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

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, buy

<![CDATA[ <article> <ul><li><strong>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</strong></li><li><strong>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</strong></li><li><strong>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</strong></li></ul><p>HP, Asus, and Acer have begun putting DRAM from China's ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) into notebook computers, <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/business/china-tech/hp-asus-and-acer-begin-using-cxmt-chips-amid-memory-shortage" target="_blank">a report from <em>Nikkei Asia</em> has claimed</a>, reporting several major PC makers completed qualification of CXMT's chips around the middle of this year.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><h2 id="a-tricky-situation-in-a-market-dictated-entirely-by-supply">A tricky situation in a market dictated entirely by supply</h2><p>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.</p><p>An executive at one PC company told <em>Nikkei</em> 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."</p><p>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.</p><p><em>Nikkei's</em> report on the matter only reinforces what many market participants <a href="https://www.notebookcheck.net/CXMT-s-budget-DDR5-RAM-is-now-pricier-than-Samsung-s-as-AI-demand-keeps-memory-prices-climbing.1353077.0.html" target="_blank">have already hinted at</a>: CXMT is hardly the "cheaper" option.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.huaweicentral.com/cxmt-prioritizing-chip-supply-for-huawei-over-global-pc-makers/" target="_blank">reportedly chooses to prioritize</a> local conglomerate Huawei's AI ambitions.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>With Samsung stating that <a href="https://www.techradar.com/computing/memory/samsung-warns-ram-pocalypse-could-last-until-2028-as-its-profits-continue-to-rise" target="_blank">the RAM crisis is here to stay</a>, 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>None of this originates in the PC market. It <a href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-global-memory-shortage-the-hidden-bottleneck-behind-the-ai-boom" target="_blank">originates in AI infrastructure</a>, where demand for high-bandwidth memory has pulled wafer capacity away from conventional DRAM at every major supplier.</p><p>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.</p><h2 id="a-short-term-irritant-for-samsung-micron-and-sk-hynix">A short term irritant for Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix?</h2><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.techradar.com/pro/notebook-prices-could-be-set-to-soar-and-no-its-not-the-apple-macbook-neos-fault-but-those-pesky-ram-and-cpu-price-rises-again" target="_blank">incumbents make life sufficiently unpleasant</a>. 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p> </article> ]]>