China says lawsuit against Micron kicks off ‘counterattack’ against US chip makers

YMTC, China’s leading memory chip maker, which was banned last year from buying certain US technology, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Micron, one its largest US competitors, in another twist in the US-China tug-of-war for tech and military superiority.

YMTC, or the Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., filed the lawsuit 9 November in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing Micron of using YMTC’s patented technology without fair compensation.

According to Global Times, the flagship news website of the Chinese Communist Party, ‘Chinese analysts said that the move is a landmark event for Chinese memory chip enterprises to formally launch a counterattack against US chip companies, which also indicates that Chinese enterprises lead the world and are completely free from US sanctions in the field of memory chips.’

YMTC and Micron have both been targets in the Sino-US ‘tech war’. In May, the Cyberspace Administration of China effectively banned Micron, saying in a review that the company’s products ‘pose a major security risk to the country’s key information infrastructure supply chain and affect the country’s national security.’

That was after October of last year, when the US Commerce Department added YMTC, which is partially state-owned and among China’s most advanced chip manufacturers, to its ‘Unverified List,’ together with 30 other Chinese companies also banned from buying certain US technologies.

‘The lawsuit seeks to address Micron’s attempt to prevent competition and innovation by forcing YMTC out of the 3D NAND Flash market,’ the website quoted YMTC as saying.