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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you think they are just stupid?
I challenge you to name a single successful example of this that isn’t state enforced.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
But they aren't going to stop whining about China, no matter how much pain the market experiences.
> 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
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]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.
This isn't a shortcoming, it's a competitive market working as intended.
> They are adding capacity as quickly as they can [...], just like everyone else
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-maker...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Pentagon has withdrawn the document that suggested updates to Section 1260H
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.If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
Currently they sell here in Germany for 409€ each, that's 6.25€ for half of each of the 16Gbit chips on that kit.
That explains it, thanks!
11.5*8 = 92. I'm seeing plenty of DDR4 sticks below that price.
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.
They will compete on price if they are forced to, but they aren't forced to right now
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
China was dominant. They got arrogant before 1840, then there's 100 years of humiliation.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-mn-698-st...
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.
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.
Search aliexpress for X99 dual socket motherboards.
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.
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.