On September 18, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar with the matter, that CXMT is preparing to enter the NAND flash market: the company plans a NAND R&D production line at its new fab in Beijing, its newly set-up Beijing research institute lists NAND development among core projects, and it has opened supply talks — including with a newly founded startup that intends to buy CXMT NAND for storage in AI systems and supercomputers. Mass-production timing remains unset. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are directing capex toward DRAM and HBM, and TrendForce expects NAND tightness to ease only in the second half of 2027.
The NAND push rests on the DRAM core business: CXMT's Q2 DRAM revenue reached US$14.62 billion, up 99.3% quarter-on-quarter, with market share climbing from 7.6% to 9.5%. Its DDR4 and LPDDR5 memory ships inside Xiaomi, Honor and other phone brands, its server DDR5 supplies Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, and it completed a RMB 57.92 billion IPO in July. Demand-side pressure is building in parallel: 16GB DDR5 modules now retail near RMB 1,500 and 1TB SSDs at RMB 950-1,000, and memory vendors have notified customers of tighter 2027 shipments locked into long-term agreements.
For the domestic components supply chain, CXMT's move into NAND — mirrored by YMTC, which sent low-power DRAM samples to customers in April as it weighs a reverse entry — marks domestic memory shifting from single-category breakthroughs to full-category coverage. Yet the road from an R&D line to volume output is measured in years: before 2027, pricing power in commodity memory stays with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, and the direct effect of added domestic capacity is supply security rather than price relief. Buyers across consumer electronics, AI hardware and industrial applications should lock volumes and lead times, front-load annual memory purchasing, qualify domestic NOR/SPI NAND alternatives ahead of demand, and lean on dynamic stocking alerts and cross-brand comparison to absorb contract-price increases.