The Chip War in Europe's Courts How China Is Turning Patents Into Its Next Weapon in the Chip Conflict

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Export controls, blacklists, and procurement bans have characterized the technology conflict between China and the U.S. for years. The dispute between YMTC and Micron now reveals another dimension: Chinese chip manufacturers are increasingly enforcing their intellectual property rights themselves in international courts.

A Chinese memory chip manufacturer has scored its first victory in a long-running patent dispute against its U.S. competitor Micron in a Munich court. Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) had filed two injunctive relief suits against Micron with the Munich I Regional Court and has now prevailed in the first instance in two out of five cases, according to the Chinese technology portal IT Zhijia.

On September 18, 2026, the Bavarian judges ruled that Micron had infringed on two German utility models held by YMTC. The court prohibited Micron from selling the affected products in Germany. However, this does not constitute a blanket ban on the sale of Micron products. Micron has filed an appeal.

“The symbolic significance is far greater than the immediate consequences for the market,” writes the Chinese trade publication Dianzi Chanpin Shijie. The patent dispute centers on technology for 3D NAND flash memory, as used in SSDs and other electronic storage media. Both sides have been locked in a legal battle for years, filing lawsuits against each other in several countries, including the U.S., the U.K., and China.

In this particular case, YMTC had accused its rival, Micron, of infringing several technical intellectual property rights with its products. The lawsuits involved patent EP 3 931 868 as well as four utility models. According to legal experts, utility models in particular are somewhat easier to challenge than patents.

The German Utility Model

“The German utility model is a special form of technical legal protection and, under German law, stands as an independent intellectual property right alongside the patent. Compared to the patent granting process, the procedure for registering a utility model is faster and more cost-effective,” IT Zhijia explained to his readers. However, the judges in Munich (Germany) had apparently examined the allegations in detail. “After nearly two full days of oral arguments, the 7th Civil Chamber, presided over by Judge Oliver Schön, ruled that two of the utility models […] were valid and had been infringed, and issued injunctions in favor of YMTC […] Micron filed an appeal against the decisions,” wrote the trade publication Juve Patent.

In China, a domestic company’s legal victory against a U.S. industry giant has understandably attracted a great deal of attention. “This is YMTC’s first significant global success in enforcing injunctive relief in court since the patent dispute between the two companies erupted in full force in November 2023. The decision concerns the following two German utility models: DE202020006166U1, titled ‘Step Structure of a Three-Dimensional Memory Device’ […] and DE202021004551U1, titled ‘Barrier Layer for Word Line Contacts in a Three-Dimensional NAND Memory’ […],” reported IT Zhijia.

The bitter battle between the two companies, which is being waged simultaneously across several continents and in numerous courtrooms, can only be understood against the backdrop of the U.S.-China “chip war.”

Did it Backfire?

As the rivalry between the U.S. and China in the high-tech sector continued to intensify, Micron had actively lobbied in Washington in the spring of 2026 for stricter export restrictions against the Chinese chip companies ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), SMIC, and YMTC. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra held a private roundtable discussion with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March 2026, Reuters reported on April 22, citing people familiar with the matter. According to the report, the goal of the event was to make it even more difficult for Chinese companies to acquire advanced equipment for chip manufacturing.

China had long been an important market for Micron until it found itself caught in the crossfire of the U.S.-China trade and technology war in early 2023. On March 31, 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a cybersecurity review of Micron products sold in China. The move was widely seen as a retaliatory response to Washington’s restrictions on Chinese access to key technologies. Beijing, however, portrayed it as a legitimate, fact-based cybersecurity review. In any case, Beijing had chosen Micron for its first major test case.

Procurement Freeze

On May 21, 2023, the CAC instructed operators of critical information infrastructure in China to stop purchasing Micron products. Officially, the agency justified this limited procurement ban by citing significant risks to national security—the same argument Washington uses to place many Chinese technology companies on its blacklists.

Since then, Micron has repeatedly filed lawsuits against YMTC, most recently on September 15, 2026, in a federal court in Idaho. Things are really heating up again. YMTC allegedly poached leading engineers from Micron, misappropriated trade secrets, and is now using against Micron—of all things—patents whose inventions, according to the U.S. company, were in part developed while the engineers were still employed by Micron, Tom’s Hardware reports on the lawsuit in Idaho.

However, Tom’s Hardware also points out that engineers switching to a competitor does not, in and of itself, prove any wrongdoing. “Engineers regularly change employers and continue to develop new inventions in their fields of expertise,” writes the American tech portal. In this bitter battle, it remains somewhat unclear to outsiders who stole what from whom and who is suing whom and why. It’s almost certain that YMTC won’t run out of money for lawyers and lawsuits against Micron anytime soon.

YMTC is predominantly state-owned. According to a stock exchange prospectus from August of this year, the four largest state-owned shareholders of its holding company hold 75.24 percent of the shares, including various state-owned investors from Hubei Province and Wuhan, as well as state-owned semiconductor funds.

Even without taking sides, it’s clear that the Chinese semiconductor industry has learned a lesson. The tactic of filing lawsuits against competitors—which U.S. companies have long employed—is now also being used by China’s NAND champion. The first such victory was just achieved in Munich. However, it will not necessarily be the last. Three additional lawsuits filed by YMTC against Micron are already pending before a court in Düsseldorf (Germany). 

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