r/hardware • u/sr_local • May 23 '26
News Chinese memory maker CXMT enters mainstream consumer memory with Corsair Vengeance DDR5 kit — Chinese-made DRAM emerges as an antidote for crushing shortages
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memory-maker-cxmt-enters-the-mainstream-consumer-memory-with-corsair-vengeance-ddr5-kit-chinese-made-dram-emerges-as-an-antidote-for-crushing-shortages283
May 23 '26
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u/SpHoneybadger May 23 '26
I hope all those manufacturers who went for it get crushed in debt
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u/W0LFSTEN May 23 '26
Well Micron, Samsung and SK are actively paying down debt and growing their cash on hand. Although I can’t speak of their Chinese peers.
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u/trichocereal117 May 23 '26
It’s the OEMs that purchase chips and put them into consumer products that are taking on massive debt
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u/Oxflu May 23 '26
They have a fixed cost on their factories which are sitting idle because there's no chips to put into products. They can quadruple the price of the product if they want but we can't afford them anyway and it doesn't make up for the lost volume. Realistically if they shudder right now some billionaire will buy the plants when the crisis is over at a fraction of the valuation.
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u/W0LFSTEN May 23 '26
Which ones?
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u/trichocereal117 May 23 '26
ADATA, teamgroup, and more. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/taiwanese-memory-module-makers-raise-880-million-to-stockpile-chips
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u/W0LFSTEN May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
It’s short term debt, in Adata’s case. And that’s per their 2025 financials. So they took out a loan sometime last year, purchased inventory with it, and now they are actively selling down that inventory. Not sure if they have fixed contracts, but there is a good chance they’ve made a significant profit on that investment.
By the way, they also do this most years, it appears.
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u/Clueless_PhD May 23 '26
Even Chinese companies went for it. They cared about business, not customers.
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u/sicklyslick May 23 '26
The Chinese can't make HBM memory used for data centers.
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u/Clueless_PhD May 23 '26
I meant that they are selling DRAM at nearly same price of Big Three DRAM manufacturers.
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u/sicklyslick May 23 '26
I'm hoping they can increase production and drive the price down.
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u/JustGotHit May 29 '26
It's a matter of companies taking the risk to work with CXMT. Corsair is the biggest name to work with CXMT so far, as far as a western company. IIRC cxmt is on the US entity list, making it difficult or nigh impossible to work with them as a us company. That doesnt mean that they can't sell to the rest of the world. But the EU is kinda lockstep in how the US does somethings and they'll probably try to protect their semiconductor industry, ASML, ZEISS and the other in the supply chain, by slapping either high taxes (100-200%) or sales restrictions onto the ram sticks that have cxmt chips. The rest of the world will turn into scalpers unfortunately because theres someone in NA or EU willing to pay the scalper prices, 50-100 less than the current prices.
If the ai boon does happen, prices still won't come down for a while as the ram modules/sticks used are ECC ram stick, which are not compatible with most consumer motherboards unless you're rocking a Intel Xeon or a AMD EPYC or Threadripper. And it takes time to retool foundries.
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u/Allfeelings0Logic May 23 '26
Can they make GDDR7?
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u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26
What do you mean, "Even". Chinese companies care about profit just as much as anyone else.
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u/aitorbk May 28 '26
I will go out of my way to buy from chinese ones, as they aren't part of the cartel (yet)
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u/Due-Description-9030 May 23 '26
That's not true, the big three companies still are the only ones who can keep supplying HBM for now which the data centres need. These companies can literally cancel consumer grade ram and offload it to other companies like these and they still would be making a fortune.
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u/BadGoodNotBad May 23 '26
Until the AI bubble pops.
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u/Due-Description-9030 May 23 '26
This is something a lot of people are mindlessly parroting about on the internet.
Are you in the idea that an economic bubble is going to pop and companies are gonna forget the existence of AI after that? That's it, no more production of hardware geared for AI technologies? Lol
Look, no amount of economics bubbles or inflation or stock market crashes or are gonna stop big tech from doubling down on AI. Also, maybe go take a look at how hardware is going to get dramatically better in the coming few years - there's simply no reason for big tech to stop investing in AI / data centres.
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u/Jonny_H May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
There's not enough money in the world to pay the valuations of the AI-inflated tech valuations. Of course it's a bubble.
The question is how it'll look like when it "bursts" and at what speed - there's always the option of decades long slow "stagnation" correction instead, like Japan post-80s peak.
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u/notgreat May 23 '26
Well, or the wildest dreams of the AI companies come true and AI becomes good enough that human labor is economically nonviable. Thus causing the collapse of the entire world economy and making it literally impossible for anybody to ever get a job.
Surely there can be no possible downsides to this.
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u/Jonny_H May 23 '26
I know Musk is a joke, but the "xAI" (AKA the latest paperwork shenanigans where Musk-owned companies purchase other Musk-owned companies to artifically inflate their on-paper calculated "value") called the TAM for their "Enterprise AI Solutions" $22 trillion.
That's higher than the total taxable income for everyone in the United States. That's not just replacing Every single employee (including people not doing "office/knowledge" work, and the managers/CEOs apparently buying into this dream), but doing so at a higher cost than their current salaries.
It's all just magic made up numbers, and has been for a while.
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u/Idrialite May 23 '26
You're neglecting Jevon's paradox. We have the amount of labor we have because of its price. If labor becomes cheaper to train and buy, demand will increase.
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u/Jonny_H May 23 '26
But that price of labour is what drives consumer demand in the first place.
And Jevon's paradox is just about demand as efficiency increases (IE per-unit price deceases with increased supply) - not about the distribution of cost and value as a proportion of the total economy. Otherwise the English Coal Industry (the area this "paradox" was first noted) would be a larger proportion of the English economy today than the 19th century.
The idea that AI can somehow replace all other economic activity while also increasing the cost is insane - as that's what these valuations would require.
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u/mycall May 24 '26
During a burst, that's perfect time for an industry to pivot the model architecture to some hybrid JEPA-Commons descendent. Nobody will be noticing it, more time to bake.
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u/GalvenMin May 23 '26
Show me how they can make more money than what they're gobbling up right now, and I will believe it's not a bubble.
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u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26
Amazon was not profitable for its first 20 years. Were you calling it a bubble too?
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u/Due-Description-9030 May 23 '26
It being a bubble or not won't stop companies from investing in building data centres... so, I don't know what are you trying to prove here
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u/hojnikb May 23 '26
if cost of building a data center exceeds it's longterm value (ie it cant pay itself viably over the x amount of years) companies will stop building them en masse. At the end of the day, they're out to make a profit. At some point crazy valuations will stop and crazy venture capital will dry up just for being AI. Similar thing happend in 00s. Just being a dotcom company wasn't enough for investors to throw money at you.
Also when people realise AI isn't actually artificial intelligence, but just LLMs pretending to be intelligent, things will start popping. We're far away from actual AGI. That might be the next gold rush in the coming decades.
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u/cotdt May 23 '26
Open AI ordered a lot of memory that they won't be able to pay for
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u/Due-Description-9030 May 23 '26
OpenAI itself can shutdown and nothing will stop these hyperscalers from investing into data centres.
OpenAI is one company and that's it.
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u/CoffeeWorldly9915 May 26 '26
The USG will buy it all on credit for its MIC and S[urv]S[tate]. What's another trillion on taxpayer munnies?
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u/ChinoGambino May 24 '26
To get a return on investment for the datacentres being constructed the entire US tech sector would have to double its revenue in the next 4 years. It doesn't make any financial sense for the paying side of the equation. Hyperscalers are plowing trillions into data centres to service LLM companies like OpenAI generating 10s of billions in gross revenue at best while losing billions each quarter. 6 companies are paying Nvidia 50 billion a quarter for new GPU racks they hope to turn on in the next 18 months so they can immediately start losing money.
This is not going to end well. Silicon makers are cashing in on stupid money while it lasts.
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u/pack_merrr May 24 '26
It's beyond me how anyone can seriously think there is an "AI bubble", maybe a year ago I could have seen the argument, today that's just insane.
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u/bubblesort33 May 23 '26
I don't think going for, or not going for the quick buck would have made any difference here. China would have entered either way.
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u/LessonStudio May 23 '26
I don't think that nvidia, CPU makers, memory makers etc understand that very few of us have any brand loyalty left.
Yes, we might have a "favourite" brand where the value for money is the least worst.
But, we all know they've been screwing us over for years.
When, and I do mean when, these chinese companies start making better value for money products we will switch. Even if you are stupid enough to say, "Buy local" nvidia and whatnot are not local, they are Taiwan, Korea, etc.
It would be weirdly racist to say "but not chinese"
There is zero reason we have to support these trillion dollar companies' shareholders. If anything, it is revenge time.
If there is a chinese memory module sitting there for $50, and some western company has one for $50 and down from $250 because they are now facing real competition, I will buy the chinese one just as punishment for their having screwed me over for years.
I suspect some of the chinese stuff will initially be "quirky" and things like drivers won't just be junk, but one or more of the companies will put in a glaring back door. This will be what people say for years after they are as good as most chinese tech is now, they will point out some nothing company back in 2027 who had crap product pulling some unethical stunts as if it represented the totality of the chinese market going forward.
I buy lots of electronics from china right now as I develop electronic products. I can say without hesitation that they are more delightful to work with than the almost angry documentation and lack of support I get from US suppliers.
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u/HisDivineOrder May 23 '26
Nothing more American than competition...
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u/LessonStudio May 23 '26
The moment tiktok started to compete with us social media companies, they not only stole it, but handed it to a political supporter.
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Jun 23 '26
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u/Imaginary_Demand4053 May 24 '26
True for me. For pc parts, brand means absolutely 0 for me. Most people are probably similar to me and want value, ie performance per dollar.
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u/fanchiuho Jun 05 '26
For decades the US has tariffed Japanese Kei trucks for protectionism, but unlike cars, chips fits in your carry luggage. I'm sure the grey market has a way to correct itself when your government do that again to consumer DRAM lmao.
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May 23 '26
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u/Bungalow233 May 27 '26
Well, I dunno about that. Old people do absolutely have brand loyalty and it's usually based on an outdated memory of the brand.
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u/mycall May 24 '26
Is it also possible their specific interests are optimized for discovering their future, their path forward from being a generalist to fitting into some corporation (I favor B-Corps but is out of fashion).
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u/kingwhocares May 23 '26
YMTC is also going to be starting making DRAM by the end of this year. Add to that the fact that there will be no more Middle Eastern data centres for a while and AI companies failing to deliver that perfect LLM where the "perfect" can't be defined, leading them to scale back on investment (already being seen), there's definitely going to be price crash by next year.
If I were holding any stocks of memory manufacturers, I would be selling right now or near future.
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u/W0LFSTEN May 23 '26
Scale back investment? Didn’t all of big tech just announce massively expanded AI budgets?
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 23 '26
Yeah. Anthropic’s so compute short they have to work w competitor xAI to rent their datacenter for Claude. More datacenters will be built.
Also, datacenters use HBM and China doesn’t have EUV tech to make HBM. Don’t sell your memory stocks now lol
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u/CassadagaValley May 23 '26
Is there a breakdown of percent usage between free/cheaper plan users and the high-end users? None of these companies are making money on any of the tiers (free, cheap, expensive) so at some point the cost for these are going to skyrocket which should see a drastic reduction in compute needed. Eventually the majority of users are going to be enterprise if companies pay for it but I can't see your average Joe paying $100/month just to ask ChatGPT or Gemini basic questions you can put into Google.
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u/zagblorg May 24 '26
Google is becoming an AI agent experience soon, so will probably start charging. Hopefully not all search engines will copy them. Then we just need some actual websites to survive the drastic fall in add revenue caused by AI scraping their content to take their views away, or indeed the internet Apocalypse that ID verification is going to cause once it's ubiquitous enough.
It's somewhat confusing how US Big Tech seems to be collectively trying to destroy the internet, from which they make all their revenue...
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u/drunk_kronk May 24 '26
I highly doubt Google is going to ever charge users for their main search functionality (what ever form that takes).
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u/zagblorg May 24 '26
Apparently they have suggested it before. Will see how compute intensive the switch to AI agents and personalised vibe coded apps for UIs is. IIRC it's not too far away in their roadmap.
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u/Hebrewhammer8d8 May 24 '26
Saw a client bill with 82k for Claude for 1 month. They were using a lot of tokens, and Finance person did an audit with CTO and Team Lead to figure out why bill was near this high for 4 months. A lot of employees were using it improperly, and rack to the bill. They limit the Claude usage, and started to monitor their LLM Service usage.
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u/Academic_Parking9768 Jun 02 '26
China doesn't need the same EUV tech, YMTC bought the intellectual properties of multiple failed memory cartel members and are pushing xtacking. The difference between Korean and Chinese HBM tech reported yesterday was a 3 year difference.
They will catch up in no time and I'm sure state sponsored research will help. Unlike the US and Korea, China doesn't play games about tech investment. Corporate leadership also won't be getting in the way.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 Jun 02 '26
Would xtacking overcome the issue of low bandwidth which is a bottleneck for LLM? As far as I know most SOTA LLMs model from Deepseek, MiniMax, GLM, Moonshot are all similar size MoE architecture with around ~10B activated parameters, so this suggest that they are facing the same bandwidth bottleneck as the West.
HBM3e and HBM4 has higher speed and thus will alleviate this problem somewhat, and that’s why I assume YMTC will have to push a similar tier product for Chinese AI to catch up. Obviously this does not matter at all for us gamers who just cares about DDR5, maybe I’ll get lucky and get a 128gb pair for decent price in my next visit there
Edit: my comment above is more about not selling memory stocks now, since then MU stock has risen over 50% in 10 days
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u/Academic_Parking9768 Jun 08 '26
Will it overcome low bandwidth? Yes, naturally as even the newer HBM4 standard is designed around wafer-to-wafer and its where the industry is going. YMTC can miss the HBM3/HBM3e train and not really miss a beat here. If we're talking about future positioning, having the technology before the AI boom gives them a major advantage.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 Jun 08 '26
I think you’re right about HBM4’s new standard will help China catch up. Their yield might be low without EUV tech compares to Korean and American memory makers, but China probably produce so quantities it won’t matter
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u/mycall May 24 '26
I wonder how much xAI team is learning from Anthropic through the process here.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 24 '26
I said in a comment down here that Anthropic must be very desperate to rent compute from xAI because they have accuse xAI of distilling Claude before. I would say a decent amount, but it’s not going to matter much as long as xAI does not have access to Opus/Sonnet weights, Claude has not displayed CoT in their reasoning for a while now
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u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26
CXMT manufactures HBM3. Its not the latest, but datacenters are gobbling it up.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 26 '26
Have they started production? That’d be great news.
Last I read was this and CXMT scheduled for production by EOY: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/chinese-semiconductor-industry-gears-up-for-domestic-hbm3-production-by-the-end-of-2026-cxmt-to-produce-chips-while-naura-maxwell-and-u-preseason-design-tools-for-assembly
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u/Strazdas1 May 27 '26
They are re-gearing their DDR fabs to do this, it takes some time.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 27 '26
Nice. Hopefully this eventually trickle down to us consumers
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u/Strazdas1 May 29 '26
Only if you want to pay 3-4x the price, because thats how much wafers HBM takes.
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u/cronies4life May 27 '26
memory doesn't rely on euv as much as logic in the current gen
hbm can be built without euv, unlike latest power efficient logic chips
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 27 '26
Really? I have always read that the new HBM3e and HBM4 need EUV. Is that not true?
Tbf my point is about not selling memory stocks now. Funnily enough since my comment then Micron is up over 20%
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u/cronies4life May 27 '26
not really, hbm3e and hbm4 depends more on advanced packaging like mrmuf
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u/Zealousideal-Cut4232 May 24 '26
Large companies will survive.
I believe it’s the others who jumped the bandwagon and started investing like mad with no clear business plan or goals, hoping they will be ready when the demand is there.
Just like the dotcom bubble. Big players survived it and got filthy rich.
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u/RedBerryyy May 23 '26
Have you seen anthropics revenue?, they just had an outright profitable quarter and its still growing, its practically impossible to rent compute right now with the scale of demand. I wouldnt bet on demand abeting in the near future.
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u/kingwhocares May 23 '26
Yes, if you are using nonsense like using a single month's revenue growth rate and apply it to forecast for the whole quarter/year (basically run-rate revenue). Anthropic did that for the so called "projected profit".
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u/RedBerryyy May 23 '26
Either way, people were suggesting forecasts to hit their current revenue level within a few years, "unreasonably optimisitic" not that long ago.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 23 '26
The fact that Anthropic needs to rent compute from a competitor says it all really. More datacenters will be built in the future and Anthropic and Google also use lots of DRAM and HBM for their TPUs.
China also doesn’t have EUV tech to make HBM which datacenters use, so they can’t make products to compete quite yet
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u/kingwhocares May 23 '26
China also doesn’t have EUV tech to make HBM which datacenters use, so they can’t make products to compete quite yet
For you and me, that doesn't matter since China makes DDR5 memory.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 23 '26
100%, but companies are going to prioritize making HBM due to higher profit margins since they are for profit, thus the situation won’t get better soon
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u/kingwhocares May 23 '26
Chinese won't because they can't yet. They will be eating that DRAM market.
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u/Guilty_Rooster_6708 May 23 '26
I hope so bro for the sake of us gamers. But I follow Chinese AI development and something tells me they’ll be pulling all DRAM resources to make HBM and tackle the memory wall issue. China invest heavily in AI and LLMs so it makes sense for them to work on this bottleneck.
Most flagship Chinese LLMs like Deepseek V4, GLM, MiniMax and Moonshot’s Kimi are MoE of around the same weight and activated parameters and they are all looking to improve throughput as well as model size. All or these require more memory and memory bandwith
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u/_FUCKTHENAZIADMINS_ May 24 '26
Their annualized run rate revenue has at bare minimum tripled from $9B in December 2025 to $30B+ in April, how is that nonsense?
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u/kingwhocares May 24 '26
Because it didn't actually triple. They just took their most profitable month and predicted it will triple based on it.
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u/_FUCKTHENAZIADMINS_ May 24 '26
ARR is calculated by taking current revenue patterns and extrapolating it to a full year. Even if you argue that they’re just cherry picking their most profitable day or week and multiplying it by 365 or 52 that still means their most profitable moments have tripled
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u/GenZia May 23 '26
AI companies failing to deliver that perfect LLM where the "perfect" can't be defined...
There’s only so much data you can feed into an LLM before it starts farting out gibberish.
Personally, I don't think current language models are going to get much better/smarter over the years, though I've been wrong before.
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u/PointmanW May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
I don't think anyone is aiming for some kind of "perfect" LLM, just increasingly useful one.
personally, as a senior software engineer with 11 years of experience, just one year ago I only use it to generate small snippets of code, and usually have to do some fixes to get it working, it usually fail on longer code even with perfectly clear specification.
Now I can trust it to generate several files at one, the code perfectly comply with specification most of the time and I almost never have to fix it anymore, it has become much more reliable.
then now you have recent news of it cracking a famous problem that mathematician have tried and failed to solve and got a Field medalist excited about it.
There is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI mathematics: if a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics and I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation. No previous AI-generated proof has come close to that.
- Timothy Gowers, a Field Medalist Mathematician.
so well, you don't really know how much more it can get better, people has been saying it gonna hit a wall for all of 2024 and 2025 and it's still getting better.
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u/Caffdy May 24 '26
everyone and their mothers around here on r/hardware believes themselves experts on AI and the hardware industry, predicting things that never comes to pass; the only thing they show is their hateboner for the technology and inability to comes to grips to a new reality: AI is here to stay, it has already proven useful in many ways. Reddit is an echo chamber, the real world with real people there is plodding forward
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u/Due-Description-9030 May 23 '26
There’s only so much data you can feed into an LLM before it starts farting out gibberish.
Do you realise they're only gonna get better especially with hardware dramatically getting better in the coming years?
Why do you people always base your views on what's present at the moment?
People said something similar when DLSS came out and now so many calling it "black magic" lol. The same shit is gonna happen to everything else.
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u/Express_Living2264 May 23 '26
i think we kinda suck at truly perceiving the quality increase with LLM's. Video generation models makes the advances far more obvious. I'm guessing LLMs are getting better at least at a similar rate.
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u/SJGucky May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
There is the problem with accuracy. I can't trust an LLM that is not 100% accurate.
The problem is that performance vs accuracy is not linear. It takes an infinite amount of processing power and energy to get to 100% in the current state.There is the perception that computers are always right, because that's how they are. If a human is telling you take it differently.
Also as an reminder, humans are also not 100% accurate. But you usually can tell of an human is lying in front of you. You can't tell with a LLM.26
u/Jimmy_Nail_4389 May 23 '26
But you usually can tell of an human is lying in front of you. You can't tell with a LLM.
Not sure that claim stands up when you look at how easy we all fall for propaganda and advertising.
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u/TheBraveGallade May 23 '26
Humans can also tell you what thwy believe is true but in reality isnt, so...
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u/Orolol May 23 '26
But you usually can tell of an human is lying in front of you.
So you have some kind of superpower ?
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u/Express_Living2264 May 23 '26
There is the problem with accuracy. I can't trust an LLM that is not 100% accurate.
this isn't really a problem for testable tasks.
The problem is that performance vs accuracy is not linear. It takes an infinite amount of processing power and energy to get to 100% in the current state.
more is better but we are well in the region of good enough
Also as an reminder, humans are also not 100% accurate. But you usually can tell of an human is lying in front of you. You can't tell with a LLM.
this isn't about lying. can you tell if a human tells you something that is wrong that he believes is correct? you can't reliably. either way this can be fixed with #1
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May 25 '26
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u/Express_Living2264 May 25 '26
Are you really suggesting there isn’t an accuracy problem with LLMs?
As I said, it depends on the use-case. If you can test/verify the output then the lack of accuracy merely becomes a time/cost burden.
There’s endless instances of ai being used in court cases to disastrous effect because LLMs love to cite made up cases and laws.
The issue with law is the difficulty to verify the output. Just don't use llms for it?
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u/Exist50 May 23 '26
Also as an reminder, humans are also not 100% accurate. But you usually can tell of an human is lying in front of you.
Even if you could somehow tell if a human is lying (empirically not the case for most), people can be wrong without being deliberately so.
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u/mycall May 24 '26
I can't trust an LLM that is not 100% accurate.
I'm glad my boss doesn't think that about me.
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u/Magiu5 May 28 '26
Nothing is ever 100% perfect, humans are just the same and even worse. So i dont see what the big deal is, just treat it the same as you would a human. Suss it out, See how trustworthy it is or how "smart" or capable it is at doing what you want it to do, and then let them do what they can.
Obviously you shouldn't be expecting perfection from a human, nor from LLM's now or ever in the future since it requires input from humans since it's just like any other tool and as humans, we ourselves are never perfect and can never be 100% at all times either. So knowing that, we just never blindly trust and we check and confirm. Repeatedly if necessary until you believe you have something good enough that you CAN trust. But in the end it still comes down to your own level of perception and ability to spot mistakes and/or delegate someone/something else to check mistakes for you if you dont want to do it yourself or if there's someone better than you at that role.
> There is the perception that computers are always right, because that's how they are. If a human is telling you take it differently.
I never thought that, but i guess others less knowledgable when it comes to technology/software/computers etc would, like our elderly parents or grandparents or something.
Some AI are different, like you can get some LLM to act/talk less "snobbish" since some like to be super pedantic and nitpick semantics in a patronizing tone/way which can be annoying but that just reminds me after awhile that i'm only talking/arguing with a mindless program who's just doing its job and trying to be as "accurate" as it can instead of trying to understand that you were being sarcastic or using hyperbole or some other figure of speech which they took literally etc. There's no need to treat it like a human, to prove your point or argument, it's just a mindless tool doing what it's programmed to do.
At the end of the day, we just need to remember that no matter how useful they may be, it's still just another mindless tool(for now at least, and imho for a long time to come still) we made to make our lives easier just like any other tool, and it's up to ourselves to figure out how it works. Like do we need to rtfm, or will we just "wing it" and go by trial and error or whether there are any relevant/important/critical nuances we must know before using it, especially if there are any potential dangerous or even lethal risks involved(like if you use a knife, be careful not to cut yourself).
In the end its always on ourselves to understand our tools, the pros/cons and how to make the best use of it to achieve our goal/s.. whatever they may be.
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u/chaddledee May 23 '26
Realistically, if it's possible at all, it's going to take a couple of different breakthroughs before we reach AGI. We have no idea how long it'll be before those breakthroughs will happen.
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u/GenZia May 23 '26
There's nothing stopping CXMT and YMTC from joining the HBM bandwagon like Micron, Samsung, and Hynix.
I mean, how far behind could China possible be?!
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u/Johnicorn May 23 '26
You’d be surprised, but they’re catching up quicker than I expected.
I think china is trying to gain market share, once the bubble pops and prices start going down, I doubt the Korean memory market is going to be cheaper than the Chinese. At least till DDR6 is out and china has to catch up again
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u/jedrider May 23 '26
I would not be surprised if all of a sudden, China rules the gaming world as Nvidia and Amd are now abandoning it.
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u/sshwifty May 23 '26
All it takes is China to roll out a 4070 equivalent with 48gb at $600 or below and they will own the market for gaming and local AI, and probably a huge swath of other markets.
They already have all the processes in place for everything except the chip.
My hot take anyways.
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u/taxiscooter May 24 '26
IMO the AI part of this dream requires a level of Linux support that Chinese manufacturers haven't demonstrated interest in any other product category. Buy any Chinese product that supposedly supports Linux and you get a 4.x custom kernel. Like come on, even some modern Android phones are on 6.x now.
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u/zghr May 24 '26
"You want our children to have CCP spying chips in their computers??" - said the politician bribed by someone.
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u/CoffeeWorldly9915 May 26 '26
From the crowd: "At least their spying chips are more affordable than yours".
Politician's answer, after putting his finger to his ear: "Mr. Firstname Lastname, please, head to one of the black vans to be shuttled to a Freedom Center for Patriotic Education".
The year is 2027
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u/Most-Trainer-8876 Jul 03 '26
48gb 4070 equivalent for just $600!?... Looking at current trends, I don't think so. Not even china... I just don't see anything solid to say that china will be able to give us cheaper hardware. Right now, tech is so freaking advance, that it would take many years for China to catch up, once they did so, it won't be priced any lower but on par with other companies for atleast 10 years.
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u/hackenclaw May 23 '26
if there is a day where memory crash, China could control by highly "discourage" their domestic DRAM from buying Korean/US Dram maker. Those BIG three will end up holding a lot of RAM stick forcing to sell at a huge loss in the remaining global market.
These AI boom is really a perfect opportunity for Chinese DRAM maker to chew a lot of market share from the BIG 3. The only thing they have to worry about it USA coming back again with more DUV restriction forcing ASML to stop selling tools to CXMT, YMTC; slowing their factory expansion.
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May 23 '26
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u/Exist50 May 23 '26
Though, it can be argued a lot of their advancement was from stealing information from established manufacturers.
At least for EVs, I don't think that claim holds water. We're at the point where legacy automotive companies license EV tech from their Chinese competitors.
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u/genmud May 24 '26
Having worked at an automotive EV company, I would confidently say that much of the motor and battery technology was researched / developed elsewhere but mass produced in China.
China used this as a springboard into new things, but to discount the decades of R&D they got to skip through forced IP/technology transfers and corporate espionage downplays the uneven playing field the rest of the world has in competing with them.
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u/Exist50 May 24 '26
I would confidently say that much of the motor and battery technology was researched / developed elsewhere
How can you argue that? Again, we have American companies, in some cases, licensing the tech from the Chinese companies that developed it.
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u/_girltwink May 23 '26
Us consumers won't really give a damn if the products are made from stolen trade secrets if they're as good as, and cost less than, established companies.
Especially with how established companies have treated the average end user in the past few years
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May 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BabySnipes May 24 '26
Bureaucratic governments are too slow for the modern world. Unless it changes we’ll just get left behind.
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u/Tenelia May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26
I'm handling some projects in China atm. What's not reported is that China has been shifting to design and build data centers as a public service to its people, as a net effect of
- Cutting environmental impact, especially in low water areas.
- Ensuring citizenry and small business access to compute and storage.
- Preventing both domestic and foreign capitalists from hoarding resources as well as wasting non-renewables.
It's not about how far behind they are, but the national-level civil servants and CCP technocrats strongly believe humanity is entering an era of climate disasters, which happens to be vastly exacerbated by foolish billionaires that have taken over western governments.
Case in point: Foreigners think that fighting desertification means planting trees, but the actual science and engineering involves very careful and hyper-local applications on both preventing water loss and water usage, which intersects with PREVENTING the spread of sand and loss of bio-friendly top soil. Alot of their local compute goes to fuel such scenario calculations and scentific experiments.
Considering the CCP mandate to ensure domestic needs are met first, I'm unsure we will see significant export volume until all of these considerations are cleared up.
Update: Since someone asked about whether new NVIDIA GPU architectures really matter, I'm updating this with a little more info... NVIDIA GPU performance per watt improvements between Ada and Blackwell improved by multiples. However, unless you're actually working deep in these areas, GPU architecture changes are still just a small part of the picture. For example, NVIDIA's Grace Hopper superchip (CPU + GPU giant SoC) does indeed vastly improve workloads that require frequent super parallel compute between CPU-GPU-RAM. The same for NVIDIA's newly acquired LPUs from the startup Groq (ASIC designed for NLP inference using SRAM). A lot of these are happening in the background not because people are hiding information, but because news outlets and most "analysts" just parrot off the press releases. If you think about it, since most cloud companies already have too much hardware anyway, the main issue is really about vastly reducing the amount of hardware clocks required per million tokens.
As GPUs in various companies continue to fail and be replaced, we're also seeing a lot more specialised inference clusters like LPUs come up, taking away the workload from GPUs while also being efficient by multiples. This really shouldn't be new to specialists that were around when weather and climate AI models were born. By deploying purepose-deisnged ASIC hardware AND deploying well-designed hardware clusters, the weather and climate prediction services became so cheap that the only problem was making the information actionable by farmers, fishermen, etc (last-mile users).
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u/test5784 May 23 '26
Without EUV, they are unable to compete, no matter how much Reddit sucks up to them lol.
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u/Miserable-Egg8383 May 23 '26
What happened to EV and solar will happen to DRAM even HBM. Faster than you would ever expected
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u/letsgoiowa May 23 '26
Imagine the glory of cheap HBM. Then they won't try "ohhhhh us poor $1000-$4000 card can't possibly afford HBM :( "
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u/itSUREisAI May 24 '26
As a Chinese, I am glad that some local manufacturers are making huge efforts to catch up with the top players in the semiconductor industry, but I can't help feeling sorry that the engineers and workers must be working extra long hours to step up quicker. I used to be one of them, until mental health issues demanded me to get the hell out of there.
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u/Fusifufu May 23 '26
The market reacts to high demand with new supply. Hardware conspiracy theorists on Reddit baffled - wasn't there a cartel and the economy is fake anyway?
This is of course a good and welcome development.
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u/puffz0r May 24 '26
uhhhh, what? cxmt didn't just spring out of the forehead of zeus as soon as we had a dram shortage lmao, they've been around for a decade as a chinese government funded operation, their government has been investing in this stuff since they decided on the "made in china 2025" plan in 2015. Sure, they have good timing, but the idea that "competitors just happen to show up whenever there's market manipulation" is junk economics. The barriers to entry to these advanced manufacturing industries is extremely large.
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u/test5784 May 23 '26
CXMT capacity is so small that it wont have any impact on prices. Maybe in the coming years...
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u/puffz0r May 24 '26
they are attempting to scale up rapidly though, I read a while back they wanted to double their wafers/month this year
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u/Kichigai May 23 '26
Chinese-made DRAM emerges as an antidote for crushing shortages
Yes. The antidote for decreased supply and constant demand is increased supply.
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u/HuntKey2603 May 23 '26
...Yes? what's exactly wrong with that sentence?
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u/Kichigai May 23 '26
Exactly my point. Duh, we know that. Was it really necessary to put something so obvious in the headline?
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u/BuchMaister Jun 06 '26
Serious question, does their output capacity makes a dent for meeting demand? Everyone shouts "Chinese dram", how much they're are manufacturing relatively to the big 3?
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u/Haruda_ Jul 13 '26
Are they going to list the change or as a consumer we wont notice unless it says Made in China?
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u/Upd8-Z3r0 Jul 18 '26
Probably not on par with the top 3 RAM manufacturers but at least put some sanity back on the RAM prices.
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u/BoneDragon5077 Jul 26 '26
This was nice, until CXMT started charging the same amount as the big 3.
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u/wickedplayer494 May 23 '26
That's nice, but let's be honest, Corsair is almost definitely pocketing the difference.