CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10679206

by phront • 5 months ago

265 271 5 months ago

More competition is always good

mrweasel• 5 months ago

This feels like a classic business blunder. Focus hard on a single business segment, leaving an opening in the market for your competitors. Not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough for you, right now. Only downside is that now you've created an opening for a new player in the market.

This feels like a short coming of western business/stock market thinking. Focusing on profit within the next few quarters, and not caring about the longer term consequences. For all it's flaws and shady business practises at least China can think beyond a single fiscal year.

tjwebbnorfolk2• 5 months ago

Ok but this is how the market is supposed to work. If the incumbents aren't doing what their customers want, then competitors can rise and fill the gap and compete.

This isn't a shortcoming, it's a competitive market working as intended.

delecti2• 5 months ago

The market doing what it's supposed to do does not negate that the market segment has only been left open because of overly myopic businesses.

PearlRiver2• 5 months ago

Everyone gets mad when Chinese do capitalism...

assaddayinh• 5 months ago

Lets not forget there is no competitors. There is one competitor- the chinese state, one huge company willing to subsidize any endeavor that will help it fmgain more marketshare with already captured markets.

1272• 5 months ago

Only if you don't want or need any geopolitical gradient at all.

xadhominemx6• 5 months ago

CXMT sells the vast majority of their bits at the prevailing market rate, just like everyone else. They are adding capacity as quickly as they can, with a 5-10 year planning horizon, just like everyone else. It’s really not that deep!

orphea• 5 months ago

  > They are adding capacity as quickly as they can [...], just like everyone else

Are you sure? In the past they explicitly said they are not going to increase production.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-maker...

zozbot23412• 5 months ago

It's not really a blunder though. Given that total capacity is tightly constrained, Samsung and SK Hynix are happy to focus on what they do at their best and with the highest margins. Why shouldn't they supply the HBM market?

overfeed2• 5 months ago

It's putting all eggs in one basket. If/when the higher-margin category collapses, they'll have no fallback. Imagine Chevrolet had discontinued Impalas and other low-margin cars, and switched to Corvettes during the pandemic

m4rtink• 5 months ago

Maybe not to starve whole segments of the society and economy of critical inputs ?

This is why we have strategy reserves - to avoid greedy companies to make a quick buck when they find out they can sell the equivalent of crack and dump all the other now low margin stuff like food or other essentials.

Sure, that company might make a killing for a short while, but people will die from hunger, missing medicine or freeze to death.

sophrosyne422• 5 months ago

There is really nothing about the stock market that means only thinking about the mext few quarters. See all the losses on the profit and loss statements of AI tech giants, or, say, game console companies? Why are their stocks still valued so highly during these periods? The answer: investors are thinking long term.

It is really impossible to have quality long term thinking without capitalization accounting and similar instruments that come out of the "wester" system of business that chinese free enterprise gladly and speedily copied when it was made free.

twosdai• 5 months ago

I think the sentiment here is about management's tie of bonuses to near-term stock performance. Maybe not about the market itself, I agree with your view on investors want long term gains over short term fluctuations mostly.

nirui• 5 months ago

Focusing on profit within the next few quarters, and not caring about the longer term consequences

Anything new? From my non-American view, American companies has done similar things for a very long time now. It happened in the consumer electronics, it might happen again in the IT industry.

It's not the fault of the companies, they simply just wanted more certainty and the consumer market is not (when compare to cooperate contracts).

But from the stand point of a nation, if no one creates low-end products, then no one will be providing low-end/entry-level jobs. That's when you got structural problems.

someperson• 5 months ago

As a outside observer, NAND and DRAM prices have skyrocket ed with the AI infrastructure boom just as the China-based fabs are coming online.

It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM.

But right now it seems they can max out their supply capacity without selling below cost.

Appears to me like China's endless state led (often unproductive) investment in semiconductor manufacturing subsidies (for decades) is about to pay off with some industry dominance soon.

Like the electric vehicle sector.

nutjob23• 5 months ago

It's funny that you call this an "very aggressive dumping strategy" while AI vendors are doing the same but with even greater losses and on a much larger scale.

It's all simply a fight for market share.

The original sin is the existing DRAM vendors selling their entire (spare) capacity to the likes of OpenAI.

xadhominemx6• 5 months ago

No one sold their capacity to OpenAI. The vast majority of DRAM is transacted in what is essentially a quarterly auction.

sho2• 5 months ago

Can we please stop with this irritatingly persistent myth? AI companies, at least the big ones, do not sell inference at a loss - far from it. This has been debunked and explained many times and yet it keeps being repeated.

The numbers aren't public but most guesses I've heard are that Anthropic's markup is around 50% on average, and that if considered in isolation, most models are profitable overall. The constant losses are instead due to training the next models, which will also eventually recoup but later, and forward capex investment.

This idea that big AI companies are normally and systematically selling inference at a loss as some kind of market share strategy is just not supported by the facts.

PowerElectronix5• 5 months ago

I personally fail to see the downside of any manufacturer selling forever at a loss, except for the manufacturer itself.

xyzzy1233• 5 months ago

You become dependent on the supplier.

The downside in general is that other countries lose production capacity in steel, heavy industry, semiconductors, machine tools etc - industries that took decades to build and can't be easily replaced.

Also they gradually lose the ability to meaningfully innovate in those sectors because there's no grounding against production reality anymore.

This has geopolitical consequences further down the line.

numpad02• 5 months ago

the currency eventually collapses

creato• 5 months ago

If you actually believe this, then what is your explanation for a manufacturer to do this?

Do you think they are just stupid?

fph• 5 months ago

Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer at a loss, and what happened to internet standards?

skeeter2020• 5 months ago

First, they're not selling at a loss; the huge price increases have allowed them to push aggrssively in the legacy markets. They're making "slightly smaller" profits than other manufacturers (of which there are now very few).

Second, they can drive out all competition and then have a captive audience for whatever prices they want, as the barriers to entry in these markets are very high. This is essentially what's happened with all higher-end manufacturing in the west over the past 30+ years.

gchamonlive6• 5 months ago

Because it's never forever. It's until the corporation substitutes the market, at which point you are at their mercy.

PearlRiver2• 5 months ago

Chinese investment has not been unproductive. It gave them independence so that the US could not cut them of- see Cuba.

dygd• 5 months ago

It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM.

Crucial's departure from the consumer market left such a gaping hole, that CXMT doesn't even need to push other players out to gain a footing.

RobotToaster2• 5 months ago

It's more like everyone else abandoned the market, and CXMT realised it was free real estate.

Maxious• 5 months ago

CXMT was already an option for consumers via brands like Kingbank and Asgard.

There's Kingbank DDR5 using CXMT modules starting to become available in Australia https://www.techpowerup.com/346479/hardware-unboxed-examines... including from mainstream retailers like Mwave https://www.mwave.com.au/memory/pc-ddr4/kingbank https://www.mwave.com.au/memory/pc-ddr5/kingbank

maxglute5• 5 months ago

How's it dumping below cost when hey can simply sell for 100% margins instead of western makers selling for 400%.

shimman• 5 months ago

Because only western companies are allowed to make massive profits at the expense of entire nations, it's not greed when they do it apparently.

jml7c5• 5 months ago

It's easy to misread, but they're not arguing that. Note the "eventually" and "but right now".

RobotToaster2• 5 months ago

It's amazing what can be achieved when you can plan 5 years in advance, instead of just making the line go up for the next quarter.

nine_k• 5 months ago

Not five, but likely twenty-five. Not specific plans but attention: situation changes all the time, but the interest remains.

abtinf4• 5 months ago

History is littered with the corpses of those slaughtered by the millions in the name of great leader’s 5 year plans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

victorbjorklund• 5 months ago

Don’t forget all the times those plans fail because the world did not turn out to be what you thought it would.

andersmurphy2• 5 months ago

But, we do plan 5 years in advance. Cloud, VR, Crypto, and now AI. All glorious five year plans from the Silicon Valley Planning Bureau comrade.

odiroot• 5 months ago

Most importantly it's amazing what you can achieve if you can cut the red tape.

constantcrying2• 5 months ago

This has nothing to do with 5 year plans, but with having a functional and competent government enable to enact a coherent long term policy.

In western countries every couple of years we elect a new clown show, which then proceeds to destroy whatever the last clown show tried to accomplish. That has happened again and again for decades, truly awesome "our democracy".

ponector• 5 months ago

Also amazing what could be wasted when you can plan 5 years in the wrong direction. Remember USSR computers? They also been planned years in advance.

xnx• 5 months ago

If CXMT new what was coming 5 years ago, they could've bought NVDA stock and 14x their investment.

SlinkyOnStairs3• 5 months ago

It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM.

It's not dumping, it's the opposite.

Sam Altman's stunt has created massive amounts of fictitious demand (OpenAI isn't using those wafers it's ordering) and triggered massive panic-buying from everyone else.

Prices are arteficially high, this has turbocharged China's fab and R&D budgets as you observe.

is about to pay off with some industry dominance soon.

They're not looking to dump the semiconductor markets. They're looking to invade Taiwan.

All this buildout in their semiconductor industry is to detach themselves from the western semiconductor industry that will either sanction them if they invade Taiwan, or in the case of TSMC, suffer major damage in the ensuing conflict.

That the collapse/destruction of the Taiwanese semiconductor and electronics industries will utterly ruin the western tech industry is somewhere between a happy coincidence and acceptable collateral damage to them. No dumping required.

fc417fc8025• 5 months ago

utterly ruin

I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use cutting edge nodes to begin with.

Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that would hardly be the end of the world. I still use a desktop with DDR3 on a daily basis (granted the GPU is much newer with GDDR6) and my laptop is from the early era of DDR4 ...

dontlaugh• 5 months ago

Why would they bother to invade Taiwan when they’re winning economically and diplomatically?

Public opinion in Taiwan is rapidly changing towards peaceful re-unification and no one anywhere on earth trust the US will help them with anything.

abtinf4• 5 months ago

It is wise … to price well below cost push out other players forever

I challenge you to name a single successful example of this that isn’t state enforced.

stingraycharles2• 5 months ago

Amazon?

api2• 5 months ago

All VC funded companies that release free or underpriced products and services, capture market share, then raise prices or enshittify?

The entire business model of VC funded tech?

neves• 5 months ago

Uber

pclmulqdq• 5 months ago

Dumping is when you sell things for below cost. It is not dumping when you charge a 500% markup instead of a 1000% markup, even if the market is currently selling at that markup.

HauntingPin2• 5 months ago

I thought the same but when I googled, the results disagreed with this point of view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

All the laws listed there define dumping as something being sold below the "normal price" and there being some quantifiable harm being done to local industry of the country being exported to.

So it has nothing to do necessarily with the cost of production, and based on this it could be considered price dumping.

yogthos• 5 months ago

I find people tend to miss the productive aspects of Chinese state led investments because they don't consider their value at scale. Take the HSR system, it has been derided time and again as being wasteful, and too expensive, and so on. Yet, now it's become a key artery for trade and commerce across China. It allows goods to move at an incredible speed, boosts tourism, and helps overall development of many regions which otherwise wouldn't see much economic activity.

gchamonlive6• 5 months ago

Is China doing to DRAM what Amazon did to bookstores?

swed420• 5 months ago

Awesome. Hopefully storage is next.

nutjob23• 5 months ago

This is good news. The price you pay for jacking up your prices is losing market share.

Once established, the Chinese vendors will retain most the market share if the quality is ok. The SK/JP vendors are making a big mistake.

xadhominemx6• 5 months ago

Everyone is completely sold out and adding capacity as quickly as possible.

ErneX2• 5 months ago

Are they really adding capacity?

wrsh07• 5 months ago

It's not clear that raising your prices to match the supply/demand curve is a mistake

They will compete on price if they are forced to, but they aren't forced to right now

yellowapple5• 5 months ago

It ain't the price raise that's the mistake (even if that's what's currently painful for those of us looking to buy RAM). It's the willingness to only raise prices, and not meaningfully expand production, that's the mistake.

ThrowawayTestr• 5 months ago

This decade is going to end with Chinese dominance in everything. Trump and AI handed them everything they need on a platter.

hyperman1• 5 months ago

Western European countries got dominant, then got arrogant, letting the USA eat their lunch.

USA got dominant, got arrogant, letting China eat their lunch.

China is indeed getting dominant. They will get arrogant one day. Meanwhile, Western Europe and the USA are still very good places to live.

yellowapple5• 5 months ago

The pertinent question, then, is who's gonna eat China's lunch?

My guess would be south/southeast Asia (India and Vietnam seem especially promising), but if the US was smart it'd put its efforts fully toward as many infrastructure investments and trade agreements and immigration agreements as possible to create a pan-American economic union. We have the resources and technology to turn every country in North and South America into an industrial and technological powerhouse. We have the resources and technology to finally conquer the Darién Gap and connect North and South America with highways and high-speed rail. We have the resources and technology to go on the offense against drug cartels (while also eliminating the failed border controls and drug prohibitions that keep those cartels in business in the first place).

If we're gonna be imperialists, then by golly let's at least be productive about it.

est• 5 months ago

China is indeed getting dominant. They will get arrogant one day

China was dominant. They got arrogant before 1840, then there's 100 years of humiliation.

Snoozus2• 5 months ago

Exactly, there are no losers here, everyone gets lunch.

Magnets• 5 months ago

This is just marketing. Why would you sell at 50% of market rate? Chinese production of NAND and DRAM is not significant, it's single digit %

amluto• 5 months ago

It might be very effective marketing. The big non-Chinese OEMs trust and use Korean and Japanese DRAM, and they might have been unwilling to put DRAM from CXMT into their products. (CXMT is newish, does not have access to ASML gear, which ASML would like you to believe makes it harder to make high-quality DRAM, DRAM is historically not a very large fraction of the cost of most non-huge-memory machines, and a bad DIMM is an expensive mistake for a company like Dell or HPE that is on the hook for repairs.)

But now CXMT seems to have gotten at least Dell, HP (I wonder if the article meant HPE), Acer and Asus to buy and attempt to qualify samples. If CXMT lands some serious purchasing agreements while still selling well above cost, that’s a win for them.

deepsquirrelnet• 5 months ago

Does the last part of your comment explain it? They need revenue to expand capacity and the market has opened up a window to become a bigger supplier while still being profitable.

Tadpole9181• 5 months ago

Why would you sell at 50% of market rate?

Because market rate is a 400%+ markup right now and not everyone is a greedy American kleptocrat with a diagnosable addiction to extracting every possible cent of wealth on the planet within a single fiscal quarter.

simoncion• 5 months ago

Yeah. Seriously.

I can see a few other benefits to the "Sell at a reasonable markup, rather than 'market price'" strategy.

* You get a reputation for not price-gouging.

* Your company gets used to operating with "enough" cash, rather than having "crazy" amounts of cash that it might be tempted to spend on misadventures.

* When the collapse of LLM Mania burns the LLM industry and its hangers-on to the ground, you get to keep your prices the same and keep your business practices the same... rather than scrambling to figure out how to make do with far less cash.

7777777phil• 5 months ago

DDR4 going from $1.35 to $11.50 in a year shows this market was already distorted before CXMT showed up.

Legacy DRAM is still over half of Samsung and SK hynix's production capacity. That's where the volume pain actually lands while they're betting everything on HBM4.

bigbadfeline• 5 months ago

A near 10 times price rise of legacy chips and surely a lot higher profit increase couldn't motivate SKamsunix to increase their capacity for that segment, even more, they proudly informed the market about their decision to stop making DDR4 at the end of this year... to focus on even higher margin products.

But they aren't going to stop whining about China, no matter how much pain the market experiences.

Havoc• 5 months ago

Great moment to break into the market if you're willing to forfeit profits

fulafel• 5 months ago

Has DDR5 caught up to DDR4 latency yet? I remember it was worse at least in the beginning. There's more bandwidth per channel but a hw design can always add more channels for the desired BW. Not so for latency.

kvemkon2• 5 months ago

add more channels

and unfortunately increase latency even more with registered DIMMs. Comparing bandwidth increase (50 GB/s) to the stagnated latency (~80..120 ns total, less than ~0.1 GB/s) over last decades, I'm wondering, whether one still can call today's RAM random memory (though sure it can be accessed randomly). Similar to hard disk drives. Up to 300 MB/s sequentially but only up to less than 1 MB/s 4KB random (read).

fhars• 5 months ago

People have been wondering that for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19304281

maxglute5• 5 months ago

Still no confirmation if CXMT or YMTC actually removed from entity list, until then this is jus cheap domestic inputs.

wcoenen• 5 months ago

As far as I understand, the "entity list" you are referring to is part of the "Export Administration Regulations", so it restricts sales from the US to restricted entities, not the other way around.

maxglute5• 5 months ago

Consumers generally safe to import for personal use, but for larger orgs, there's likely strict supply chain compliance risks that makes companies on 1260H list, i.e. military concern list no go.

alecco2• 5 months ago

Good news. Now we need Chinese manufacturers of DDR4 chipsets and motherboards.

wmf• 5 months ago

Chipsets don't determine the RAM type and all motherboards have been made in China for a while.

alecco2• 5 months ago

Taiwan dominates the global motherboard industry. (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, etc. and MediaTek etc)

The big Taiwanese manufacturers are chasing the AI dragon.

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251021PD219/ai-server-asro... (Oct 2025)

OTOH, now I read small Taiwanese manufacturers who are left out of the Nvidia supply chain are reverting to DDR4 motherboards because of the DDR5 shortage. Strange times.

lelanthran• 5 months ago

Good news. Now we need Chinese manufacturers of DDR4 chipsets and motherboards.

Search aliexpress for X99 dual socket motherboards.

DoctorOetker2• 5 months ago

Is there a reason GPU's don't use insane "blocks" of sdcard slots (for massively parallel io) so the model weights don't need to pass through a limited PCI bus?

Neywiny2• 5 months ago

Yes. Let's do the math. The fastest sd cards can read at around 300 MB/s (https://havecamerawilltravel.com/fastest-sd-cards/). Modern GPUs use 16 lanes of PCIe gen 5, which is 16x32Gb/s = 512Gb/s = 64 GB/s. Meaning you'd need over 200 of the fastest SD cards. So what you're asking is: is there a reason GPUs don't use 200 SD cards? And I can't think of any way that would work

hedgehog2• 5 months ago

SD is obviously the wrong interface for this but "High Bandwidth Flash" (stacked flash akin to HBM) is in development for exactly this kind of problem. AMD actually made a GPU with onboard flash maybe a decade ago but I think it was a bit early. Today I would love to have a pool of 50GB/s storage attached to the GPU.

magicalhippo2• 5 months ago

Some years ago I realized that if I had oodles of money to spend I would totally get someone to make a PCIe card with like several hundreds microSD cards on it.

You can buy vertical microSD connectors, so you can stack quite a lot of them on a PCIe card. Then a beefy FPGA to present it as a NVMe device to the host.

Goal total capacity, as you can put 1TB cards in there. And for teh lulz of course.

Dylan168072• 5 months ago

One thing to note, those aren't the fastest SD cards, those are the fastest UHS-II SD cards. The future is SD Express and you can already get microSDs at 900 MB/s.

numpad02• 5 months ago

Maybe latency. IIRC flash is a lot laggier than DRAMs and SRAMs.

DoctorOetker2• 5 months ago

The random access memory models is not really representative of ML workloads (both training and inference), where multiplying large tensors result in predictable memory access patterns.

jiggawatts2• 5 months ago

The next gen inference chips will use High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) to store model weights.

These are made similarly to HBM but are lower power and much higher capacity. They can also be used for caching to reduce costs when processing long chat sessions.

decryption• 5 months ago

That explains the cheap DDR4 DIMMs on AliExpress. Can get 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 DIMMs for A$252 delivered to Australia. A local PC store has same spec “name brand” RAM for around $380-$400.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mssanU1

Forgeties794• 5 months ago

These prices are insane. I can’t believe that’s what constitutes a good deal right now.

Forgeties794• 5 months ago

For context, I spent $105 USD (all in) for 2x16gb DDR5 ram last April

walterbell3• 5 months ago

Look at pricing for hard drives, SSDs and even USB flash drives.

guerrilla• 5 months ago

I was wondering when people would find out about CXMT. I wish them luck and hope the US doesn't sabotage them. We need diversity and competition right now.

1272• 5 months ago

The cure for high prices is high prices.

kristianp• 5 months ago

Also moving into HBM:

CXMT is in the process of converting wafer capacity equivalent to about 20 percent of its total DRAM output — some 60,000 wafers per month — at its Shanghai plant to the fourth-generation HBM3 chip production

yellowapple5• 5 months ago

the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50

If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?

alex43578• 5 months ago

Brent crude is $71 a barrel, but you can't buy gas for $1.69. Why's that?

dizhn• 5 months ago

Are you able to buy crude by the gallon and refine it yourself? That would bring the cost down a bit.

dogma11382• 5 months ago

Because that’s just the price for the dies, still need packaging, integration and then retail distribution. Also raw BOM is like 1/5th of the retail price usually.

Tuna-Fish• 5 months ago

Raw BOM is much higher than 1/5th of retail price for ram. Some industries have higher margins than others.

11.5*8 = 92. I'm seeing plenty of DDR4 sticks below that price.

namibj• 5 months ago

That's a small b, that's gigabit. And that matches e.g. a "crucial pro udimm 64GB kit ddr4-3200 cl22-22-22 2Rx8" being at about 100$ a year ago.

Currently they sell here in Germany for 409€ each, that's 6.25€ for half of each of the 16Gbit chips on that kit.

yellowapple5• 5 months ago

That's a small b, that's gigabit.

That explains it, thanks!

yanhangyhy• 5 months ago

Whenever China is mentioned, it's always about government subsidies, as if Samsung didn't receive government subsidies when it was developing

throwaway2907• 5 months ago

remind me is Samsung's source subsidies also regularly attacking every country's telecoms and infrastructure

361994752• 5 months ago

is CXMT attacking every contry?

bhouston• 5 months ago

I've heard that Samsung's business practices can be quite predatory. Basically if you have cool tech and you try to sell it to Samsung, you'll often get a few meetings and then they will go silent and then what you were trying to sell them will be offered by them as a new product about a year later. At least this was the situation like a decade ago.

I think this is because they are a huge conglomerate and there are divisions and groups that specialize in everything and their (Samsung) culture is to do everything as much as possible in house.

erxam• 5 months ago

You mean the US? Yeah, they are.

dakolli• 5 months ago

Samsung IS the government.

tooltalk2• 5 months ago

> as if Samsung didn't receive government subsidies when it was developing

That's because Samsung didn't get gov't subsidies when they developed DRAM in the early 80's. Semiconductors weren't really among the targeted industries by the South Korean gov't and were largely ignored as the govt prioritized HCI (Heavy Chemical Industry), shipbuilding, steel, and automobiles. The gov't didn't understand the potential of semiconductors and viewed the growing industry as risky investment.

Unlike China or Taiwan, the South Korea's semiconductor industry was very much organic, started by a private company, Korea Semiconductor, in the mid 70's which was later acquired by Samsung and became Samsung Semiconductors Inc. And they bled millions of their own money until their own DRAM came out in the early 80's.

The gov't still believed the industry was too risky and costly even after Samsung's development of 64K and 256K DRAM in 1983 and 1984. Samsung burnt through their own cash stockpile cross-financed by other divisions, or borrowed from foreign banks and financial institutions. There was really no major support until 1986 when ETRI, a gov't sponsored research institution, stepped in to promote cooperation among domestic semiconductor players -- ie, so Samsung could teach and help bring up other chaebols LG and Hyundai up to speed.

So PLEASE no more insane whataboutism to defend China's neo-mercantile practices or illegal state subsidies.

walterbell3• 5 months ago

https://wccftech.com/apple-eyeing-a-partnership-with-chinese...

  Apple has planned to explore cooperation with Chinese memory chip manufacturers Yangtze Storage (YMTC) and Changxin Storage (CXMT) to strive for more favorable supply contracts [from the big three]

hedora• 5 months ago

Back in the 1990’s everyone had to have a unix workstation for unclear reasons (why not run Linux for < 10% the cost?).

There were crazy bubble economics schemes that meant doomed startups got unix boxes for free.

When the bubble popped, the workstation vendors hit a triple whammy: Inferior $/perf, unlimited used inventory at low prices, and an economic downturn.

The same exact thing is happening now, except the hardware is being jammed into data center models.

Anyway, when the bubble pops, people making affordable consumer stuff will be fine (like this CXMT company).

People that went all-in on firing all non-hyperscaler customers (like micron/crucial) will find they’re building the wrong chips for end-user devices, there is no server market anymore (for a few years), and they have a total addressable market of maybe 1000 distressed companies, globally.

I predict the people making these decisions and destroying their companies to juice Q2 2026 financial outlook numbers will genuinely be surprised when the bankruptcies start.

throwaway85825• 5 months ago

They wont be allowed to go bankrupt.

ekaryotic• 5 months ago

great comment. actually reminds me of how intel screwed up with developing the first 64 bit processor, then amd came along with theirs and managed to force intel into compatibility. All these big companies think they're too big to fail until they do. at the end of the day the consumers hold the purchasing power. ignore them at your peril.

WarOnPrivacy3• 5 months ago

Everyone here wants to be able to buy RAM at a reasonable price again.

After reading articles about CXMT and repeatedly reviewing the comments here - my take is there's nothing in play that will lead to reasonably priced RAM anytime soon.

If I'm wrong please illuminate us. We could use some hope.

walterbell3• 5 months ago

Can Apple, Dell and HP lobbyists convince US regulators to lift restrictions on working with Chinese memory manufacturers, at least until Micron's new semiconductor fabs can ship US-made DRAM and SSDs to US OEMs in 2028? https://wccftech.com/cxmt-ymtc-removed-from-pentagon-list-op...

  The Pentagon has withdrawn the document that suggested updates to Section 1260H

https://www.wsj.com/tech/micron-is-spending-200-billion-to-b... | https://archive.is/XKSpC

  Each fab will be 600,000 square feet—the size of more than 10 football fields—making them some of the biggest “clean rooms” ever built in America. To prepare the site, engineers have already blasted through more than 7 million pounds of dynamite. An army of construction workers, building contractors and architects have set up a small city’s worth of trailers so they can work around the clock.

trash_cat• 5 months ago

Geopolitics and industrial policty aside, I think it's important to check how stable and reliable these chips are. I wouldn't count on them being on par with "western" ones. Correct me if I am wrong here.

ErneX2• 5 months ago

Even Apple is looking into them as providers. And imagine what the money Apple can provide in advance can do for their manufacturing needs if they are serious about securing memory supply for their product lines.

globemaster99• 5 months ago

Most of the westerners and Americans got no idea about What they are talking.

Chinese economy is a carefully engineered financial and industrial capitalism, that focuses on what real people need in the real world.

American oligarchy really focus on financial engineering with profits on stock prices and quarterly profits.

WhereIsTheTruth• 5 months ago

Flashbacks incoming

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-mn-698-st...

CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

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