Apple Lobbies Trump White House to Buy Chips From Blacklisted Chinese Firm
Apple is seeking U.S. approval to source memory chips from CXMT, a Pentagon-blacklisted Chinese company, as rising chip costs squeeze the iPhone maker.
Apple is quietly pressing the Trump administration for permission to purchase memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, a Chinese semiconductor firm that sits on a Pentagon blacklist, according to a Financial Times report published Friday. The disclosure puts one of America's most valuable companies at the center of a widening tension between corporate supply-chain economics and U.S. national security policy.
The motivation, according to sources cited by the FT, is straightforward: surging memory chip prices are adding meaningful financial pressure to Apple's cost structure, and CXMT reportedly offers a more affordable alternative to suppliers outside China. For a company that operates on razor-thin margins in its hardware division relative to services, input costs for components like DRAM matter enormously at scale.
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What makes the request politically delicate is the Pentagon's designation itself. Companies placed on the Defense Department's blacklist are identified as having ties to China's military apparatus — a classification designed specifically to discourage American firms from doing business with them. Apple seeking a carve-out would, if granted, signal that commercial interests can override national security designations under the right lobbying conditions, setting a precedent other tech giants might quickly seek to exploit.
The White House, Apple, and CXMT had not responded to requests for comment from Reuters at the time of the report, leaving the status of any formal waiver process unclear. The episode nonetheless underscores how U.S. semiconductor policy — built around export controls and entity lists — is increasingly colliding with the global supply dependencies that American technology companies have spent decades constructing.
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