Apple Lobbies White House to Buy Chips From Blacklisted Chinese Firm
Apple is pushing the Trump administration for a waiver to source memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company on the Pentagon's blacklist.
Apple is quietly working the phones in Washington — and not to sell iPhones. The tech giant is lobbying the Trump administration for permission to buy memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, a Chinese chipmaker that the Pentagon has placed on its blacklist, according to a Financial Times report published Friday.
So why would Apple take that kind of political risk? Money, basically. The company is reportedly feeling the squeeze from rising memory chip prices, and buying from CXMT could help ease that financial pressure. When a supplier gets blacklisted, that usually means U.S. companies are blocked from doing business with them — so Apple would need an explicit carve-out, or waiver, from the White House to make any deal happen legally.
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This puts Apple in a delicate spot. The company has been navigating an already complicated relationship with the Trump administration over tariffs and its manufacturing footprint in China. Asking for a favor that involves a Pentagon-flagged Chinese firm adds another layer of sensitivity to that dance. The FT cited unnamed sources for its reporting, and neither the White House, Apple, nor CXMT responded to Reuters' requests for comment outside of business hours.
For everyday consumers, this kind of supply chain maneuvering rarely shows up directly in your iPhone's price tag overnight — but memory chip costs do flow through to device prices eventually. If Apple can lock in cheaper chips, that's a margin win for the company, though there's no guarantee those savings get passed along to you at checkout. The broader story here is a reminder of just how tangled U.S.-China tech trade has become, even for the world's most valuable company.
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