Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology, two of the world’s largest memory chip makers, warned that strict COVID-19 curbs in the Chinese city of Xi’an could disrupt their chip manufacturing bases in the area. The lockdown in the city puts further pressure on global supply chains and adds to a torturous year for exporters facing sharply higher freight costs even as prices for raw materials including semiconductors skyrocket amid the two-year long pandemic. The curbs could cause delays in the supply of DRAM memory chips, widely used in data centres, Micron said on Wednesday. The stringent restrictions, which went into effect earlier this month, may be increasingly difficult to mitigate and have resulted in thinner staffing levels at the manufacturing site, Micron added. Samsung Electronics also said on Wednesday that it would temporarily adjust operations at its Xi’an manufacturing facilities for NAND flash memory chips, used for data storage in data …