China’s Memory Makers Set the Price Now

China’s CXMT and YMTC are now charging more than Samsung and SK Hynix for memory chips, wielding new pricing power that’s drawing sharper U.S. scrutiny.

A supply chain doesn’t usually get to talk back to its customers. But China’s memory makers have found the one lever — global DRAM scarcity — that flips buyer and seller, and Washington is watching the reversal happen in real time. The Pentagon has already labeled both firms Chinese military companies, Congress is weighing new equipment restrictions, and Apple has quietly lobbied to keep CXMT off the Entity List. Even as both chipmakers remain tethered to a single external chokepoint: ASML’s export-controlled EUV lithography tools, still withheld from China since 2019. (Reuters)

The clearest evidence of that reversal played out on a factory floor in Hefei in June, when CXMT instructed engineers from a Huawei-linked equipment vendor to vacate its R&D cleanrooms without notice, following a pricing dispute Huawei could not resolve in its favor; the two companies continue to do business, but the engineers have not been readmitted. (Reuters)

The commercial momentum behind that leverage is now on public display: CXMT signed a five-year, $7 billion supply agreement with ByteDance this month, following a $3 billion deal with Tencent in June (Reuters), while first-quarter revenue jumped more than 700% year-on-year to reach roughly $17.6 billion, according to CXMT’s own IPO prospectus ahead of its Shanghai debut. (MarketScreener/Reuters) YMTC, meanwhile, is reportedly targeting a $148 billion valuation for its own listing. (Reuters)

The pricing power is playing out against a broader Chinese push to lock in chip self-sufficiency at the policy level: Beijing revised its integrated-circuit design-protection rules this week, sharpening infringement penalties and clarifying licensing rights effective October 15, explicitly framed as support for the 15th five-year plan’s semiconductor goals. (SCMP)

Upstream, the equipment maker both Chinese firms still depend on is itself riding the same AI wave: ASML raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to €43–45 billion and said it would expand EUV and DUV production capacity by roughly 30% annually over the next two years. (TradingView/Invezz) Separately, social platform RedNote is weighing a $2.2 billion, 600-megawatt data center in Inner Mongolia — one data point in China’s stated plan for 4 trillion yuan ($592 billion) in national computing-network investment over five years. (Tech in Asia)