On August 5, citing foreign media reports, the China Fund News noted that Apple had recently approached CXMT regarding supply prices for LPDDR5X and other mobile DRAM chips, hoping to ease cost pressures on its next-generation iPhones and other smart devices. However, its request for lower pricing was flatly rejected. What’s more, CXMT’s asking price is reportedly higher than—or at least on par with—what Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix charge.
So why does CXMT feel confident enough to say no to Apple? Simple: Chinese domestic players like Huawei and Xiaomi have already locked up CXMT’s production capacity through long-term contracts. With that kind of backing, CXMT simply doesn’t need to bend over backward to accommodate Apple’s tough negotiating stance.
For the longest time, landing a spot in Apple’s supply chain was the golden ticket for most suppliers—a guarantee of stable, massive orders for years to come. Getting kicked out, on the other hand, could mean billions in losses and, in the worst cases, threaten a company’s very survival. That’s why suppliers historically had almost zero wiggle room when it came to haggling with Apple.
But here’s the thing: with the AI explosion, the rules of this game are quietly shifting. Memory components have become a far more critical piece of Apple’s supply chain puzzle, and that gives memory makers a level of leverage they’ve never really had before.
Back in June of this year, Apple officially raised prices on its iPad and Mac lineups, citing the relentless surge in memory and storage chip costs. In a statement, Apple said: “The consumer electronics industry is facing unprecedented challenges. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has sent storage demand through the roof—we’ve never seen component prices climb at this pace or magnitude. We’ve been absorbing these costs internally, but we’ve now reached the point where we have to raise prices on several products, including the iPads and Macs announced today.” Industry watchers predict that upcoming iPhone models and other new products could see broad price hikes in the second half of the year, signaling the start of a fresh pricing cycle across the consumer electronics sector.
On June 27, according to reports cited by Zhongxin Jingwei from foreign media, Apple was lobbying the U.S. government for approval to purchase memory chips from CXMT as a way to relieve cost pressure from rising memory prices. Bringing CXMT into its memory supply chain would give Apple some breathing room against upstream suppliers. Right now, Apple’s DRAM supply relies mainly on Micron Technology from the U.S. and Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix.
The reason CXMT can afford to reject Apple’s lowball offers—and even raise prices—is largely thanks to the booming demand in China’s domestic market.
According to OpenRouter data, global AI large model call volumes totaled 56.8 trillion tokens last week, down 2.07% week-over-week. Among the top models, Chinese AI models logged 28.13 trillion tokens in weekly calls, a 14.76% decline from the prior week. U.S. models, meanwhile, saw 4.38 trillion tokens, representing an 87.18% jump. Even with the dip, Chinese models have now held the top spot globally for fourteen consecutive weeks.
CXMT’s parent company, ChangXin Technology, disclosed in its IPO prospectus that it has already forged partnerships with key industry players including Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Lenovo, and Xiaomi.
Right now, CXMT is on an aggressive expansion path. It has established a dual-base 12-inch DRAM wafer manufacturing footprint spanning Hefei and Beijing. By the end of 2026, the company’s monthly wafer input capacity is expected to exceed 300,000 wafers—roughly three times the scale of China’s second-tier DRAM manufacturers.
As of early 2026, CXMT operates three 12-inch DRAM wafer fabs across Hefei and Beijing, with monthly capacity of roughly 280,000 to 300,000 wafers and utilization rates consistently above 95%. By the end of 2026, monthly capacity is expected to climb to around 350,000 wafers—getting close to Micron’s projected capacity of about 385,000 wafers. Looking further ahead, CXMT’s long-term goal is 600,000 wafers per month. At the current pace, the company could overtake Micron in overall production scale around 2030.
ChangXin Technology, China’s largest integrated DRAM design and manufacturing enterprise, made its STAR Market debut on July 27, surging 465.82% on day one. The stock hit an intraday high of 55.03 yuan per share and closed with a total market value exceeding 3 trillion yuan, claiming the top spot on the A-share market cap leaderboard.
As of the close on August 5, ChangXin Technology shares were trading at 54.30 yuan, down 1.27%, with a market value of 3.63 trillion yuan.
