The talks target CXMT and YMTC, China's top memory chip makers, but both sit on a US Defense Department list of Chinese military linked firms, putting Cook in a bind between a global chip shortage and Washington's rules.
Apple's chief executive Tim Cook is personally lobbying the Trump administration to let Apple buy memory chips from two Chinese companies the Pentagon has flagged as military-linked, a request that exposes the collision between US national-security designation policy and Apple's China-market supply problem, according to people familiar with the matter.
The talks target ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's leading producer of DRAM (the working memory inside phones and computers), and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), China's leading producer of NAND flash (the storage that holds photos, apps, and data on devices). Both firms sit on a recently updated US Defense Department list, Section 1260H of the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act, that names Chinese entities the US government believes support Beijing's military, according to a Business Times report on the negotiations.
The bind Apple is in is structural, not political. To sell phones competitively in China, Apple needs chips that local regulators and supply chains recognize as Chinese, and that is exactly what CXMT and YMTC make. The same two suppliers, however, are the ones Washington has formally designated as military-adjacent. The legal exposure does not rest on the politics of the moment. Section 1260H is a designation, not a sanction, and whether any individual chip purchase from a 1260H-listed entity requires an export license depends on Commerce Department rules that the public reporting has not pinned down. Apple's problem is therefore not that a China deal is controversial. It is that the deal would sit inside a regime where procurement, military designation, and export control now run through the same small set of legal hooks.
What makes Cook's lobbying channel unusual is who he is talking to. He has personally appealed to Trump administration officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as reported by the Business Times. Treasury is the financial diplomat of the US government: sanctions, foreign-investment review, and the working-level US-China economic track all run through Bessent's building. Going to Treasury, rather than to the Commerce Department (which administers export controls) or the Defense Department (which maintains the 1260H list), is a tell. Apple is not asking for a license under a specific export rule. It is asking for a diplomatic off-ramp, a way to thread a deal that the designation regime on its own would make very hard to clear.
The pressure underneath the lobbying is a global memory shortage that has forced Apple to raise prices across its product line, according to the Business Times report. That shortage is the falsifier of the simple version of this story, in which Apple could just buy elsewhere. Memory chips are not interchangeable across foundries in the short term, and the public basis for the price-hike framing is the wire's reporting, not an independent market data point. If the shortage is real, CXMT and YMTC are not optional substitutes. Apple cannot simply switch out of the bind.
The talks are ongoing and not final, and the public record is sourced entirely to anonymous people familiar with the matter, with the Business Times carrying the Bloomberg distribution. That matters for two reasons. The lobbying targets, the dollar figures, and the legal mechanism remain unconfirmed. The 1260H list and the export-control rules that follow from it are public law, and they constrain what any eventual deal could look like regardless of who wins the lobbying fight.
The next trigger to watch is whether the Commerce Department takes a public position on whether 1260H-designated firms are subject to specific export-license requirements for the kind of memory chip sale Apple is reportedly negotiating. If Commerce stays silent, the deal, if it closes, will close inside a regulatory fog. If Commerce objects publicly, Cook's Treasury channel becomes the only path. Either way, the choice has stopped being a procurement question and has become a test of how the US government wants its China policy to work when one company is caught on both sides of the line.