CXMT close to matching Micron's memory capacity in 2026, research claims — would put China on track to become world's second-largest DRAM producer
https://archive.ph/20260716053951/https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/cxmt-close-to-matching-microns-memory-capacity-in-2026-research-claims-would-put-china-on-track-to-become-worlds-second-largest-dram-producer
>ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's largest DRAM maker, is on track to match Micron's production capacity in 2026, if Citrini Research's forecasting models are correct. If this happens, China will become the world's second-largest DRAM production base in the coming years.
>The bottom-up model estimates that CXMT will finish 2026 with approximately 350,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM) of DRAM capacity, which is just 25,000 WPM less than Micron. According to the analysis, the federal government is pushing CXMT to share its DRAM technology with JHICC, Swaysure, and YMTC's subsidiary XMC to ease domestic shortages. All three companies have either built DRAM capacity already, or will do so in the short-term future, the report claims.
>Swaysure has completed construction of a 140,000-WSPM fab in Shenzhen, while JHICC's Jinjiang complex contains enough cleanroom space for 120,000 WSPM, and the initial 60,000-WSPM phase is expected to receive equipment by the end of 2026. YMTC is also projected to operate about 50,000 WSPM of DRAM production at Wuhan Fab 3. If all these facilities initiate operations in the coming years, then China will have a total DRAM capacity of 600,000 WSPM (not counting Samsung's and SK hynix's fabs in China), which is dramatically lower compared to South Korea, but ahead of Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S. combined.
>But China is not going to stop developing its DRAM industry, and by 2030, its total capacity will increase to around 1.41 million WSPM, according to Citrini. CXMT alone is projected to build new production capacities in Beijing, Hefei, and Shanghai, to expand its production capability to 950,000 WSPM in 2030, assuming everything goes as planned.
>The supply model assumes that about 400,000 WSPM of CXMT output will remain on D1a, another 400,000 WSPM will migrate to D1b, and roughly 150,000 WPM will produce D1c devices.
>Citrini admits that producing China's outlook is considerably more difficult than predicting the development of established DRAM makers. On the one hand, there is rapidly expanding fabrication infrastructure in China, abundant state-backed financing, and government-directed technology transfers. On the other hand, among the key near-term limitations remains lithography equipment availability, particularly if the proposed MATCH Act restricts sales of advanced immersion DUV tools to select Chinese companies.
>However, the author expects SMEE's domestic immersion DUV scanners to enter volume production around late 2026 or early 2027 following beta testing, as well as SiCarrier/Yuliangsheng introduce its own production-ready DUV platform in 2028. Perhaps a bit optimistically, the analysts predict that availability of lithography tools is not expected to constrain Chinese production beyond 2028, at least for mature logic and DRAM nodes. Yet, for obvious reasons, if the MATCH Act works as planned and disrupts supply of advanced immersion DUV tools to DRAM makers, production capacity expansions will not occur in the next couple of years, the report suggests.
>Still, both SMEE and SiCarrier will need time to ramp up production of their lithography systems, whereas DRAM makers must learn how to use them efficiently, so we would not be as optimistic as the authors and would not expect Chinese tools to produce meaningful DRAM volumes before the early 2030s. Still, the key takeaway here is that China is on track to become a major DRAM maker rather sooner than later.
>Unprecedented demand
>Citrini Research projects total DRAM demand to reach 157.5 exabytes (EB) per year by 2030, including 75 EB of commodity DRAM for agentic AI CPUs, 25 EB of commodity DRAM for conventional cloud servers, 20 EB of commodity DRAM for client devices, and 37.5 EB of HBM4E as well as HBM5 for AI accelerators (15 EB and 22.5 EB, respectively).
>Meanwhile, Citrini expects the whole industry to only produce around 37.5 EB of HBM4E/HBM4 memory (mostly by Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix) as well as 91.3 EB of commodity DRAM (including output in China) in 2030, leaving a deficit of 28.7 EB, or roughly 25%.
>That said, the rapid expansion of DRAM production in China could be the industry's best hope to maintain relatively low prices of memory, something that will be particularly beneficial for the market of consumer devices that are sensitive to memory prices, analysts from Citrini believe. Yet, the author argues that most of this new capacity would satisfy China's own demand rather than eliminate the global shortage. Furthermore, even if companies like CXMT can expand their fabs faster, that additional capacity will mostly be consumed by domestic needs, according to Citrini.
>It should be noted that to make more memory, DRAM makers need more fab tools, primarily 193nm immersion scanners. Yet, companies like ASML, Canon, and Nikon cannot increase output of immersion DUV systems quickly as these are extremely complex machines containing tens of thousands of parts. While Chinese memory companies certainly pin their hopes on local producers like SMEE and SiCarrier, neither has delivered a single commercial immersion system, and after they do, it will take them years to ramp up production of such tools.
China claims chip exports nearly doubled to $177 billion in the first half of 2026 as memory prices surged — 96% year-on-year increase inflated by hikes
https://archive.ph/20260716054700/https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-claims-chip-exports-nearly-doubled-to-177-billion-in-the-first-half-of-2026
>China exported 179.44 billion integrated circuits worth $177.28 billion in the first six months of 2026, an increase of more than 96% year on year by value, according to data released by the country's General Administration of Customs and reported by the South China Morning Post. The figures are Beijing's own customs numbers, presented at a state press briefing as part of a broader account of China's trade performance, and they made semiconductors one of the main contributors to the country's double-digit export growth over the period.
>The customs administration attributed the surge to global demand for AI hardware, but the underlying numbers point more towards a worldwide memory price boom that has inflated the value of the commodity-grade chips that China exports in volume.
>The half-year value figure implies an average of roughly $0.99 per exported chip, which reflects the composition of China's IC exports: memory, power management, microcontrollers, and other mature-node parts, along with chips packaged and tested in China for re-export, rather than advanced processors.
>Earlier customs releases this year show the growth is being driven by prices rather than shipments. In January and February, IC export value rose 72.6% year on year while volume grew only 13.7%, according to the same customs data series. In April, export value rose 100.1% year on year, the first monthly doubling on record, as price increases across AI servers, data centers, and memory spread through the supply chain.
>Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have redirected DRAM capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators and are phasing out DDR4 production, tightening supply of conventional memory and pushing spot and contract prices sharply higher through late 2025 and into 2026. Chinese memory makers, including CXMT in DRAM and YMTC in NAND, sell into exactly that commodity segment, so their export quotations have risen alongside global prices. China's IC export growth ran at 24.7% through the first ten months of 2025 per DigiTimes, before accelerating to the 70% to 100% monthly rates recorded this year, a timeline that tracks the memory price cycle, not any step change in Chinese output.
>Volume growth is real, however, if far smaller than the value figure suggests. China produced 484.3 billion ICs in 2025 and counted 3,901 domestic chip design companies with combined sales up nearly 30% year on year, as a years-long buildout of mature-node fab capacity reached scale and exports became the outlet for output exceeding domestic demand.
>It’s worth noting that a meaningful share of China's IC exports is processing trade, in which chips are imported, packaged or tested at Chinese OSAT facilities, and re-exported. These are counted in customs figures as gross value crossing the border, not domestically designed and fabricated silicon, and are therefore somewhat misleading,
>Adjacent categories showed the same AI-driven pattern, with exports of automatic data processing machines and parts, a category covering computers, servers, and memory modules, rose 41.3% year on year to $138.08 billion in the first half. Industrial robot exports rose 18.6% to 6.29 billion yuan ($927.7 million) across 141 countries and regions.
>As China reports record export figures, U.S. policy continues to shift. A Bureau of Industry and Security rule that took effect on January 16 moved license applications for Nvidia's H200 to case-by-case review for Chinese customers, and Nvidia has since booked orders for more than 400,000 units from ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, though it had recognized no revenue from those orders as of March.
>Beijing obviously presented the export figures as evidence of industrial strength. "The export growth was fundamentally driven by precisely matching 'Made in China' [products] with diverse global demand," Wang Jun, a vice-minister at the General Administration of Customs, said at Tuesday's briefing, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.
Kind of funny that the memory cartel created a chink competition, if they get to big I bet the burger ((( goverment ))) will ban chink shit and I will have to do memory trafficking.