Ten years ago, memory chips were considered one of the worst bets in tech. The business demanded billions in upfront capital, offered thin margins, and was dominated by three entrenched giants — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — that most investors assumed could never be dislodged. Private venture capital largely stayed away.

The city government of Hefei didn’t. It poured public money into a fledgling manufacturer called ChangXin Memory Technologies, betting that China’s tech ambitions were worth the risk even when the market said otherwise.

That bet paid off in dramatic fashion this week. CXMT began trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market, pricing its shares at 8.66 yuan and raising roughly 57.9 billion yuan — about $8.6 billion — in what became the largest semiconductor listing in the exchange’s history and Asia’s biggest IPO of the year. Within hours, shares had surged more than 460%, pushing CXMT’s market capitalization past 3.3 trillion yuan and making it, almost overnight, the most valuable company on any mainland Chinese exchange — bigger than the country’s major banks and internet platforms, and by some measures bigger than Intel.

Riding the AI Memory Boom

CXMT’s timing could hardly have been better. The company’s revenue jumped more than sevenfold year-over-year in the first quarter alone, fueled by a global scramble for memory chips that traces back to the AI data center boom.

As AI accelerators became the industry’s most profitable product, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all redirected significant manufacturing capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — the specialized chips used in AI servers — and away from standard DRAM, the more basic memory used in everyday laptops, phones, and PCs. That left a supply gap. CXMT, which had spent years building out conventional DRAM production, moved to fill it, and demand followed. Reports have even suggested that Apple has begun evaluating CXMT’s chips for use in consumer products, a notable vote of confidence for a company that was, until recently, a minor player on the world stage.

CXMT now holds roughly 8% of the global DRAM market, putting it in fourth place worldwide behind Samsung (about 38%), SK Hynix (about 29%), and Micron (about 22%). It’s still well behind the leaders — but it’s the only large-scale domestic option for a Chinese tech industry increasingly focused on reducing its dependence on foreign suppliers.