Rescue from China will not come. The desire for profit won

Chinese memory manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies It is increasingly boldly entering the game for the most advanced and profitable market segment DRAM. But contrary to the players’ hopeswho were counting on a flood of cheap modules from the Middle Kingdom and an easing of shortages, new information suggests that the company’s priorities are completely different.

The latest reports show that CXMT plans to devote approximately 20% of its production capacity to HBM3. In practice, this means up to 60,000 silicon wafers targeted at the segment memory for AI accelerators. This is a clear signal that the company wants to take advantage of the gigantic demand generated by the Chinese artificial intelligence market.

In China, the demand is particularly high because the country has been cut off from the latest solutions from Korean and American manufacturers. Interestingly, in the case of Huawei The bottleneck when scaling the production of AI accelerators is not the logic circuits themselves, but access to memory. The company relies largely on inventories accumulated before the introduction of export restrictions.

But entering HBM3 is a huge technological challenge for CXMT. The Chinese manufacturer does not have access to EUV machines, which means the need to use complex multiple exposures. This, in turn, raises questions about the yields, costs and profitability of the entire process. On the other hand, even partial success in this area would be a breakthrough for China and could significantly support the development of national accelerators.

In parallel, CXMT is in talks with global computer manufacturers. Its classical DRAM capacity is attractive to companies looking for alternative sources of supply. For now, the talks remain at the validation stage, but a possible breakthrough in HBM production could result in a larger part of the production capacity being redirected precisely to the high-performance memory segment.