As they say in business: "Your margin is my opportunity"
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. 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..this wouldn't be such a problem if prices weren't so insane. Samsung would still have volume/know how/efficienciez.
Translation: Could Korean government win a power struggle against Chinese government
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.
Japanese companies are also nearshoring to vietnam.
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.
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-...
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.
But it will end and who knows how many lives will be ruined in the fall.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.realtor.com/advice/hyperlocal/austin-rents-are-g...
Downvoting doesn't answer my question though.
With RAM you can always just AliExpress it. I live in a small country yet every day literally MILLIONS of packages come in from Asia.
If CXMT can fill more of China's domestic demand, that's still good news for us all.
The entire price crisis stems from anticipation of that prospect
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.
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.
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. 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.Power efficiency. Strix Halo also offers unified CPU/GPU memory with 256 GB/s memory bandwidth, which brings it closer to Apple Silicon performance for local LLMs, https://chipsandcheese.com/p/strix-halos-memory-subsystem-ta...
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...
Here's a recent AMD processor one from Lenovo https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series...
Here'a a Dell with Intel. I can't decipher Intel's model numbers, but it's DDR5 so it can't be that old. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/dell-pro-qcm1250...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's been no news on Samsung exiting any DRAM market as far as I can tell?
> 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.
better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Unfortunately as far as I can see it is not possible from where I am (Denmark).
Some Hong Kong shares and linked Shanghai shares are available in interactive brokers but not these ipoes.
Samsung Electronics – https://www.samsung.com
SK hynix – https://www.skhynix.com
Micron Technology – https://www.micron.com
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) – https://www.cxmt.com
Nanya Technology – https://www.nanya.com
Winbond Electronics – https://www.winbond.com
Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (PSMC) – https://www.psmc.com.tw
Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit (JHICC) – http://www.jhicc.com
GigaDevice – https://www.gigadevice.com
Etron Technology – https://www.etron.com
Integrated Silicon Solution Inc. (ISSI) – https://www.issi.com
Elite Semiconductor Memory Technology (ESMT) – https://www.esmt.com.tw
Zentel Electronics – https://www.zentel.com.tw
Alliance Memory – https://www.alliancememory.com
AP Memory Technology – https://www.apmemory.com
AMIC Technology – https://www.amictechnology.com
Hua Hong Semiconductor – https://www.huahong.com
(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...
> 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 to be the case with CPUs although I know that's a bit different since they're contracting with existing fabs
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...
it has become this due to the cyclical mania and bad margins on the troughs killing companies. hopefully this current hunger for memory make it less painful down the line.
amluto•1mo ago
The other major DRAM makers use ASML machines, and I’m curious how competitive CXMT will manage to be without them.
eek2121•1mo ago
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.
cpldcpu•1mo ago
They are, of course, a bit slower in EUV adoption. But its already there:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/micron-sampl...
https://www.techinsights.com/blog/samsung-d1z-lpddr5-dram-eu...
nerdsniper•1mo ago
Micron s/uses/“will use” ASML’s EUV machines[0] in New York. Micron shares some info on their EUV DRAM process[1].
DRAM composed 80% of Micron’s revenue, NAND is about 20%.
0: https://www.syracuse.com/business/2023/09/mind-boggling-mach...
1: https://www.micron.com/products/memory/1gamma-dram-technolog...
kevin_thibedeau•1mo ago
Will use. The fab isn't built yet.
boojums•1mo ago
https://investors.micron.com/static-files/530bd7ed-a8c8-4687...
kevin_thibedeau•1mo ago
arjie•1mo ago
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.
tooltalk•1mo ago