Sen. Marco Rubio is calling out Apple for considering a purchase of phone memory chips from a Chinese state-owned supplier that he says would be disastrous for American tech leadership and national security.
The Florida Republican warned Apple CEO Tim Cook in a letter Thursday against striking a deal with Chinese chip manufacturer Yangtze Memory, which is funded by the Chinese Communist Party and has extensive links to the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army.
The company plays a key role in China’s broader national strategy of challenging American leadership in economic, military, and tech innovation by building up the technological capabilities of the Chinese military and allowing it to coerce neighbors into accepting Beijing’s sovereignty claims and leadership position in the Indo-Pacific region.
“It is unacceptable that sales of the next generation of iPhones would end up strengthening the Chinese military and put the lives of American service-members at risk as a result,” said Rubio in a letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner.
“If Apple goes through with any deal with YMTC, tens of millions of Americans who own iPhones will end up unintentionally enriching the Chinese Communist Party. If Tim Cook is serious about ‘loving this country,’ he should not go forward with any sale,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner.
Yangtze Memory, which the White House in a June 2021 report described as Beijing’s “national champion memory chip producer,” likely has the capacity to produce twice as much as American chip giant Intel and therefore represents a low-cost threat to U.S.-based memory companies, the White House warned.
If Apple were to help boost a huge, state-subsidized chip supplier in China, U.S. chip manufacturers and those of U.S. allies would face an uneven playing field and have difficulty competing in already unfair circumstances, Rubio said.
Enriching a Chinese-government-backed competitor such as Yangtze Memory would force American manufactures in the industry to consolidate further, downsize, or close down altogether, posing a significant threat to U.S. national defense and other critical sectors that rely on trustworthy advanced chips, Rubio added.
Yangtze Memory is known to be one of China’s top companies for advancing the design and development of homegrown memory chips that are used widely for storing data in laptops, servers, smartphones, and gadgets in electric vehicles and other smart devices.
Apple is exploring new sources for memory chips that are used in iPhones after a recent disruption to a key Japanese chip partner exposed the company to risks in its global supply chain.
An industrywide shortage of chips has disrupted production by the world’s biggest consumer electronic brands in the past two years due to the coronavirus pandemic, forcing tech giants such as Apple to diversify their network of suppliers and reduce the risk of further disruptions.
Apple already manufactures all of its iPhones in China using Foxconn Technology Group and Pegatron Corp., which use memory chips from many different providers, and Yangtze Memory could offer a viable source of cheaper chips that are close to their manufacturing plants.
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Headquartered in California, Apple’s electronic manufacturing parents employ millions in China, and it consistently complies with the Chinese government’s rules around censorship and data localization to make profits in China, where rivals such as Google and Facebook have been shut out.
