by refulgentis | 2026-02-22 17:55:47+00:00
tl;dr: "Who benefits is what matters, not the official explanation" is how you prove anything you want. Boeing benefits when Airbus has problems, that doesn't mean Boeing sabotaged them. And even on its own terms: Qualcomm collected royalties from Huawei on every handset sold (per their 2018 licensing deal), so Qualcomm had direct financial incentive for Huawei to sell more phones, not fewer. The "cui bono" doesn't even bono the right cui.

I appreciate the detailed response, but I think several of your arguments actually undermine your own case on closer inspection.

On "cui bono" as proof of motive:

"When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation" is a general-purpose conspiracy epistemology that can prove anything. Boeing benefits when Airbus has production problems, that doesn't mean Boeing sabotaged Airbus. Cui bono is a reason to investigate, not a reason to conclude.

But even on your own terms, the timeline doesn't work. You say the Huawei sanctions happened "immediately after" Huawei showed their next-gen CPU. The Kirin 980 was announced at IFA in August 2018 [1]. The Entity List designation came in May 2019, nine months later [2]. In the semiconductor industry, nine months is not "immediately after." The Snapdragon 855, which benchmarked significantly faster than the Kirin 980 in CPU and GPU, shipped in December 2018 [3]. If Qualcomm needed government protection from an inferior chip that launched earlier, that's not a very compelling story about competitive threat.

You're right that Huawei was on track to overtake Samsung in smartphone shipments. They hit #2 globally in 2019 [4]. But Huawei's strength was in price-competitive handsets in emerging markets, not in chip design threatening Qualcomm's licensing business. Qualcomm's revenue model is based on patent licensing across the entire industry; Huawei's rise in handset volume actually increased Qualcomm's licensing revenue, since Huawei paid Qualcomm royalties on every handset sold (they signed a patent license agreement in 2018). Qualcomm had financial incentive for Huawei to sell more phones, not fewer.

On "they knew about Iran for years":

You concede the Iran dealings are "probably based on true facts" but argue the timing was convenient. The actual timeline: HSBC's internal probe of the Huawei-Iran transactions began in late 2016, the DOJ investigation built on HSBC's disclosures throughout 2017-2018, and the arrest warrant was issued in August 2018 [5][6]. Criminal investigations of this complexity involving international banking, foreign defendants, and extradition treaties routinely take years. The idea that prosecutors had a ready-made case sitting in a drawer and deployed it at an opportune moment isn't how federal criminal prosecution works. Grand jury proceedings, evidence gathering, and extradition requests have their own institutional momentum and timeline.

Also: "USA has also made deals with Iran and they have not sanctioned themselves" is a non-sequitur. The sanctions against Huawei aren't for "dealing with Iran" in the abstract, they're for bank fraud, i.e., lying to HSBC about the nature of transactions to evade sanctions that were in force at the time. The US government conducting foreign policy with Iran through official channels is categorically different from a private company deceiving banks to circumvent sanctions law.

On YMTC's projected dominance:

You say there were "published prognoses" for YMTC's rapid growth. I don't doubt that bullish analyst projections existed. But even the most optimistic 2022 forecasts projected YMTC reaching perhaps 8-10% of NAND by 2025 [7], which is roughly what actually happened despite the sanctions [8]. "Dominant position" means something like Samsung's 35%. Single-digit-to-low-double-digit share, even at aggressive prices, is "credible new entrant," not "dominant position."

On Apple: You say Apple dropping YMTC before the Entity List "doesn't prove anything, except that Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome." This is unfalsifiable. If Apple dropped them after sanctions: "they were forced to." If Apple dropped them before: "they had inside knowledge." What evidence would you accept that Apple made an independent commercial/reputational risk decision?

On memory prices:

I actually think you have the kernel of a legitimate argument here, and I should have engaged with it more carefully. You're right that the memory market is a tight oligopoly with a documented history of anticompetitive behavior: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have literally pled guilty to DRAM price fixing, paying $731 million in criminal fines in the 2000s, and faced renewed price-fixing allegations in 2018 [9]. More vendors would structurally improve this market.

But the distance between "more vendors would be good for competition" and "US sanctions on YMTC caused the current price crisis" remains enormous. Even in your restated version, the counterfactual requires YMTC to have grown large enough by 2024-2025 to serve as a meaningful alternative when Samsung/SK Hynix pivoted to HBM. Given that YMTC actually did reach ~10-13% NAND share by late 2025 even under sanctions [8], and prices still spiked, the evidence suggests the HBM reallocation would have overwhelmed any competitive pressure from a mid-sized Chinese entrant. The structural problem is that three companies control >90% of DRAM, and YMTC doesn't make DRAM at all, they make NAND. CXMT's DRAM operation is far smaller and wasn't even targeted by the same sanctions.

The memory price crisis is real, the oligopoly is real, and more competition would help. But attributing the current crisis primarily to sanctions rather than to AI-driven demand reallocation and the inherent fragility of a 3-player oligopoly (which existed long before any Chinese entrant) conflates a contributing factor with the primary cause.

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_announces_the_kirin_980-news...

[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/05/21/2019-10...

[3] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/snapdragon-855-benchmarks,news-...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/30/21114885/huawei-overtakes...

[5] https://thefinanser.com/2021/06/usa-v-china-or-huawei-v-hsbc...

[6] https://www.cbc.ca/news/meng-wanzhou-huawei-kovrig-spavor-1....

[7] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/2022-nand-process-tech...

[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1q3qln3/ymtc_rock...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal