CXMT, China’s leading producer of memory chips, is rapidly gaining global market share at the expense of South Korean competitors, joining OpenAI rival DeepSeek in strengthening Beijing’s drive to reduce its dependence on foreign technology in advanced fields such as artificial intelligence.
Based in Hefei in the eastern province of Anhui, CXMT — ChangXin Memory Technologies — increased its share of the $90bn global Dram memory market from close to zero in 2020 to 5 per cent last year, according to Shenzhen-based consultancy Qianzhan, with analysts predicting growth could quickly “snowball”.
The company is also spearheading China’s efforts to break into the high-growth market for so-called high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a crucial component in running AI systems such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, which is facing new competition from its cheaper Chinese rival DeepSeek.