US Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused Beijing Thursday of backing a scheme by Chinese and Taiwan companies to steal an estimated $8.75 billion worth…
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions accused Beijing Thursday of backing a scheme by Chinese and Taiwan companies to steal an estimated $8.75 billion worth of trade secrets from semiconductor giant Micron.
The Justice department unveiled criminal charges against Chinese state-owned Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) of Taiwan, along with three UMC officials.
It said they conspired to rob US-based Micron’s advanced designs to turn Fujian Jinhua into a major player in the global computer chip market.
The charges were the latest in a series of cases targeting what Washington calls an ongoing Beijing program to steal valuable US industrial and commercial secrets in order to advance the Chinese economy.
“Taken together, these cases and many others like them paint a grim picture of a country bent on stealing its way up the ladder of economic development and doing so at American expense,” Sessions said.
“This behavior is illegal. It is wrong. It is a threat to our national security. And it must stop.”
The indictment released in the US district court in San Jose, California alleges that three former Micron employees in Taiwan — Stephen Chen Zhengkun, He Jianting and Kenny Wang Yungming — joined UMC in 2015 and 2016 with the express plan to hand over to the company Micron’s design and manufacturing processes for specific dynamic random access memory (DRAM) semiconductors.
