Chip industry globalisation under threat, says chief of China's YMTC

Geopolitics and the national security concerns of some countries are threatening the globalisation of the world's chip industry, which is now in a turbulent era, the chairman of memory chipmaker Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) said on Thursday.

Chen Nanxiang said in a speech at the opening ceremony of the Semicon China conference in Shanghai that this had given him doubts over whether the global semiconductor industry could realise an earlier forecast that it could see $1 trillion in sales by 2030.

Washington put YMTC along with over a dozen players in the Chinese artificial intelligence chip sector on a trade blacklist last year over fears it could divert American technology to previously blacklisted Chinese tech giants Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Hikvision.


The move barred YMTC's suppliers from shipping U.S. goods to it without a difficult-to-obtain license.