The current component crisis brings back memories of Vietnam. Specifically, of the semiconductor crisis of 2020. If at that time there were no chips due to COVID, the incipient trade war between China and the United States and natural disasters, now it is the exorbitant investment in artificial intelligence the one that is leaving us without SSD and, above all, without RAM.
The three major memory manufacturers (Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron) have dedicated themselves to creating chips for GPUs in data centers, so much so that Micron has exited the consumer segment for dedicate all your production to meet the demand for AI. own NVIDIA will not launch the RTX 6000 this year Because of this, and apart from PC users, there are others affected by this crisis: RAM assemblers.
To the point that there are already reports that the main PC manufacturers are thinking about buying RAM from Chinese manufacturers. To CXMT, specifically.
Bad for many, support for Chinese RAM?
If there is no RAM, there is no RAM. The problem is that, as we say, there are many brands that sell memory ‘pills’but not all of them manufacture that component. If you buy an SSD or RAM from Samsung, they have manufactured it, but if you buy a module from Corsair, what they have done is assemble the chips that have been purchased from one of the major RAM manufacturers.
And then there are the PC vendors. HP, Asus or Dell do not manufacture the key components of their computers already assembled: they buy them from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and RAM and SSD manufacturers. That is to say: this shortage of components that affects us as users, It is also impacting the main PC manufacturers.
The perfect example is the Steam Machinewhich seemed like it would arrive at an attractive price and not only has it been delayed, but there are already signs that this crisis will cause it to be much more expensive than it should. Also the case of manufacturers selling PC… without memory.
A few weeks ago we told you that, in such a situation, Asus was considering looking at the Chinese RAM industrybut now there are more reports pointing in that direction. Nikkei Asia point that Asus, Acer, Dell and HP are evaluating sourcing memory chips from China. It would be the first time, and one of the options is CXMT (which has ‘messes‘of course industrial espionage to Samsung).
With Samsung turning to HBM memory and SK Hynix pointing out that its capacity is exhausted by 2026, the price of RAM has skyrocketed between 90 and 95% this first quarter of 2026. That’s where companies like ChangXin Memory Technologies They can take a bite out of the RAM market.
“There is real potential for Chinese companies to aggressively expand in memory chips and flash memory” – Tae Kim
A few weeks ago they presented DDR5 chips at 8,000 MHz for desktops and LPDDR5X at 10,667 MHz for portable devices and they have already started to supply to another Chinese company: Lenovo.
Aside from the Nikkei Asia report, technology analyst Tae Kim – author of the book ‘The NVIDIA Way‘- also points out that HP is analyzing Chinese suppliers for products destined for the Asian and European markets.
Kim points out that, while memory chips for GPU and AI have very specific characteristics, RAM memory chips are more ‘basic’, and this crisis of the large manufacturers can mean a golden opportunity for Chinese companies to “expand aggressively in the memory chip and flash memory space.”
It certainly seems like the perfect opportunity for a company like CXMT that hopes reach 300,000 units manufactured per month in 2026 and that seeks to go public to raise 4.2 billion dollars that will allow them to expand their production. And they are not the only ones, since there are other heavyweights of Chinese RAM such as Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. -YMTC- that aspires to the same as its neighbor: to bite a piece of the pie that is the international RAM market.
The production of Chinese companies is quite lower to that of Samsung, for example, but with a RAM market that will not ease until 2027 according to some2028 according to Intel and to whom It has seven or eight years of aggressive expansion leftAccording to NVIDIA, it is clear that companies like YMTC or CXMT have an opportunity that they should not miss.
We will see if this alleviates the market somewhat, since right now it is impossible to consider building a PC…and the one we already have better not break.
Image | Blake Patterson (edited)
In Xataka | The RAM crisis is so extreme that it has achieved what seemed unthinkable: Apple’s memories are “cheap”


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