From The Wall Street Journal, January 11:
As AI demand drives prices up, CXMT overcomes Washington’s curbs to vie with Micron and South Korean leaders
China’s national champion in memory-chip manufacturing is preparing a $4 billion share offering after making significant technical advances, upending an industry dominated by South Korean and U.S. companies.
The offering by ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, is one of the biggest by a chip maker this century and would normally be great news for tech companies starved of memory chips during the artificial-intelligence boom. AI data centers have been grabbing chip capacity that would otherwise serve the makers of computers, videogame consoles and smartphones, driving up prices for American consumers.
But even though CXMT intends to boost production and says it wants more international business, the geopolitical walls are high. Successive U.S. administrations have tightened curbs on Chinese chip makers.
And prosecutors in South Korea, home to memory-chip leaders Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, are alleging that some of CXMT’s rise comes from theft of trade secrets obtained from former Samsung employees.
Memory chips are like the fuel lines feeding the engines of computing machines. As AI engines made by Nvidia of the U.S. and others get more powerful, they need more memory, both the traditional kind and an advanced type called high-bandwidth memory.
A single AI server now uses more dynamic random-access memory than entire fleets of laptops, and the price of conventional DRAM is forecast to surge more than 50% this quarter compared with the previous quarter, according to research firm TrendForce.
Until recently, the global DRAM market was dominated by three companies—Samsung, SK Hynix and U.S.-based Micron Technology. Those makers have pivoted toward higher-margin AI memory chips, and Micron is retreating from parts of the consumer market.
That opens the door for CXMT. The company was formed a decade ago after a bid by a state-backed Chinese company to acquire Micron failed. A local government in the eastern city of Hefei decided it should create its own DRAM maker.
The company, now led by U.S.-trained chip engineer Zhu Yiming, garnered support from a national tech fund and a who’s-who list of Chinese tech companies including Alibaba and Xiaomi.
CXMT said in late December that it had submitted plans to list on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-like tech board, aiming to raise the equivalent of $4 billion. Recent capital injections have valued the company at more than $20 billion, analysts said.
CXMT is among the stars in a roster of Chinese companies across the semiconductor industry that the government hopes will lift the country’s self-sufficiency during its trade war with the U.S. From manufacturing specialist SMIC to equipment maker AMEC, Beijing is pushing the industry to develop local alternatives to everything the U.S. and its allies produce.
CXMT’s prospectus shows the company has rapidly advanced from prototypes to mass production in just a few years. Revenue nearly tripled over two years to more than $3 billion in 2024. Analysts said its process technology has come within a generation or two of the industry leaders, and the company’s global DRAM market share has risen to around 5% by revenue.
The progress comes despite U.S. curbs on China’s access to advanced chip-making equipment.
“The progress CXMT has made in the face of U.S. end-use controls on memory has surprised the industry,” said Paul Triolo, technology policy lead at consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
Triolo said U.S. concerns would be heightened if CXMT could supply high-bandwidth memory chips to Huawei, whose AI processors represent China’s closest domestic alternative to Nvidia’s AI accelerators.
According to DSET, a think tank backed by the Taiwanese government, CXMT built its foundation on the ruins of others, acquiring patents from the bankrupt German chip maker Qimonda and raiding Taiwan’s talent pool.
In December, Korean prosecutors said they had indicted 10 people including a former Samsung executive and employees on charges of transferring secrets to CXMT including technology to help CXMT mass-produce advanced DRAM chips.
The suspects allegedly worked systematically to avoid detection, joining CXMT through shell companies, shifting offices and disguising travel to China by routing trips through other locations. They exchanged a coded warning using four heart emojis to warn each other in case South Korea tried to bar their travel or arrest them, prosecutors said.
The prosecutors said the leak of trade secrets caused billions of dollars in losses to Samsung and South Korea’s semiconductor-driven economy....
....MUCH MORE
