions on different aspects of China’s semiconductor industry.

While US sanctions are set to prevent China from making any more progress in semiconductor development and manufacturing the ban on Micron is likely to have only a relatively minor impact. Only about 11 percent of Micron’s sales are to China and the critical infrastructure market is only a subset of that.

Nonetheless Raimondo is quoted saying: “We see it as, plain and simple, economic coercion. We won’t tolerate it, nor do we think it will be successful.”

What to do?

Senior US and Chinese politicians have been meeting in recent days with a pledge from the US to keep channels of communication open. Raimondo reportedly raised the Micron issue in a meeting on Thursday with China’s Commerce Minister, Wang Wentao.

In remains unclear what steps the US might take in response to the ban. One possibility is that Changxin Memory Technologies Inc. (Hefei, China), the leading Chinese DRAM maker (see Chinese startup starts DRAM production) could be added to a US list of firms with restricted access to American technology.

A ban on the export of leading-edge chip manufacturing equipment is already effecting such companies as CXMT and Yangtze Memory Technology Corp., China’s leading maker of NAND flash memory (see Advanced logic, memory, YMTC come under China export controls).