Would love to see them succeed and take on the pc builder market, aka hobbyist market. Honestly, the recent rise in RAM left me behind with a huge amount of disbelief and anger. Anger primarily, because big corporations are responsible for draining the market, while on the other hand a Satya Nadella states that they are sitting on a pile of GPUs they cannot use because of limited power.[1]
I simply cannot understand how that will ever be profitable. To me, it just looks like a huge waste of resources.
Sure those particular ones are still using TSMC but at least people are doing something to prevent everything from being such oligopolies: which is also why I own an Intel Arc A580 and B580.
Any step towards market competition is nice to hear about.
Plenty of countries gave Huawei the same treatment the US did, and the US and its allies have the weight to impose sanctions, tariffs, etc to punish consumers within their borders for daring to consider better and cheaper options.
The allies of the US all banned Huawei because the US asked them (quite forcefully) to do so.
CXMT is already under a full set of US long arm sanctions so probably only very little of their products will ever reach western markets.
However some Chinese demand will definitely be met by CXMTs product displacing western suppliers - so maybe there is a tiny bit of relief for western consumers there.
> However some Chinese demand will definitely be met by CXMTs product displacing western suppliers - so maybe there is a tiny bit of relief for western consumers there.
I recall years of hints that the affordable housing crunch would eventually be helped by developers - even tho they're only building tons of not-affordable housing.
We're five years in. No meaningful change is visible from the perspective of folks who need affordable housing.
Based on that lesson, I expect what CXMT does there to have no meaningful effect here.
> I recall years of hints that the affordable housing crunch would eventually be helped by developers - even tho they're only building tons of not-affordable housing.
If I may ask, what cities? For example, Austin has seen a 6.6% asking price decrease for 0- to 2-bedroom units [1]. The big problem is there is an absolutely massive hole, and very few places are building "enough" to make a dent.
How could a subsidized housing number increase from building not-subsidized housing? That is illogical. The market rate housing will become cheaper and therefore more housing will be affordable to more people but you can’t make the number of “affordable housing” units go up by building anything else because “affordable housing” is a brand name for subsidized housing.
I don't know about that. All I'm pointing out is that just because US doesn't like China doesn't mean there isn't a bigger market out there. So, even if China ends up servicing that market only, that's still a big chunk of the pie. So, case in point, a Chinese DRAM maker flooding the market with cheap(er) DRAMs (or any DRAM for that matter -- thanks Micron), will end up affecting the price of DRAM in the US.
That's true. The greater the numbers, the lower the demand on the global scale (unless those all be consumed by AI too). It makes me wonder if AI data centers will never be satisfied.
Sucks for everyone else is what I'm saying. 100% of people should be allowed access, not be preempted from it in order to protect the value of exalted tech cartels.
It's a colossal misallocation of resources by a handful of fucknuggets so wealthy that they will never experience real consequences for it. Meanwhile, everyone else is made to suffer.
This is a situation in which a government would typically step in and force companies to stop ratfucking end users in favor of business partners, but the problem here is that (a) it's an international problem that would require cooperation with China and (b) the US has the most venal administration in history and has already taken bribes from AI and hardware companies.
These companies going all in on purely AI partnership sales are foolish because the aforementioned user ratfucking is step two of Doctorow's original description of enshittification:
1. Attract users and partners with market disrupting quality of service
2. Screw over users in favor of partners, knowing that users are less likely to be critical and more likely to be locked in
3. Screw over partners once you've achieved enough market dominance that they are also locked in
4. Use rent seeking behavior (government bribes, etc.) now that you've exhausted your users and partners for growth
This is an announcement of increased competition in a market with acute supply shortages. That’s exactly what is supposed to happen.
Jumping to regulating the global RAM market this early sounds like the worst of all solutions. You want people to get cross-government approval every time they want to buy or sell RAM? American companies will call up Korea to get their RAM rations.
Note that the company in question is specifically sanctioned by the US, so this is not exactly a glowing example of the utopia of the free market you seem to be holding it up as.
Rationing chips makes sense to me. You don't have to set the ration at a low enough level that it would ever impact legitimate businesses. You could just set a ration level that prevents a company that is losing hundreds of billions of dollars from spending imaginary money buying 40% of the annual raw material supply despite lacking the capability to refine the raw materials into a working product, for the sole purpose of denying it to their competition. You strawmanned the opposition as requiring cross-government approval "every time anyone wants to buy RAM", but maybe we could just start with requiring cross-government approval to buy 40% of the global supply.
It actually kinda doesn't. I more meant around the GPUs where directly or otherwise Nvidia pays Microsoft, Microsoft pays Nvidia, both stocks go up by more than those amounts, profit.
But for RAM, Sam Altman didn't put in a purchase order for idk 10 trillion DIMMs or something. He said he would buy a bunch of wafers. A tweet had put it well: he said he'd buy wafers that don't yet exist for computers that don't exist for data centers that don't exist for AI models that don't exist for demand that doesn't exist.
So the demand is kinda made up the same way there were TP shortages at the height of covid. There's plenty enough to go around, but one person rocks the boat and everyone goes nuts.
These situations usually lead to price collapse in the long run. Prices are simply an information vector on what humans should be doing for others globally.
It’s essentially an economic death spiral, but that has a lot of energy and dynamism until it crashes. In this case as long as NVIDIA prints money and people are willing to play pretend for a paycheck, this will go on.
But it will end and who knows how many lives will be ruined in the fall.
Chinese memory makers are the product of massive state backing, with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies and the full weight of the Chinese government behind them. Could Samsung win a power struggle against the Chinese government? .. The market that [Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron] created by surviving is completely different from the past. When there were ten players, even if I cut output, someone else could simply increase theirs. But now that only three remain, everyone knows all too well that if anyone recklessly expands supply, everyone goes down together.. the market paradigm has shifted from a “market share (M/S) war” to “profit maximization.”
The key to (CXMT) achieving 10nm-class DRAM mass production at a speed that seemingly defies physics lies in its complete acquisition of Samsung’s PRP process roadmap—a project that took Samsung five years and 1.6 trillion KRW to develop.
South Korean prosecutors indicted multiple individuals in a case alleging that a former Samsung engineer leaked advanced DRAM manufacturing process data to [CXMT] .. shedding light on how leaked trade secrets may have accelerated China’s push into 10nm-class memory.. engineers in question allegedly took note of detailed critical manufacturing steps in handwritten notes taken over five years.. handwritten notes remain difficult to track or audit. Investigators say the accused engineer exploited this gap by memorizing and transcribing process flows, which is virtually impossible to police effectively.
Samsung closed the last Chinese smartphone factory in 2019 and moved South to Vietnam. In 2020, Samsung's Vietnam production accounted for about 25+% of the country's GDP and export.
IMO, and it's not even really clear how Samsung's DRAM business really benefited from the state backing. The South Korea gov't first major initiative "Semiconductor Industry Promotion Plan" started only after Samsung'd developed their first 64K DRAM in 1983. It really helped other local industry competitors such as LG and Hyundai catch up, but Samsung was already on a roll -- by the early 90's, the company became the first to develop 256Mb DRAM. Not clear whether they really needed hand-holding from the gov't.
The government leniency and support for oligarchy and way more important than the dollars they could provide. The current regime could be characterized as a techno surveillance state run by a few oligarchs.
As a free-software advocate, I believe competition should be based on investment in industrial machinery and labour, not on secretly guarded know-how. If Samsung, Micron, and SK-Electronics weren't an oligopoly trying to squeeze maximum profit out of consumers and instead offered good prices, China wouldn't be able to—and would have no interest in—subsidizing private companies to get them on the same level. It's only the greed of these three companies in their oligopoly that has put them in such a fragile position, where the slightest competition could be fatal to them.
Security advisor Brian Shields discovered that not one, but seven Nortel executives, including CEO Frank Dunn, had been hacked, and that the hackers were vacuuming an alarming volume of sensitive material out of its databases. By the end of his investigation, Shields says he was able to track the theft of over 1,400 documents.. during a six-month period when bosses allowed him to monitor the stealing. He found evidence the break-in of Nortel’s internal computer network had started no later than 2000, and probably began in the 1990s. He says it lasted past 2009..
Since I'm in China, I took a look at Taobao hoping to find cheaper ddr5 sticks made with CXMT chips. Unfortunately, they are the same price or only marginally cheaper than Hynix sticks (1900 - 2300 rmb for 32g ddr5). Perhaps capacity at CXMT is not very high yet.
They failed to achieve quality and decent yield. And that is at least 10 years from DDR3 to DDR5. On the other hand YMTC from NAND space are moving to DRAM.
Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50?
Or the supply of non-CXMT DRAM is sufficient poor right now that Chinese buyers, of which there are plenty, are willing to pay approximately as much for CXMT’s product as for anyone else’s?
CXMT’s real ability to reduce prices will come (if it does) by adding enough supply to drive down prices everywhere, or at least everywhere that is willing to import CXMT’s products without absurd tariffs.
If they have the runway, they can try the tried and true method of undercutting competitors until they fold, and then capture the market for themselves.
Investors have the stomach for this tactic, surely a company with the state's backing can remain solvent even longer than those funded by private investors.
I think the economics are wrong for this, at least so far. CXMT seems to be scaling up as fast as they can, and they have maybe 5% market share. They can’t flood the market with cheap DRAM because they don’t have enough DRAM yet — I’m not convinced they could materially impact anyone else’s profits even if they literally gave away their entire output. At best selling their product cheaply might help them gain some mindshare as integrators test it and hopefully discover that it meets the spec and works fine. What they need is capital and time with which to scale, and selling at a profit-maximizing price will get them the most capital, and this benefit may well exceed the actual profit on goods sold: the stock market might appreciate that they are profitable, thus making it easier for them to obtain funding under favorable terms.
If they actually want to try to destroy their competitors by undercutting them, they need to be able supply enough DRAM to actually drive down the price. At the rate that the big buyers are buying DRAM, that will take several more years at least.
I’m curious whether their presumed inability to buy ASML machines might actually help them. If they can meet the target DDR5 and HBM specs without EUV while maintaining decent yield and acceptable power consumption of the finished product, they may well be able to out-scale their competitors. I imagine it’s a lot easier to procure the equipment for additional DUV lines than EUV lines, especially with other Chinese vendors doing their best to supply semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Undercutting the competitors is done when a business is working close to cost and a slight anomaly (eg. competitor that doesn't have to make profit, is subsidized or is cheaper for some artificial reason) makes them go out of business.
A stick of ram, made for $10, that used to cost $20 is now $100 due to the AI bubble (numbers pulled out of my ass)... you'd have to bring the prices down to $15 or even less to make those companies fold, but you can earn much more if you sell your ram at $80.
Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators. This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly.
Mini PCs seems to be the perfect vector, since the only serious manufacturers are Chinese brands. International brands only seem to dabble in this sector.
If (SO)DIMM memory prices rise to the stratosphere while integrated memory in Chinese mini PCs remain relatively affordable, from 16GB Intel N150 to 128GB AMD Strix Halo for Edge AI, there will be industry-altering consequences that persist long after DRAM pseudo-shortages end. Oligopolists can relearn old lessons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
New companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business.
Indeed. I am waiting to buy a Strix Halo on Taobao when supply has been replenished. I asked the manufacturer if price would remain the same after restocking, they said they weren't sure. They re-stock in the middle of January, so it will be interesting to see what the price ends up being. I wonder if there is any advantage of having integrated memory in this regard?
Another opportunity is low-latency storage with millions of IOPS. Nvidia is rebooting Intel's cancelled (see eBay) Optane for "AI Storage". Future Mini PCs and LLM accelerators for Narrow/Edge AI industrial use could benefit from high-IOPS storage, https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-and-kioxia...
I know there's more variety and typically lower prices (and sketchier windows licenses) from the Chinese brands, but last I looked, there's lots of options if you want an established brand. You can even get them from the likes of HP, Dell, Lenovo (still chinese, but), etc.
I think these have pretty high prices (as I acknowledged in my first message), but they exist. And I see similar things all over the place in retail and medical settings.
1 litre micro PCs are about 4X (35W+) TDP and price of Intel N150 with 6W TDP. They do offer more performance and features (e.g. security) than N150, but exist in a separate and stable (15+ year) category of business desktop.
Mini-PCs have a range of experimental form factors, including mini-desktop, NAS, router, tablet, SBCs, industrial with GPIO, thanks to competition between Chinese and Korean (e.g. ODROID) OEMs.
HP has a $220 4GB Windows laptop and $400+ 8GB Chromebook based on Intel N150.
Why would I buy CXMT if it's virtually the same price as Hynix?
Edit: I see you made an edit without noting that you did so.
Only this sentence was in the pre-edit comment: "Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50?"
For your added comments: There is no supply issue, there are hundreds of sellers of Hynix, Crucial, Samsung ddr5 on Taobao. For your second comment about them driving down prices later on by increasing supply, well, I first of all noted that perhaps capacity is not great in my comment, and you are also contradicting your first point where you said CXMT would be stupid to compete on price.
In reality, the history of every Chinese market entrant, even those leading technologically, shows that they always cut margins to compete by driving down costs. I have a decade worth of experience related to this.
I believe CXMT simply has not gotten to the stage where they really try to win market share and crank up supply - perhaps due to lack of capital, or as I said, due to capacity limitations (which may be a result of capital).
I'm watching the price refresh since last year, hoping the domestic manufacturers in China could rebalance the price a bit. Nope, it turned out that did not happen. It's a free money grab right now of course they raised their prices.
But I guess Americans will not be buying Chinese RAMs/SSDs for critical applications (such as AI), and not a lot of user outside China will use Chinese AI due to restrictions such as censorship etc being enforced on it, limiting the growth and scale of the tech. So, there is still hope that some of the manufacturers will eventually pivot towards tried and true consumer products.
Like Nanya in Taiwan, DDR5 production at CXMT is in its early stages and a small fraction of their overall shipments. Give it a year and that will likely change.
No DRAM manufacturer I know of uses ASML. DRAM is several years behind on lithography due to complexity/differences.
Outside of that, I hope China can manage to obtain a foothold in silicon, the world, especially NVIDIA, Micron, Hynix, etc. definitely needs a wake up call. The AI world was spooked when China released an MIT licensed LLM model that outperformed others in many metrics at the time, let us hope that others can follow on this success.
A bit harsh. It's just information outdated by a year. The majority of DRAM by all big manufacturers is still on DUV tech AFAIK. Micron's "1-gamma" is pretty new. It's been less than a year since Micron started shipping DRAM based on that process.
And to the OP's comment: CXMT won't be making stuff for an Nvidia H100 any time soon haha, but there's a lot of stuff out there that's not that.
Micron's FQ1 2026 report says they expect their 1-gamma process (uses EUV) to the be the majority of their bit output by the second half of the year. The same report says they've already begun sampling 1-gamma parts to OEMs, so they must have a fab somewhere using EUV already.
The Boise plant is being reactivated and is not ready for EUV production yet. The Syracuse plant won't be running until 2030. Their Japan and Taiwan fabs are scheduled for the 1-gamma rollout.
It's good that if not anything, the AI giant's antics have shaken up the industry awake and made us aware of how finicky the current status quo is with essential commodities for the entire world being choked up by a handful of suppliers. In the end as new entrants increase, with fortune, the consumers shall eventually be better off as things settle.
You cannot buy these. You can only buy companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen that are enrolled in Stock Connect, which has certain requirements that means these small IPOd companies cannot be enrolled. It is possible that there mutual funds or ETFs in HK that are available, and hold these types of companies.
It's an opportune moment given how wildly expensive and in demand DRAM is and hopefully it'll give notice to the incumbents that they'll lose market share if they expand production.
As they say in business: "Your margin is my opportunity"
Of course, people always forget that communism is based on huge production of everything. That's why China can continue to do this and break capitalist companies.
> Samsung is officially stepping in to shut down the panic. The company has firmly denied reports that it plans to kill off its consumer SATA SSD production. In a direct statement, a spokesperson made it clear: the rumors are false, and Samsung isn’t going anywhere.
Micron hasn't pulled out of the market CXMT is in. They make DRAM chips, same as CXMT. They might also make DIMMs for servers and so on, but CXMT is primarily competing with the DRAM chip stuff.
(Note that I have not researched each of these companies individually... There may be errors in the above list (some may be DRAM resellers, some may be defunct, etc., etc.))
Coke and Pepsi dominate the worldwide drink market, but due to the immense size of the market, there are always up-and-coming competitors.
Go to your local superstore, supermarket, or your local convenience store.
You'll find Coke and Pepsi, lots of it, but you'll also find no-name drinks and sodas from drink companies that are not as well established yet or well known.
That those exist is a good thing, at least for consumers, at least for those that consume, because the root of all consumer prosperity brought on by capitalism (global trade = capitalism, regardless of the names of countries involved) comes from the relentless competition brought on by two or more companies, ideally as many as possible...
We would not have the super high performing desktop computers we have today if it were not for the historic early competition between AMD and Intel (later entered by other CPU manufacturers), and we would not have choice if it were not for competition.
Getting back to DRAM manufacturers, The first three do dominate 95+% of the market as of 2026.
But there might be some interesting up-and-coming smaller companies to watch...
Let's remember that OpenAI came from basically nowhere -- to give Google a run for its money -- as did Google with Microsoft's behemoth 20+ years ago...
What new DRAM manufacturer might be the next up-and-coming DRAM manufacturer in the space?
Well, we don't as-of-yet know... but the space is an interesting one to watch, to be sure!
But you are correct!
The first three do currently dominate 95+% of the market as of 2026...
Isn't there higher barriers to entry than OpenAI and soda? They were able to compete with "commodity" hardware. A DRAM manufacturer would need expensive machines from ASML, right?
I'm not forced to drink Coke or Pepsi if I go to a bar. Only if I specifically want a cola I very likely get whatever cola they got (likely either Coke or Pepsi). If you want to use a computer, it will have DRAM, and you'll end up with one of the DRAM hardware manufacturers.
> Let's remember that OpenAI came from basically nowhere -- to give Google a run for its money -- as did Google with Microsoft's behemoth 20+ years ago...
Yeah, but the capital behind it certainly did not:
> OpenAI was initially founded as a nonprofit organization by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised pledges for $1 billion. [1]
Altman was well connected, with rich friends. People like Thiel and Musk. Under the guise of a non-profit they eventually pulled a rug to make OpenAI for-profit.
The barrier of entry for hardware design is also just plain different than software. There was a good talk on that recently on 39c3.
Seems more likely OpenAI or one of the hyperscalers would continue vertical expansion into chips but likely only supply themselves--possibly making proprietary variants only they could use anyway
Seems to be the case with CPUs although I know that's a bit different since they're contracting with existing fabs
We know, minimally, from Perplexity's list above, that there exist multiple alternative DRAM manufacturers other than Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, that have completed at least some of the barriers of entry to the high-end DRAM market, and possibly many...
We also know that the world is full of capital -- as you suggest.
That capital is continually looking for investment opportunities, and DRAM is a huge, huge market...
When capital invests in markets, any barriers to entry are moved, if not outright displaced (i.e., OpenAI, $1 billion, etc.).
Point is, we don't know what the future will hold...
I think it's a good bet that cheaper DRAM, DDR5 and otherwise, will be coming down the pike soon, once production catches up, once supply outpaces demand...
I simply cannot understand how that will ever be profitable. To me, it just looks like a huge waste of resources.
[1]: https://redmondmag.com/blogs/generationai/2025/12/microsoft-...
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