Are Chinese Memory Chips About to Reshape Global NAND and DRAM Supply?

• YMTC are on track to become the world’s third-largest NAND producer.
• CXMT posts US$8 bn revenue for 2025, up 130%.
• Chinese memory chips ride an AI-driven supercycle.

China’s two leading memory chipmakers are moving into a global market that, for once, has room for them. Demand for NAND and DRAM is climbing sharply on the back of AI infrastructure build-out, and YMTC and CXMT are using that window to expand capacity, lock in pricing, and position themselves well ahead of a supply wave analysts expect to hit in 2027.

According to a report by South Korean media outlet ChosunBiz last week, YMTC is set to begin mass production at a new Wuhan facility in the second half of 2026, a move that would push it past SK Hynix and Micron to become the third-largest NAND manufacturer globally, behind Samsung and Kioxia.

CXMT, meanwhile, posted 2025 revenue of approximately US$8 billion, a 130% increase from the previous year, driven by surging memory prices and a nearly tripling of its monthly DRAM wafer capacity, from 100,000 units at the start of 2024 to 290,000 by year-end.

The pricing picture sharpens the picture. Chinese manufacturers hold a price advantage of over 15% against equivalent global specifications, according to Arisa Liu, Chief Director and Research Fellow at Taiwan Industry Economics Services. That gap is narrowing, but MS Hwang, research analyst at Counterpoint Research, argues the competitive edge has shifted.

Chinese players are gaining share “because they have the volume that others lack,” he told South China Morning Postsuggesting a structural advantage that pricing alone does not fully explain. Capital is fuelling the next phase of expansion. CXMT has earmarked 7.5 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) from its planned IPO on Shanghai’s Star Market specifically for production line upgrades, while targeting mass production of high-bandwidth memory in Shanghai by year-end.

YMTC is also planning a public listing in the second half of 2026, with proceeds directed toward equipment and R&D. UBS estimates China’s combined memory capacity expansion could reach 120,000 to 140,000 additional wafers per month this year, with further growth expected in 2027. The broader market is moving in their favour.

Some industry projections claim DRAM contract prices will rise between 58% and 63% in the second quarter of 2026 compared to the previous quarter, with NAND contract prices expected to climb 70% to 75% over the same period. Some analysts have flagged preemptive customer stockpiling as a factor amplifying apparent demand, but Counterpoint Research’s Hwang pushes back, noting that stockpiling has not produced inventory excess and that multi-year supply agreements between GPU manufacturers and cloud providers point to demand that is sustained not inflated.

Government support adds a longer tail to the competitive calculus. Beijing’s current policy of subsidising domestic device manufacturers that use locally produced memory is expected to compound cost advantages over time, Hwang said, a structural lever that sits outside the usual market dynamics of pricing and yield.

CXMT still trails Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron by approximately three years in advanced DRAM node development, and yield rates on new production lines remain the variable that determines whether capacity targets translate into reliable supply. Liu notes that lines launched in the second half of 2026 are unlikely to change the global supply-demand balance until 2027.

By then, the IPO capital will have been deployed, the Wuhan NAND line will be running, and HBM out of Shanghai will either be competitive or it won’t. That’s a short enough timeline that memory procurement decisions being made now in APAC data centres are effectively being made in parallel with it.

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