YMTC

Full briefing

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC) was founded in 2016 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, with substantial funding from the Chinese government's National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (the 'Big Fund'). It was established with the explicit goal of building a domestic NAND flash industry to reduce China's dependence on Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, and other foreign memory suppliers. YMTC developed its own proprietary 3D NAND architecture called Xtacking, which separates the array and peripheral circuits onto different wafers before bonding them together — a design intended to improve performance and density without requiring the most advanced single lithography nodes. By 2022, YMTC had demonstrated a 128-layer Xtacking NAND and was sampling a 232-layer product, positioning itself as a credible fourth player in the global NAND market. In December 2022, Apple was reported to be nearing qualification of YMTC NAND chips for use in iPhones sold in China — a potentially transformative commercial relationship. This development, combined with U.S. government intelligence about YMTC supplying Huawei with NAND in apparent violation of existing restrictions, accelerated the Entity List decision. The December 15, 2022 listing cut YMTC off from the U.S.-origin advanced equipment it needed to scale its 232-layer process to high-volume production and develop next-generation 300-layer NAND. Post-listing, YMTC has continued to operate its existing fabs using equipment installed before the restrictions took effect, and is working with domestic Chinese equipment suppliers to try to fill gaps. However, the most precise lithography, etch, and deposition tools it needs for leading-edge scaling are not yet available domestically at the required specifications. YMTC supplies NAND primarily to Chinese Android smartphone makers and domestic storage integrators; it no longer has a path to international tier-1 customers like Apple.