Chinese government-backed Tsinghua Unigroup is said to be interested in acquiring U.S.-owned semiconductor firm Micron Technology Inc. in a $23 billion deal that would boost China’s efforts to become less dependent on foreign technology.

The Wall Street Journal, which first grabbed wind of the rumors, says Tsinghua Unigroup is mulling a $21 per-share offer for Micron. However, Micron has so far said it has not yet received any offers. If the deal did go ahead, it would become the largest takeover of an American company by a Chinese firm in history.

Micron specilizes in a range of semiconductor chips, including the DRAM and NAND chips that are often found in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The company has made its presence felt in the PC market too, though in its most recent financial quarter it admitted it was feeling the squeeze from that market’s seemingly irreversible decline. Its revenue fell by three percent compared to the same quarter one year before, while net income fell from $941 million to $620 million in the same period.

Tsinghua Unigroup is largely unknown in the U.S., but the company is said to be the biggest fabless semiconductor business in China, and at the forefront of the country’s efforts to build out its own IT capabilities.

On the other hand, Tsinghua Unigroup is a fully state-owned limited liability corporation with several top officials who’re closely linked to China’s ruling Communist Party. As such, analysts told Computerworld that Tsinghua’s chances of taking over a U.S. firm as big as Micron are unlikely, because regulators would almost certainly oppose it.

Nonetheless, Tsinghua Unigroup has been busy on the acquisition front while stepping up its involvement with U.S. firms recent months, The WSJ noted in its original report. Last year it snapped up Chinese chip makers RDA Microelectronics and Spreadtrum Communications for $1.6 billion. Meanwhile in September 2014 it secured a $1.5 billion investment from Intel that saw the U.S. chip giant take a 20 percent stake in the company.

More recently, last May, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced plans to create a new company called H3C in partnership with Tsinghua Unigroup. It was reported that H3C would become the largest networking vendor in China, not too mention one of the leaders in segments such as the servers and storage markets. That deal will see Tsinghua Unigroup cough up $2.3 billion to obtain a 51 percent stake in the new firm, which will have around 8,000 employees and drive $3.1 billion in annual revenues.

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