by adrian_b | 2026-02-22 17:03:10+00:00
> 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.