China boosts chip self‑sufficiency

China’s push to replace foreign chips with domestic ones is starting to show up in the numbers: one analyst estimate put China’s AI-chip self-sufficiency at 41% on April 17. (en.sedaily.com) Seoul Economic Daily said Chinese companies now supply about 41% of China’s AI-chip market and projected that share could reach 76% by 2030. The same report said South Korea slipped to fifth place in semiconductor competitiveness. (en.sedaily.com) S&P Global Ratings, cited by TechNode Global on April 17, said China’s latest five-year plan should bring heavier state support for domestic tech hardware firms across the semiconductor supply chain. That includes companies making the tools, materials and components needed to build chips, not just the chip designers themselves. (technode.global) A semiconductor supply chain is the full factory network behind a chip: design software, wafer equipment, chemicals, packaging and testing. China’s policy goal is to localize more of those steps after U.S. export controls tightened access to advanced computing chips and chipmaking equipment in October 2022 and were updated again in October 2023. (bis.gov 1) (bis.gov 2) Memory is a separate part of that story. NAND flash is the storage chip used to hold data in phones, laptops and servers, and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., or YMTC, is China’s main NAND producer. (digitimes.com) (spglobal.com) DigiTimes reported on April 16 that YMTC plans to ramp its Wuhan fab in 2026 and could become the world’s third-largest NAND maker by that year. But the same report said meaningful new global capacity is still unlikely before 2028. (digitimes.com 1) (digitimes.com 2) That timing matters because memory supply is already tight. S&P Global said in a March 2026 electronics supply-chain outlook that chip shortages were pushing up prices, while DigiTimes separately reported warnings that NAND shortages could worsen in the second half of 2026. (spglobal.com) (digitimes.com) China’s strategy is not just about catching up on the most advanced logic chips used to train artificial intelligence models. It is also about building enough domestic capacity in memory, packaging, tools and materials that sanctions or supplier cutoffs do less damage to Chinese manufacturers. (technode.global) (congress.gov)) The near-term picture is uneven: China is gaining ground in parts of the chip stack, but the reports out this week still point to a long build-out, with 2026 bringing more domestic output and 2028 still the marker for larger new supply. (en.sedaily.com) (digitimes.com)