by Dennis Crouch
In January 2026, USPTO Director John Squires issued his first decision targeting a Chinese state-linked entity's inter partes review petition, and the result is both less dramatic and more revealing than the national-security framing might suggest. Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. v. Micron Technology, Inc., IPR2025-00098 & IPR2025-00099, Paper 38 (USPTO Jan. 15, 2026). The Director vacated the PTAB's decisions granting institution and denied YMTC's petitions challenging two Micron NAND flash memory patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 8,945,996 and 10,872,903). The decision is designated informative.
The case sits at the intersection focal points. The first is geopolitical. YMTC is a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer founded in 2016 by the partially state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup with approximately $24 billion in initial state-backed investment. The company was placed on the Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List in December 2022 as an organization "reasonably believed to be involved, or to pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved, in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States." 15 C.F.R. § 744.11. The Department of Defense separately designated YMTC as a "Chinese Military Company Operating in the United States" in January 2024. Against this backdrop, YMTC filed IPR petitions challenging two Micron NAND flash memory patents. After Micron sought Director Review, Dir. Squires issued a Show Cause order on November 10, 2025, requiring YMTC to justify why adjudicating its petitions was an appropriate use of the Office's limited resources given its Entity List designation. See Dennis Crouch, Shutting the Patent Office Door: YMTC and the Entity List, Patently-O (Nov. 16, 2025).
The second focal point is IPR process. Dir. Squires has been systematically tightening the IPR petition process, including the real-party-in-interest requirement. In September 2025, he de-designated SharkNinja Operating LLC v. iRobot Corp., IPR2020-00734, Paper 11 (PTAB Oct. 6, 2020), which had permitted PTAB judges to ignore RPI deficiencies in some instances. With SharkNinja gone, the statutory text of § 312(a)(2) returned to full force as an independent threshold requirement: a petition "may be considered" only if it identifies "all" real parties in interest. Failure to disclose means the petition is simply not in condition for consideration.