ASML, a big company that makes equipment for making computer chips, says a former worker in China stole information about the company’s technology.
Since then, the Dutch company has told both Dutch and US authorities about the breach.
But the company also said it “does not think that the theft is important to our business.”
ASML is one of the most important companies in the world that make chips. It makes machines that make the most advanced chips in the world.
The US and China are fighting over chips, also called semiconductors, used to power everything from cell phones to military equipment.
ASML didn’t say who the former employee was or explain how export control laws may have been broken.
When the BBC asked the company for comment, they waited to answer.
When the BBC asked the Chinese embassy in Washington for a comment, they did not answer right away.
ASML accuses China of IP theft
ASML has previously linked a violation of its intellectual property (IP) to China.
In its annual report for 2021, the company said it was aware of reports that DongFang JingYuan Electron, a Chinese company that makes semiconductor equipment and software, “was actively marketing products in China that could possibly violate ASML’s IP rights.”
DongFang JingYuan Electron said that the claims were not true.
At the time, a company based in Beijing said that the reports were “not in line with the facts.”
Exports to China from big companies in the semiconductor business have been limited.
In October, Washington said that any company that makes chips anywhere in the world with US tools or software and then sells them to China would need a license.
The US has been trying to get the Netherlands and Japan to do the same.
Since 2019, the Dutch government has stopped ASML from selling China its most advanced lithography machines.
As part of making microchips, lasers are used in lithography machines to print tiny patterns on silicon.
How China steals secrets about American technology
An employee who used to work for the energy company General Electric Power, Zheng Xiaoqing, was fired because of a harmless-looking picture.
An indictment from the Department of Justice (DOJ) says that the US citizen hid confidential files he stole from his employers in the binary code of a digital photo of a sunset, which he then mailed to himself.
It was a method called “steganography,” which is a way to hide a file of data inside the code of another file of data. Mr. Zheng used it more than once to steal sensitive documents from GE.
GE is a multinational company known for its work in healthcare, energy, and aerospace. It makes everything from refrigerators to aircraft engines.
Zheng stole information about how gas and steam turbines, like turbine blades and seals, are designed and made. It was sent to his partner in China. It was thought to be worth millions of dollars. It would help the Chinese government, companies, and universities in the long run.
Zheng was given a prison sentence of two years early this month. It is the latest case like this that US authorities have gone after. In November, Chinese citizen Xu Yanjun, who was said to be a professional spy, was given a 20-year prison sentence for planning to steal trade secrets from GE and other US aviation and aerospace companies.
It is part of a larger struggle between the US and China. China wants to learn more about technology to help its economy and challenge the geopolitical order. On the other hand, the US wants to stop a serious rival to American power from rising.
Theft of trade secrets is appealing because it lets countries “jumpfrog up global value chains relatively quickly and without the costs, both in time and money, of relying completely on their capabilities,” Nick Marro of the Economist Intelligence Unit told the BBC.
Last July, FBI Director Christopher Wray told a group of business leaders and academics in London that China wanted to “ransack” the intellectual property of Western companies to speed up its industrial development and eventually take over key industries.
He warned that it was spying on companies everywhere, “from big cities to small towns, from Fortune 100s to start-ups, people who work on everything from aviation to AI to pharma.”
At the time, Zhao Lijian, a China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said that Mr. Wray was “smearing China” and still had a “Cold War mentality.”
In the DOJ statement about Zheng, Alan Kohler Jr. of the FBI said that China was going after “American ingenuity” and trying to “topple our status” as a world leader.
Zheng was an engineer who worked on leakage containment technologies in steam turbine engineering and specialized in turbine sealing technology. The DOJ said these seals improve turbine performance “by increasing power or efficiency or making the engine last longer.”
Read Also: Tech War: US halts exports to Huawei
The growth of China’s aviation industry depends on gas turbines that power planes.
Aerospace and aviation equipment are two of the ten areas the Chinese government wants to see grow quickly so that the country doesn’t have to rely so much on foreign technology and can eventually surpass it.
But the Chinese are also spying on a wide range of other industries.
