by refulgentis | 2026-02-22 16:04:35+00:00
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...