State-backed chip investment fund has provided funding worth a third of the company’s entire registered capital, Reuters says.
State-backed chip investment fund has provided funding worth a third of the company’s entire registered capital, Reuters says.
The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund – also known as the Big Fund – has invested 14.56bn yuan ($1.99bn) in Changxin Xinqiao.
The investment amounted to 33.15 per cent of the total registered capital of the memory chip company, according to an update dated October 26 to the company’s registration information on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (NECIPS).
Changxin Xinqiao has applied to build a manufacturing base of 12-inch memory wafer, according to the official NECIPS database. If it goes ahead with the project, the company could become the first in China to design and mass produce integrated dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips design.
The firm was founded in 2021 in Hefei in Anhui province and is led by Zhao Lun, general manager of ChangXin Memory Technologies, one of China’s leading memory chip companies.
Investments made through the Big Fund have provided financing to China’s two biggest chip foundries, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and Hua Hong Semiconductor, as well as to Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), and a number of smaller companies and funds.
The Big Fund was launched in 2014 to accelerate China’s semiconductor industry, which is considered to lag behind that of the US, Taiwan and South Korea. The organisation raised 138.7bn yuan for its first fund, and 204bn yuan for its second.
However, the country has significantly ramped up investment in the sector since 2019, when the US began restricting China’s access to semiconductor technology. Last October, the Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls on American chipmaking tools to China.
Last year, China began a trade dispute at the World Trade Organization over the US’s chip export control measures, saying the curbs “threaten the stability of the global industrial supply chains”. In May, China told its operators not to use Micron chips in certain infrastructure projects because of national security concerns.
Earlier this year, the Big Fund invested 13bn yuan into YMTC, which was also placed on the US blacklist.
This year’s Big Fund investment is expected to reach $41bn (£32.7bn).
