The major PC manufacturers HP, Dell, Acer, and Asus are breaking a long-standing dogma: To survive the global chip shortage, these giants are qualifying memory chips from Chinese manufacturers for their hardware for the first time.
AI greed displaces the mass market
Global market leaders Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing their capacities almost exclusively for high-margin AI chips (HBM) for the likes of Nvidia, Google, and Amazon.
- The consequence: Hardly any memory is left for conventional PCs, which is driving prices up massively.
Previously, PC brands controlled the procurement of critical components themselves. Now, they are asking their contract manufacturers to leverage their own supply chain relationships—a fundamental shift in the industry's role.
China's quiet rise in the memory market
Company | Segment | Market Share (Revenue) | Customers |
CXMT | DRAM | ~5% | Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo, ByteDance |
YMTC | NAND | ~10% | Huawei, Alibaba Cloud + first foreign markets |
In terms of wafer capacity, both already hold over 10% market share.
Despite being on the US blacklist, YMTC is even expanding abroad: SSD products under its own brand ZhiTai are already available in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand.
- From the perspective of PC builders, these manufacturers are the only alternative to avoid being left empty-handed in the shadow of the AI giants.
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