Comment by refulgentis
3 days ago
> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work
From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
3 days ago
> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work
From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron.
The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products.
Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs.
The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.
This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny.
"Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2].
"Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment.
"Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period.
"Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
"This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC.
The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share.
[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...
[4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-nat...
[5] https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6...
[6] https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820
[7] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese...
[8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage
[9] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-p...
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_sup...
> Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations
This is the official US justification. This does not mean that is also true.
The Huawei sanctions happened immediately after Huawei had shown their next generation CPU for smartphones, which was better than the next generation CPU shown by Qualcomm, and also immediately after market surveys announced that Huawei will become in a few months the world leader in the smartphone market, in front of Samsung.
When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation. The beneficiaries have been mainly Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The US sanctions were exactly what they needed, the only thing that could stop their competition.
The accusation of dealing with Iran and the blackmailing of Huawei by arresting the daughter of the CEO in Canada, are probably based on true facts, but they have probably been known for many years and they have only been exposed at that time in order to legally justify the sanctions, but due to the timing and consequences of the sanctions it is completely implausible than the old deals with Iran were their real motivation. After all, USA has also made deals with Iran, when they had the interest to do this, and they have not sanctioned themselves in such a way that would affect world economy in unrelated markets. When USA forces citizens of other countries to lose money by buying more expensive smartphones, because there is lower competition, how exactly does this hurt Iran?
The sanctions against the makers of memory devices did not have any credible "national security" motivation, despite the official claims.
> "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data
I am too lazy to search now for quotations, but some time before the announcement of the US sanctions there were published prognoses for the future market share of YTMC, which was projected to grow very fast, after they had announced a new generation of more dense SSDs, which they were willing to sell at lower prices, to get market share. The fact that Apple has stopped their plans to use YTMC as supplier, a short time before the announcement of the sanctions, does not prove anything, except that the Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome.
> "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution.
I agree with what you said about the present causes of the memory price increases. However, that has nothing to do with what I have said, which did not contain any misattribution.
What I have said is that if an increased competition on the memory market would not have been prevented by the US government, today we would have had more vendors and more diverse vendors on this market. In such a market, a deal like that of Altman and the other deals for exclusive contracts with the memory vendors would have had a much less impact. So great price increases would not have happened, because the other vendors would have been eager to step in and increase their market share. The memory market would have been much more stable. Now, in markets with 2, 3 or at most 4 vendors that matter, just a few exclusive contracts are enough to destabilize the market.
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