China: China has banned some sales of Micron products after launching a probe into the American memory chip giant for cybersecurity risks in early April.
The decision is widely seen as part of the tit-for-tat in the ongoing US-China economic competition, which has started to upend a deeply intertwined global tech supply chain.
In 2022, the US added China’s state-backed memory chip maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation to the entity list, barring US companies from supplying it without approval. The US has also restricted Nvidia from exporting H100, its state-of-the-art GPU for generative AI training, to China.
The Cyberspace Administration of China on Sunday told domestic firms that provide “key information infrastructure” to stop buying from Micron. Micron’s products “have serious cybersecurity issues and pose a big risk to the country’s key information supply chains, raising cybersecurity concerns.”
Micron, which opened its first factory in China 16 years ago, specialises in producing computer memory and data storage such as dynamic random-access memory, known as DRAM, and flash memory. China is its third-largest market, accounting for 10.7 percent of its annual revenue in 2022. We’ve reached out to Micron for comment.
“Key information infrastructure”, as China defines it, includes telecommunication, energy, transportation, finance, defence, and any other area that concerns national interests.
The authority did not specify in what ways Micron poses a cybersecurity risk, but it did cite China’s Cybersecurity Law that took effect in 2016, a wide-ranging regulation aimed at strengthening the government’s oversight on the internet with rules like real-name verification and storing local user data on local servers.
In response to the ban, the US Department of Commerce noted that it will “engage directly with Chinese authorities to detail the US position and will engage with key allies and partners to address what it termed as distortions of the memory-chip market caused by China’s actions.”
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