Apple Wants Chinese Memory Chips — Micron Wants Them Banned
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Skyrocketing memory prices have been taking the world by storm, forcing even the normally steady Apple to make massive price increases. While Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company had held out for as long as it could, the situation had become “unsustainable,” forcing it to pass on those rising costs to its customers.
Still, the company appears to be doing everything it can to avoid further price hikes. Last week, supply chain sources reported Apple is squeezing OLED suppliers to sharpen their pencils, and it’s undoubtedly doing the same for other components where it has leverage. However, it also hasn’t given up on trying to find a better deal on memory chips.
Last month, the Financial Times reported that Apple was looking for the Trump administration’s blessing on signing up new Chinese suppliers that had fallen out of favor with the US government. While it was never clear how much progress Apple was making in its campaign, it seems that at least one US chipmaker has begun lobbying the White House in the opposite direction.
According to The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+), executives from Idaho-based Micron Technology are raising concerns that allowing Chinese chipmakers to sell to US tech companies could “destroy the domestic industry.”
Micron is the company behind the better-known consumer memory brand, Crucial. It’s the largest manufacturer of memory in the United States, covering the spectrum from DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to NAND flash chips and SSDs.
That gives it a fair bit of clout, and also makes it easy to see why its executives would be nervous at a Chinese incursion.
Micron executives including CEO Sanjay Mehrotra have warned Lutnick and other administration officials that allowing CXMT and other Chinese companies to sell to U.S. tech companies, regardless of the region of sale, could destroy the domestic industry the same way China played a role in decimating U.S. steel and manufacturing plants, the people said.
Rolfe Winkler, The Wall Street Journal
Apple already faces an uphill battle in convincing the Trump administration to greenlight this particular deal for Chinese memory chips. For one thing, it’s not its first time at bat; the Financial Times reported it had considered a similar move in 2022, raising alarm bells among Republican lawmakers — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was serving as the Republican vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time.
Back then, Apple was reportedly exploring a deal with Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., or YMTC, a supplier of NAND storage that happened to be blacklisted by the Pentagon for connections to the People’s Liberation Army. This time, the deal would also be with ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), which manufactures DRAM. However, that firm is on the same blacklist.
To be clear, this Pentagon blacklist doesn’t explicitly prohibit Apple from dealing with either company, especially since, by all accounts, it doesn’t plan to use those chips for iPhone models sold in the US. This means it’s not an import restriction so much as a trade restriction, but Apple would undoubtedly prefer to avoid incurring the wrath of the Trump administration, which has proven to be a bit mercurial in its approach to tariffs.
However, there’s also been discussion about CXMT being “upgraded” to a spot on the “Entity List,” which would turn it from a bad idea into a full prohibition against dealing with foreign businesses that pose a threat to national security.
It’s unclear how much skin Micron has in this game. While it reportedly supplies about 30 percent of the memory components for Apple devices, those are spread across everything from the iPhone to the Mac. If Apple is truly looking for contract CXMT exclusively for non-US iPhone models (and it would be insane to do otherwise), it’s hard to imagine Micron coming out as the loser in the current political climate. Apple’s other primary memory suppliers — Samsung and SK Hynix — are both South Korean companies, so it’s not a stretch to imagine Tim Cook placating the Trump administration by shifting more of its remaining business to Micron.
