Apple needs 600 million gigabytes of DRAM from China’s top memory chipmaker, ChangXin Memory Technologies. That figure represents about 6.6% of CXMT’s total capacity, which sounds manageable until you learn the company is fully booked through 2027 and won’t even cover half of China’s total memory demand by 2028.
The math is brutally simple. CXMT’s projected output by 2028 sits around 10,000 million GB. China’s expected demand at that point: roughly 20,000 million GB.
A chipmaker with no spare seats
CXMT is running hot. Its utilization rate sits at 95.73% in 2025. The company currently holds approximately 8-11% of global DRAM wafer capacity, a share projected to climb toward 15% by 2028.
Apple reportedly began testing CXMT’s DRAM chips for products sold in China around mid-2026. The move is part of a broader effort to diversify memory sourcing away from Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, particularly for devices destined for the Chinese market.
Apple has simultaneously been lobbying the US government for regulatory guidance on working with CXMT, which the Pentagon has flagged for potential military ties.
AI is eating the memory market
An estimated 15-20% of consumer electronics memory capacity is expected to be diverted to AI data centers over the next couple of years. That’s memory that would have gone into phones, laptops, and tablets now being rerouted to power the server farms behind large language models and inference workloads.
The supply-demand gap in global DRAM is expected to widen through 2027.
CXMT isn’t rolling out the red carpet
Reports indicate that CXMT has resisted preferential pricing requests from major clients, including Apple. When you’re running at near-full capacity with a line of domestic customers stretching out the door, there’s little incentive to offer volume discounts to a foreign buyer.
China’s broader semiconductor self-sufficiency push adds another layer of complexity. Beijing has poured billions into building domestic chip capabilities, and CXMT sits at the center of that strategy for memory. Allocating scarce capacity to Apple, an American company, when Chinese smartphone makers and server operators also need DRAM, becomes as much a political calculation as a commercial one.
What this means for the memory market
Samsung and SK Hynix, the dominant global DRAM producers, stand to benefit from elevated pricing power as long as the shortage persists. Micron, the sole major US-based DRAM manufacturer, is similarly positioned. Leading memory producers have pivoted towards higher-margin high-bandwidth memory production, resulting in steep price hikes of 50% to 60%+ in 2026. Apple has reacted by increasing prices for its iPad and MacBook devices to alleviate the burden of escalating memory costs.
The 600 million GB figure, while a fraction of CXMT’s total output, is large enough to matter in a market where every wafer is spoken for. And with CXMT’s capacity locked up through 2027, Apple’s China memory problem doesn’t have a near-term solution.