Apple is testing DRAM chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies. That sentence would have been unthinkable three years ago, and it tells you exactly how bad the memory crunch has got.
CXMT is China’s leading DRAM maker, state-backed to the tune of at least 15 government shareholders holding 36% of it. Three years ago it was an unremarkable domestic chipmaker losing billions. Today it is the fourth-largest DRAM producer on earth, behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, with around 11% of global wafer capacity and a forecast 15% by 2028 as new lines spin up in Hefei, Shanghai and Beijing. It’s heading for an IPO that could raise $4.3bn.
The global memory market has been a comfortable three way split for years. CXMT is the outsider forcing its way in, and Apple has noticed.
What Apple Is Actually Asking For
Read the coverage carefully and the testing isn’t the story. The lobbying is.
Per the Financial Times, Apple is leading an effort among US tech companies to persuade Washington to allow broader use of CXMT’s products. Tim Cook has taken the pitch directly to administration officials, framing it narrowly: Chinese memory, in devices sold in China. Not iPhones on shelves in Ohio.
The legal position is stranger than most people assume. CXMT sits on the Pentagon’s 1260H list of firms Washington links to the Chinese military. In practice that blocks Defense Department contracting, not commercial purchases. Nothing legally prevents Apple from buying CXMT chips this afternoon. What Apple wants is an assurance that CXMT won’t be added to the Commerce Department’s Entity List later, because that would kill the supply overnight.
Compare with YMTC, the Chinese NAND maker Apple has also been in talks with. YMTC is already on the Entity List. Any US company needs an export licence before it can deal with them. That’s the fate Apple wants CXMT insured against.
Notably, the administration already held off adding CXMT, DeepSeek and more than a hundred other firms to the blacklist, reportedly to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing. Apple is asking for a formal version of a favour it has already quietly received.
Why Now
Because memory pricing has gone somewhere unpleasant. Some contract prices are up 50% to 60%. Apple raised prices across the MacBook line, iPad Pro and Air, HomePod and Apple TV in late June, some by as much as 20%, and pointedly left the iPhone alone. September will fix that.
Apple has never been shy about squeezing suppliers, and a Micron executive recently suggested Apple’s own hardball buying helped create the crunch. Bringing a fourth supplier to the table is that playbook, continued.
Except Ming-Chi Kuo doesn’t think this is about price at all. His read is that Apple is chasing supply security, not savings, with AI data centre demand pulling capacity away from consumer electronics through 2027. Kuo reckons up to 20% of memory capacity could shift away from consumer devices, and warns Apple may receive 10% to 20% fewer A20 chips between the second half of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027 on tight LPDDR supply alone.
Both things can be true. Apple wants cheaper memory and it wants memory to exist.
The Rubio Problem
Apple tried this before. In 2022 it explored Chinese memory suppliers and ran straight into congressional pushback, led in part by then-Senator Marco Rubio. The plan was shelved.
Rubio is now Secretary of State.
That is the sentence Apple’s government affairs team has to solve. Sourcing memory from a Beijing-backed champion in 2026 is not a neutral procurement decision. It hands critics a clean line about Chinese hardware and national security, and it complicates a balancing act Apple was already performing on a wire. The narrower “China-only” framing is clearly designed to defuse exactly that, but there’s a reason CXMT can still buy ASML lithography equipment: it isn’t on the Entity List. Yet.
It Won’t Fix Anything Anyway
Here’s the deflating part. Even if Washington waves this through tomorrow, CXMT can’t rescue the memory market. SemiAnalysis analyst Ray Wang points out that CXMT’s output is already largely pre-committed and its capacity stays extremely constrained for the next two years, expansion or not.
Adding a fourth supplier to a market short of chips does not conjure chips. It just gives Apple a slightly better seat at a table where everyone is hungry.
Testing is not shipping. Apple qualifies suppliers it never uses. But the fact that the largest memory buyer on the planet is running Chinese DRAM through its labs and lobbying the White House to let it keep going tells you how much pressure this market is under.
If prices keep climbing the way analysts expect, Apple won’t be the last American company knocking on Beijing’s door.
