{"slug": "chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent", "title": "China’s CXMT wins a reported $3bn memory deal with Tencent", "summary": "ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has agreed to supply Tencent with roughly $3 billion of memory chips, according to sources, in a deal that would bind one of China's largest cloud operators to its largest homegrown DRAM maker. The agreement, not yet publicly confirmed, follows Tencent's testing of CXMT's domestically made DDR5 chips for AI computing servers. The deal underscores China's push for memory self-sufficiency amid US export controls and a global DRAM shortage driven by AI infrastructure demand.", "body_md": "*ChangXin Memory Technologies has agreed to supply Tencent with roughly $3bn of memory chips, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a deal that would bind one of China’s largest cloud operators to its largest homegrown DRAM maker.*\n\nNeither company has confirmed the agreement publicly, and the figure comes from sourcing rather than a filing or a statement. Reuters reported the arrangement on 29 June, attributing both its existence and its size to people it did not name.\n\nThe number should be read with that in mind. What is firmer is the relationship behind it, which is already a matter of record.\n\nCXMT lists Tencent among its end customers, alongside Alibaba, ByteDance, Lenovo, and Xiaomi, though sales often run through distributors rather than directly.\n\nThe two have been working together on the unglamorous but decisive task of validation: Tencent has been testing CXMT’s domestically made DDR5 chips for use in its servers, the high-capacity components that feed AI computing. A multibillion-dollar supply commitment, if confirmed, is what that testing was building toward.\n\nThe timing sits inside a memory market that has turned extraordinary. CXMT reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of 50.8bn yuan, about $7.4bn, a rise of more than 700% year on year, and posted a quarterly net profit in the billions of dollars after years of losses.\n\nThe surge is the same one lifting every memory maker: AI infrastructure has soaked up DRAM faster than the industry can produce it, and prices have climbed to the point where the chips that go into [ordinary consumer devices](https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-killing-cheap-smartphone-dram-memory-crisis) are being diverted to data centres instead.\n\nFor Tencent, locking in domestic supply at scale is partly a hedge against that scarcity and partly a hedge against politics. The dominant memory suppliers are South Korean and American, and US export controls have made Chinese buyers wary of depending on chips that could become harder to obtain. Sourcing from CXMT keeps the supply chain inside the country’s borders, which is the entire point of China’s push for memory self-sufficiency.\n\nFor CXMT, a named blue-chip customer at this size is validation in the commercial sense as well as the technical one. The company has been undercutting the established players on price, supplying DDR5 to Western brands including [Corsair](https://thenextweb.com/news/chinese-dram-cxmt-corsair-ddr5-memory-prices), while converting some of its capacity to high-bandwidth memory because the margins there are too good to ignore. A large domestic contract gives it a stable base of demand while it scales.\n\nThat scaling is what makes Western buyers nervous and Western suppliers attentive. CXMT’s rise has been rapid enough that companies outside China have started lobbying for access to it, with Apple [seeking US approval](https://thenextweb.com/news/apple-lobbying-us-approval-cxmt-blacklisted-memory-chips) to buy from the firm as memory prices have quadrupled. A Chinese maker that both alarms Washington and tempts Cupertino is an unusual position to occupy.\n\nWhat the reported deal does not settle is the terms. The duration, the chip mix between DDR5 and other grades, and the delivery schedule were not disclosed in the Reuters account, and neither CXMT nor Tencent has commented.\n\nThe headline figure is the part that travelled. The contract behind it, if and when either side confirms it, will say more about how fast China’s memory industry is closing the gap.\n\n## Get the TNW newsletter\n\nGet the most important tech news in your inbox each week.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent", "canonical_source": "https://thenextweb.com/news/chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent", "published_at": "2026-06-29 07:57:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-29 08:39:43.581672+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-chips", "ai-policy", "ai-research", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["ChangXin Memory Technologies", "Tencent", "Alibaba", "ByteDance", "Lenovo", "Xiaomi", "Corsair", "Apple"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/chinas-cxmt-wins-a-reported-3bn-memory-deal-with-tencent.jsonld"}}