Global memory shortage forces top PC makers like HP and Asus to turn to CXMT chips but what will Samsung and Micron think?

Date:
Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:05:00 +0000

Description:
Three of the world's biggest PC makers now have qualified Chinese DRAM

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter HP, Asus, and Acer have qualified and begun shipping CXMT DRAM in small volumes, in a handful of notebook models sold outside the United States The restraint is potentially driven less by US policy than by fear of the incumbents: with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron holding over 90% of the market, buyers say they dare not source too much from CXMT CXMT is not a cheaper option either currently, as sources say its DRAM costs no less than Samsung's currently and cannot be booked beyond the current quarter HP , Asus, and Acer have begun putting DRAM from China's ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) into notebook computers, a report from Nikkei Asia has claimed , reporting several major PC makers completed qualification of CXMT's chips around the middle of this year.

The volumes are small, and the number of affected models is small, but
perhaps more importantly, none of those models is sold in the United States. The reason the volumes are small may have less to do with assemblers not wanting to irk a White House that has taken an increasingly tariff-heavy, America-first approach to manufacturing, but rather with market incumbents that currently account for as much as 90% of the total market's supply.
Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: A tricky situation in a market dictated entirely by supply PC makers are not being cautious primarily because of Washington, but rather because they do not want to upset
agreements with market giants such as Samsung , SK Hynix, and Micron.

An executive at one PC company told Nikkei that with the top three holding more than 90% of the global market, buyers have to stay low-key about using CXMT, adding: "We dare not source too much from CXMT at this moment." You may like SSD boss gives us yet another sign that the RAM crisis is here to stay Corsair DDR5 RAM spotted using Chinese chips here's why that's important Memory crunch and price rises see global PC shipments fall for the first time in two years

That does make for an interesting conundrum: in the middle of the worst
memory shortage in the industry's history, the binding constraint on diversification is fear of annoying the people you are already struggling to buy from.

Nikkei's report on the matter only reinforces what many market participants have already hinted at : CXMT is hardly the "cheaper" option. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get
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Its DRAM quotes do not undercut Samsung's, and it reportedly cannot even be booked beyond the current quarter, as competition over who can buy it has continued to ramp up even as it reportedly chooses to prioritize local conglomerate Huawei's AI ambitions.

What PC makers are actually buying, then, is optionality. A supply chain manager who works with HP and Asus put it to Nikkei, saying they don't want
to neglect a potentially important source while the market is this tight.

For context, validating a new DRAM supplier takes months of engineering, signal-integrity testing, thermal work, and platform validation, and it does not happen on a whim. HP, Asus, and Acer have now built a switch. Whether
they throw it depends on conditions none of them control, but the switch exists, and eighteen months ago it did not. What to read next Huawei could join Samsung as the only tech firms producing its own CPUs, SSDs, and DRAM Asus and SK Hynix just provided some glimmers of hope on the RAM crisis Microsoft stops recommending 32GB, as Apple reportedly struggles to get RAM

With Samsung stating that the RAM crisis is here to stay , the underlying conditions have merely exacerbated an AI-driven memory crisis that has directly affected consumer electronics across the board as supply continues
to get repurposed.

Spot RAM pricing has risen by 400% or more over the past twelve months. PC makers have responded by prioritizing memory allocation for premium models
and lifting prices across their ranges by several hundred dollars. IDC
expects the global PC market to contract by more than 11 percent this year, with supply conditions deteriorating further toward the end of it.

Smartphones are equally affected, with some makers scaling back certain
models to memory configurations their predecessors already offered, while others increase pricing to offset higher component costs. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo have each cut 2026 shipment targets more than once.

The pressure has already reached the components below the memory itself: motherboard makers have absorbed roughly 50 percent increases in PCB costs
and trimmed their own shipment targets accordingly.

None of this originates in the PC market. It originates in AI infrastructure
, where demand for high-bandwidth memory has pulled wafer capacity away from conventional DRAM at every major supplier.

That is precisely the gap CXMT has been expanding into, which is why a
company most Western buyers ignored two years ago is suddenly qualified at three of the largest PC brands in the world. A short term irritant for Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix? So what will Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix think? In the short term, very little, and they have every reason to say so. They are the primary beneficiaries of this shortage, with pricing power they have not enjoyed in a decade and no commercial incentive whatsoever to loosen supply. A few thousand budget laptops in Europe and Asia that carry Chinese DRAM do not register against that.

The longer view might be less comfortable. Oligopolies are usually broken not by a competitor arriving with a better product but by customers becoming willing to qualify an alternative, and customers become willing when the incumbents make life sufficiently unpleasant . That threshold has now seemingly been crossed at three of the five largest PC vendors, during a period when the incumbents were charging whatever they liked.

The alternative parts are more expensive than expected and hard to get, so nobody has switched in any meaningful volume. But the certification work is done and dusted, CXMT is building capacity at multiples of its current base, and the moment supply loosens or Washington's posture shifts, the cost of moving volume across is dramatically lower than it was.

For now, the best example of how the industry is treating this news is
visible in Acer's response to Nikkei: It declined to identify suppliers, said it maintains close contact with multiple global manufacturers, and described the goal as supply chain resilience. HP also declined to comment, and Asus
did not respond at all to inquiries at the time of writing. That is not the language of companies making a bet but rather those that would like to keep
as many options open as possible. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/global-memory-shortage-forces-top-pc-makers-like -hp-and-asus-to-turn-to-cxmt-chips-but-what-will-samsung-and-micron-think


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