Is This the Biggest Industrial Espionage Campaign in History?
8th November 2024
In 2016, the Chinese Communist Party announced that producing its own dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips was a national security priority. DRAM is critical for a variety of personal, commercial, and military computers, providing temporary, quickly accessible file storage when the computer is running programs.
Soon thereafter, the Chinese government spent $5 billion to create Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company to produce the chips. But massive amounts of money don’t magically manufacture technological know-how. State-owned Fujian Jinhua had the physical resources, but lacked the human expertise to actually make advanced DRAM chips. So Fujian Jinhua turned instead to United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) in Taiwan to provide the needed technology and experience.
What started as a seemingly innocuous business partnership ended in one of the most costly heists of American technology ever pulled off. The victim? Micron Technology, a leading US semiconductor company.