Report: Desperate PC manufacturers are turning to China for RAM

The current RAM shortage is raising prices for memory and storage as the “AI” industry gobbles up manufacturing capacity. That sucks for consumers, who are seeing the price of retail-packaged RAM go up by as much as 400 percent. But it’s also devastating for manufacturers like Dell who rely on standard consumer sales. According to one report, such manufacturers are seeking out new sources of RAM in China.

Today’s memory market is dominated by the “Big Three”: Micron based in the United States, plus Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea. Between them, these three companies ship approximately 93 percent of the DRAM modules on the market. (That’s actual memory chips, not finished RAM itself, but it amounts to basically the same thing.)

As these companies shift production to industrial memory to supply the “AI” boom—or bubble, depending upon whom you ask—output for standard memory is tanking, and both consumers and PC manufacturers are seeing prices soar. Micron has gone so far as to shutter its direct-to-consumer memory brand to make hay while the sun shines, bringing in billions by playing to supply and demand.

As any freshman economics student could tell you, this has left a big hole in the market since demand for consumer-grade memory hasn’t gone anywhere. According to a supply chain market report from Nikkei Asia, a Chinese company called ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is hoping to fill that hole. Nikkei claims that CXMT is already in talks with HP and Dell, qualifying the company’s RAM for inclusion in its products. Acer and Asus are also looking into RAM sources in China.

CXMT is a notable player in the Chinese semiconductor market… but pretty much only there. That’s not a dig at the company, by the way, since China is a big enough market that you can have incredible success without ever leaving the country. But as manufacturers get desperate, this might represent a huge opportunity. On its English website, CXMT advertises DDR5 and DDR4 RAM modules, both in high demand. It also makes LPDDR5, which is generally considered “mobile” memory but is used in laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips as well as fully integrated chip designs like Intel’s Lunar Lake.

Nikkei is considered a reliable industry reporter, but I must note that all the sources in the report are anonymous. Plus, even if all four named companies were to fast-track adoption of new memory suppliers, testing and qualification would take months. CXMT would need to vastly increase its output to accommodate huge new customers with worldwide supply chains. Even under the most optimistic interpretation of this news, RAM and PC prices are unlikely to drop any time soon.