SK hynix denies chip supply to China’s Huawei

SK hynix said Thursday that the company was not aware that its mobile memory chips were used in the newest smartphone from China’s Huawei, stressing it has begun an internal investigation.

People walk past a Huawei store with advertisements for the Mate 60 series smartphones, at a shopping mall in Beijing, China August 30, 2023. [REUTERS]

SK hynix said Thursday that the company was unaware that its mobile memory chips were used in the newest smartphone from China’s Huawei, stressing it has begun an internal investigation.

“SK hynix doesn’t do business with Huawei,” the company spokesman said.

“SK hynix, after acknowledging the fact that the company’s memory chips were deployed in Huawei’s newest products, reported immediately to the Bureau of Industry and Security under the U.S. Department of Commerce and initiated an investigation to figure out the issue.” Bloomberg had previously reported that Chinese smartphone maker Huawei used SK hynix’s LPDDR5 and NAND flash memory chips in its newest Mate 60 Pro smartphones, citing a teardown conducted by TechInsights on request of the news outlet.

"The handset’s components are almost entirely provided by Chinese suppliers and Hynix’s hardware is an isolated example of materials sourced from overseas, according to TechInsights," Bloomberg reported.

The Korean memory chip maker had stopped supplying its products to Huawei in 2020 after the United States banned companies from supplying chips made with U.S. equipment and technology to the Chinese company without prior approval, citing security issues.

It was known back then that 10 percent of SK hynix sales relied on Huawei.

“It is our firm policy to abide by the U.S. export regulation,” the SK hynix spokesman said.

Huawei’s latest Mate 60 Pro, which started sales last month, was considered a breakthrough for China’s chip technology after the phone was revealed to have been powered by China’s chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC)’s 7-nanometer processor which was only a few years behind the industry's latest technology.

The U.S. government said it is seeking more information about the Mate 60 Pro’s chip technology.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had said on Tuesday that the United States needs “more information about precisely its character and composition.”

BY JIN EUN-SOO [jin.eunsoo@joongang.co.kr]