186
Huawei is building its own DRAM fab, and it could reshape RAM prices for everyone
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
186 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
86743 readers
2447 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Protectionists complain about Chinese market dominance, yet Chinese companies are the only ones entering the DRAM market in response to the dramatic increase in demand.
I wouldn't enter a cartel-protected market either if I had to finance that myself. If I had a captive bloc-sized market at home though...
China is big. There are a lot of customers there. And the government tends to plan long-term and is heavily subsidizing chip making tech for geopolitical reasons. Entering the western market is high-risk. Entering the Chinese market as a Chinese company and then also selling outside China after scaling up is low-risk.
It is way too late to be starting a new chip fab for it to be relevant to the current market. If they are producing reliable chips 5 years from now that'll be fast.
China speed will kick in and it will be next year they will own the market.
They have a domestic market to serve first. And they are fast at scaling up - but not that fast.
Give them half a decade.
Not likely. It doesn't matter how much slave labor you throw at it, getting a new fabrication machine to the necessary precision to make modern chips requires a lot of time.
I mean making the machines to make chips and making a factory that uses said machines are two different things.
There are already factories in China making DDR5 and DDR4 ram now days.
Huawei would just provide the support and resources needed to scale up a new large factory.
No slave labor needed. All you need is a modern, advanced, high skill, responsive industrial base which China has.
True.
Are they actually fabricating the silicon, or just packaging it?
Sure, like the people working at Foxconn:
https://truthout.org/articles/a-suicide-survivor-the-life-of-a-chinese-migrant-worker-at-foxconn/
They are making it from scratch. There are lots of sources but this is the first one I found. I assume they package it as well.
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-shortages
Foxcom assembles sub models into complete products. Still higher than slave labor level skills, but not as high as chip fabrication I admit. You need a skill base to assemble phones at a high level.
China speed proves real every time though
Cxmt is already one of their most valuable companies in the stock market
My guess is this is why Huawei wants in on the action
Maybe they are aiming for something like Temu: ultra low quality, super cheap and ready to flood the market in 6 months
Understanding it'll take some time for any competition to have an impact, it's still nice to see that someone, somewhere in the world is looking at this manufactured scarcity and deciding not to exploit it.
There's a reason. US is buying all memory fab capacity to deprive other countries, including China, from having access to RAM. The RAM companies, taking advantage of this situation and colluding, are raising prices and limiting production to create false scarcity. Unfortunately this means the average American has to pay arm and a leg for even small amounts of memory and storage.
I brought up last time that if RAM prices keep going up and up, it makes more economic sense to make more factories/facilities.
Theres always those people who say that it doesn't make sense to make new facilities, but I really dont see chip shortages to stop. With climate change being a thing and supply chain issues popping up more and more, I just dont see an end within the next 10 years. Makes more sense to bring some of that in house.