Sanctions and export controls failed to contain the rise of Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. Now the national champion is riding the AI boom to a record IPO.
YMTC Chairman Chen Nanxiang. Illustration by Nate Kitch
China’s chip darling Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. faced an existential crisis when it was placed on a U.S. trade blacklist at the end of 2022.
The Wuhan-based memory chip maker was a rising challenger to Korean incumbents Samsung and SK Hynix and Idaho’s Micron. But its addition to the Entity List, along with the Biden administration’s export controls on semiconductors, cut off its access to critical chipmaking tools from America, throttling its ambitions.
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