Apple isn’t just negotiating with Chinese chipmakers on the Pentagon’s blacklist. It’s actively lobbying the Trump administration for permission to do so, seeking explicit assurances that two of China’s largest memory producers won’t face even harsher trade restrictions down the road.
The company has been in discussions with both the Commerce Department and White House officials since May 2026, pushing for guarantees around sourcing DRAM chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and potentially NAND flash from Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC). Both firms sit on the Pentagon’s 1260H list, a designation reserved for companies the US military considers to have ties to China’s armed forces.
Why Apple is willing to touch the third rail
Buying from a company on the 1260H list isn’t actually illegal. The list creates political and reputational headaches, not legal ones. What Apple wants to avoid is signing supply contracts only to have the rug pulled when these firms get added to the far more restrictive Entity List, which would effectively ban transactions entirely.
Apple tried this exact playbook before. In 2022, the company explored sourcing YMTC’s NAND flash chips for iPhones sold in China. That effort was abandoned after the US tightened export controls, making the arrangement untenable.
