The escalating trade tensions between the US and China are wearing on chipmakers, and big companies like Intel and Nvidia have recently expressed their desire to defuse the situation.
Chinese smartphone maker Oppo disbanded its chip design house Zeku in May, stimulating commentary on Zeku being the latest victim of the US-China chip war among the media in China. However, blaming geopolitical pressure for Zeku s failure does not help stakeholders to prevent the same mistake from recurring. Zeku s CEO Liu Jun and Oppo founder Duan Yongping made it clear: with sales far lower than expected, the investment needed for self-designed chips went through of the roof and it became prohibitively difficult to sustain the operation, thus.
After a review of nearly two months, China decided to require critical IT operators to cease buying Micron s products, with its ramifications potentially expanding outside of its China market.
With government departments paying more attention to internet security and trying hard to reduce the impact of US export sanctions, China has been encouraging government agencies, banks, and state-owned enterprises to expand the use of local information equipment in recent years. This includes adopting Chinese chip servers, which has resulted in a steady increase in the ratio of local server purchases. This can also be seen with the procurement of local chip server equipment by Chinese telecom service providers.
China has launched a cybersecurity investigation into Micron Technology, raising the possibility of a ban on the US memory vendor s product sales in the country.