A Washington official has made the most direct comments by a US official to date, acknowledging the existence of an agreement with Japan and the Netherlands for those countries to impose new restrictions on exports of chip-making tools to China.
“We can’t talk about the deal right now,” Don Graves, an undersecretary of the Commerce Department, said on the sidelines of an event in Washington. “But you can certainly talk to our friends in Japan and the Netherlands.”
Bloomberg reported on Friday that a deal had been finalized and two people familiar with the matter later confirmed the news to Reuters.
The United States in October imposed sweeping restrictions on export shipments of chip-making tools to China, aimed at hampering Beijing’s ability to expand its chip industry and improve its military capabilities.
For the restrictions to be effective, Washington needed to bring in the Netherlands and Japan, home to major chipmakers ASML and Tokyo Electron, among others.
The commerce department said in an email that it would continue to coordinate export controls with foreign allies, calling it a “priority.” “We recognize that multilateral controls are more effective than unilateral controls.
Officials from the Netherlands and Japan were in Washington discussing a wide range of issues in talks led by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Friday.
Asked on Friday if a semiconductor deal had been discussed, US President Joe Biden said: “Yes, we talk about a lot of things, but a lot of it is private.”
China’s semiconductor industry has become a key target of US export restrictions. Beijing has poured money into growing its domestic industry, but its manufacturing plants, known as factories, still rely heavily on foreign-made equipment.
SMIC, China’s largest factory, makes chips used in automotive products, Internet of Things devices and some smartphones.
The US added SMIC to its entity list in 2020, effectively preventing Dutch company ASML from providing extreme UV lithography machines to SMIC.
YMTC is China’s only player in the global Nand memory market, an ultra-competitive sector long dominated by a handful of companies from the US and South Korea. It designs and manufactures chips and was added to the US Entity List in 2022.
YMTC unveiled a chip in 2022 with 232 layers of memory cells, bringing it closer to rivals like South Korea’s Samsung. Experts said the equipment export restrictions were likely to derail further efforts.
CXMT is the only major player in China that designs and manufactures Dram chips, which, like Nand memory, is an industry long dominated by a handful of companies in the United States, South Korea and Taiwan.
with Reuters
