Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer says U.S. must stop flood of Chinese computer chips
ALBANY — U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York said Tuesday that companies doing business with the federal government need to cut off their supply of certain Chinese computer chips used in their products to protect the government from cyber warfare and data theft.
“It’s simple,” Schumer said. “If you want the federal government to buy your products or services, you can’t be using the kind of Chinese-made chips that put our national security at risk. To win the 21st century we need to secure our supply chains, and make sure the chips that our government and economy rely on are built in places like the Capital Region and not by companies backed by adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party.”
Schumer, who made the announcement at Albany Nanotech, did not call for a total ban on Chinese computer chips but said that three chip firms with ties to the Chinese Communist Party would be targeted by new legislation that he planned to include in the next Defense Department funding bill.
Schumer says that chips being made by companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party are selling chips to companies that do business with the federal government, or their suppliers, and that could make the federal government more vulnerable to cyber attacks and infiltration by foreign intelligence services.
Companies that would be part of the ban would be SMIC, or Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., the Chinese firm that reportedly has started making cutting-edge 7-nanometer chips that aren’t even being made in the U.S. yet. U.S. authorities believe the chips may have been made with tech stolen from U.S. allies.
The other companies that would be banned or have their products limited in the defense bill would be CXMT, or ChangXin Memory Technologies, and Yangtze Memory Technologies, or YMTC.
The new legislation would not only keep those Chinese chip suppliers largely out of the U.S. market, but it would also provide new markets for domestic chip suppliers.
The plan is Schumer’s latest effort to boost the domestic computer chip industry amid efforts by the Chinese to dominate the world’s chip and semiconductor supply. Earlier this year, Schumer pushed through the $52 billion CHIPS Act, legislation that will provide billions of dollars in funding for companies like GlobalFoundries, and now Micron, to build new computer chip fabs in upstate New York. Micron specifically makes memory chips like those made by YMTC and CXMT.
“The bill is already delivering for upstate New York,” Schumer said at Tuesday’s press conference.
The CHIPS Act will also fund a multi-billion-dollar federal chip lab known as the National Semiconductor Technology Center, or NSTC, that Schumer wants to be headquartered at Albany Nanotech.
The possibility for the center to be located in Albany helped Schumer and Gov. Kathy Hochul convince Micron to build a $100 billion chip factory in suburban Syracuse, Schumer said Tuesday. Wolfspeed also recently opened a new chip fab outside of Utica. All of that has made New York state one of the centers of chip manufacturing in the world.
Still, Schumer said more has to be done to defend against the Chinese government subverting U.S. markets for chips, especially those used in critical government activities.
“They subsidize their companies, they dump product, they’ve done this with steel,” Schumer said. “I have no doubt they will do it with chips. They try to undercut the market. They also show no shame about stealing our intellectual property and putting barriers in the way of American companies that invest in China.”
