US Fines Chipmaker $500,000 For Selling To Blacklisted Chinese Company

The U.S. fined a chipmaker $500,000 for selling $17.1 million worth of computer chips to a blacklisted Chinese company.

GlobalFoundries, based in Malta, New York, sent 74 shipments to SJ Semiconductor without seeking a license, the Commerce Department said in a Friday statement reported by Reuters.

SJ Semiconductor, based in Jiangyin, China, is an affiliate of Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., which is partly owned by the Chinese government and has been accused by the U.S. of ties to China's military industrial complex.

Both companies were placed on the Commerce Department's so-called entity list in 2020, which specifies license requirements for American companies that want to do business with those on the list.

Neither company returned requests for comment Friday but have previously denied any wrongdoing, according to Reuters.

GlobalFoundries, the world's third-largest contract chipmaker, is a publicly traded company controlled by Mubadala Investment Co., a sovereign wealth fund of the government of Abu Dhabi, UAE.

In February, it signed a deal for $1.5 billion in funding under President Joe Biden's CHIPS and Science Act to build a new manufacturing facility in Malta, expand its existing plant there and upgrade another in Burlington, Vermont.

GlobalFoundries' stock price closed Friday at $36.63, up about 0.4%, after falling from a late-morning peak of $37.51.