SITUATION ANALYSIS: CXMT lore explained We like to joke on MTS that our favorite company is China’s largest memory manufacturer, ChangXin Memory Technologies (长鑫存储). Today, CXMT surpassed Tencent to become the most valuable company in China, with a market cap of $555 billion. So how did we get here? CXMT was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, in the Tier 3 city of Hefei, Anhui Province, by an engineer named Zhu Yiming. Zhu was born in Jiangsu Province in 1972. He studied physics at Tsinghua University, one of China’s top colleges, and became deeply interested in semiconductor design and manufacturing. At the time, the industry was deeply centered in the US, and so Zhu moved overseas in 1994 to pursue a physics PhD at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Not wanting to miss out on the 90s tech boom in Silicon Valley, he left Stony Brook early (after getting a master’s in electronics engineering) to work in the memory industry. In 2005, frustrated at his company undervaluing his ideas on chip design, he left to found GigaDevice, which built NOR flash memory and microcontrollers. Zhu saw the future of the memory industry moving to Asia, so he moved himself and his company to Beijing. GigaDevice became one of China’s leading semiconductor companies, and went public in 2016. Today, it’s worth over $40 billion. The same year GigaDevice went public, Zhu partnered with the municipal government of Hefei on a new project: building China’s first domestic manufacturer of DRAM, dynamic random-access memory. At the time, the global DRAM market was concentrated almost entirely into three companies: South Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, and US-based Micron. GigaDevice had no cell design or manufacturing process for DRAM, so they had to look elsewhere: to Qimonda, a defunct German DRAM manufacturer that had gone bankrupt in 2009. CXMT acquired many of Qimonda’s patents and recruited many former engineers. With that done, they shifted focus to mass production. Fab 1, backed by the Hefei government, was completed in early 2018 and began production in 2019. By 2020, it had done something no Chinese company had ever done before: sustained mass production of DDR4 and LPDDR4 DRAM chips, which were used mostly for budget Chinese smartphones and PCs. Over the following years, CXMT advanced its process technology further, producing DDR5 and LPDDR5, used for more high-end devices. In 2024, it began producing small amounts of older HBM2, the technology used in AI chips, and in 2025, it released DDR5 server memory. This would turn out to be incredibly useful — around that time, rising AI demand caused the memory market to skyrocket. In July 2026, CXMT went public, and its stock nearly quintupled on the first day of trading. Today, it produces nearly 10% of the world’s DRAM supply, and its memory ends up in mainstream Chinese smartphones, PCs, and data centers. It’s had an incredible arc. If anyone knows where to get CXMT merch, please let us know! Written by @theojaffee. Read more at our link in bio.