US-China tech war: Beijing’s secret chipmaking champions
Once a month, senior executives of Yangtze Memory Technologies Co fly to Beijing for a flurry of meetings with China’s top economic management bodies. They focus on the company’s efforts to build some of the world’s most advanced computer memory chips — and its progress on weaning itself off American technology.
Based in the central riverside city of Wuhan, Yangtze Memory is considered at the vanguard of the country’s efforts to create a domestic semiconductor industry, already mass-producing state of the art 64-layer and 128-layer Nand flash memory chips, used in most electronics from smartphones to servers to connected cars.