China Hits Micron With Review of Chips, Citing Security Risks (bloomberg.com) 28
China has opened a cybersecurity review of imports from America's largest memory chipmaker, Micron Technology, opening a new front in the escalating battle between the two countries over dominance in the semiconductor market. From a report: The Chinese government is conducting the review to ensure the security of its information infrastructure supply chain, prevent network security risks and maintain national security, it said in a statement Friday. The move stands to further escalate trade tensions between the Biden administration and China. The US has already blacklisted Chinese tech firms, sought to cut off the flow of sophisticated processors and banned its citizens from providing certain help to the country's chip industry. It has called on other nations to join its efforts, and earlier on Friday, Japan said it will expand restrictions on exports of 23 types of leading-edge chipmaking technology.
lol (Score:2)
The market doesn't apparently think that's going to be a huge problem for Micron. The stock is down, but only by a bit under 2%.
Huawei, by comparison, does not appear to be faring very well.
It will be interesting to see where China will get DRAM and SDRAM from in the future given the sabre rattling in Asia and their enablement of North Korea.
Let the games begin.
china can just clone it and bypass all IP laws (Score:2)
china can just clone it and bypass all IP laws.
And at the same time sell the same parts in the usa at an much lower cost
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Bypassing IP (which doesn't imply capability to manufacturer) doesn't mean one can sell the fruits of such an endeavor elsewhere.
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China is probably a large enough market that it doesn't really need any external markets. Just alone it is about 1/5 of the world population. IIUC it's still largely rural, and poor, but that's subject to change (and may have changed).
The problem is that China has a cultural bias in favor of covering over failures, even more than the western nations have. And it's got an extremely entrenched bureaucracy, even compared to the western nations. This could impact them in new developments, and has in the pas
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China is probably a large enough market that it doesn't really need any external markets. Just alone it is about 1/5 of the world population. IIUC it's still largely rural, and poor, but that's subject to change (and may have changed).
You hit on the key to the vulnerability of the Chinese economy. The current makeup of the suppliers and consumers in the China economy do not allow it to be self-sustaining. Of course, no large economy in today's world can be self-sustaining without a huge blow to total economy activity, but China is particularly vulnerable. In 2022, China's trade surplus was $877 billion, while the US trade deficit reached $948 billion. That suggests that the Chinese economy would be far greater impacted in a negative w
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They can clone it and bypass IP laws, eventually...
They need the manufacturing tools and facilities to really accomplish this. The ASML tools are impossible for them to obtain, so they'll have to reverse engineer those as well. I think they'll eventually catch up, but it might be 10 years or so.
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You're assuming the western developed nations will remain monolithic. This might hold for a few years, but I doubt that it would last for a decade. (Actually, I doubt it's the case at the moment. Various corporations are continually searching for ways to escape restrictions on where and to whom they sell things.)
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China is already producing competitive flash memory. Their high end controllers are decent too.
This is just preparation to cut Micron out of the Chinese market, and markets that will follow China on national security grounds. You know, like the US did to Huawei.
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Can we just strip China's Most Favored Nation status already? Have they ever even pretended to enact reciprocal trade agreements with us? Why perpetuate this 23 year farce?
It's a failed experiment. An oppressive authoritarian regime is not going to turn nice just because we normalize trade relationships with them. Okay, lesson learned. It's not worth the slightly less expensive goods we've gotten out of the deal. We've more than paid a price in other ways.
Going after the well behaved. (Score:1)
Micron seems to be unusually well behaved among US tech companies. Have fun with that China.
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Micron is China's usual target for international shenanigans. It's Micron whom they been stealing DRAM technology off of for years. So regardless of what Micron has (or hasn't) been doing, they'll get as much grief from China as Chinese authorities deems appropriate.
Tit for tat (Score:3, Interesting)
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China has also been making gains in areas outside the US and Europe.
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China has also been making gains in areas outside the US and Europe.
They are investing huge amounts into Africa.
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Long term, those may pay off well. But for now, US and EU are the two largest economic trade blocks in the world.
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When its about volume, every little bit helps. Lots of little bits add up.
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Cut them off (Score:2)
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If you want to go cold turkey the USA will get instantly fucked. On the one side you're talking about chips, but on the other China has shown to happily use any form of trade as a weapon. Right now beyond a few high tech silicon designs, the USA needs China more than China needs the USA.
You're not ripping off the bandaid, you're skinning yourself alive. We need to fuck China slowly and cautiously.
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Good. (Score:3)
Good. Assuming they actually perform a serious security review in the hopes of adding substance to their political theater.
I don't care what the politics are - I'd be 100% in favor of several large, adversarial, governments conducting random reviews of *all* major semiconductor products on a regular basis. Spy-friendly hardware "flaws" are one of those things I suspect most security-minded techies are... at least highly suspicious about. If we can get the big boys actively looking for them as an excuse to publicly embarrass and hurt each other's economies?
We can only all become more secure as a result.