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.
