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.