The Projection — a symmetric watercolor butterfly

The Projection

The surface is never the system.

Global Capital

CXMT IPO

Up-to-$9.8B STAR Market listing (allotment 07-22, lists 07-27) funding Chinese DRAM/HBM capacity into the global squeeze. Track first-day reception, capacity-buildout plans vs. the shortage, and read-through to ai-memory-shortage and china-stack-independence.

STATUS · OPEN OPENED · 2026-07-22 LAST SEEN · 2026-09-06
CXMT Micron

Summary

CXMT's Shanghai debut surged 466% to roughly $489 billion even as Korea's chip-heavy market crashed the next session and Washington moved toward a second national-security probe.

Whether CXMT's state-funded capacity actually eases the global memory shortage is open, given it is pricing DRAM above Samsung with no relief so far.

2026-09-04 — Counterpoint Research data show CXMT’s global DRAM share nearly tripled year over year

2026-08-31 — CXMT ships its first HBM3E chips, small-batch only, at ~25% yield

2026-08-29 — CXMT sues the Pentagon to get off the “Chinese military company” blacklist

2026-08-23 — YMTC’s ~$4.9bn Shanghai STAR IPO application formally accepted

2026-08-13 — CXMT overtakes Tencent to become China’s most valuable listed company, 17 days after its IPO

2026-08-09 — Apple tests CXMT memory as Beijing pivots to capital markets to fund AI champions

2026-08-07 — The tracked “coming days” administration letter still hasn’t landed; Congress’s actual letter went to Apple instead, over a week ago

2026-08-05 — CXMT reportedly refuses Apple’s push for a lower DRAM price (moderate confidence)

2026-07-30 — Alibaba’s pre-IPO stake is up ~20x

2026-07-28 (overnight) — A second probe effort, and a lithography read-through

2026-07-28 — Washington reacts, a DeepSeek-linked fund profits

2026-07-28 — Black Tuesday

2026-07-27 — The debut

2026-07-23 — Pricing finalized, extreme oversubscription

2026-07-22 — Allotment landed as staged

← Backstory (crawl 2026-07-22 → artifacts/findings/cxmt-memory-ipo-2026-07-22.md)

2026-07-16→17 — Subscription: record and caution at once

2026-07-13→15 — Pricing at ~$85B, state-built

Context — what the raise races against

This week's evidence

CXMT's Q2 gross margin came in at 87.59%, above Micron's 84.9% and SK Hynix's 83.2%, and it has started mass-producing LPDDR6 before either of them. The margin is up 8.44 percentage points from Q1's roughly 79%. The LPDDR6 start is reported as the first commercial deployment anywhere, ahead of Samsung and SK Hynix, shipping in Xiaomi's 18 Fold launching September 2026 — confirmed by Xiaomi founder Lei Jun on Weibo. This changes what the thread is measuring. Every prior entry read the memory squeeze from the buy side and treated Chinese memory as a policy question about whether Apple may purchase it; a company that was mass-producing LPDDR5 less than a year ago is now first to the next generation and earning incumbent margins. (TrendForce, TechNode, Digitimes) 2026-08-31
🕰 CXMT sued the US Department of Defense on 08-29 to get off the Section 1260H "Chinese military company" list. The suit, filed in Washington federal court and naming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, argues CXMT makes standard civilian JEDEC-spec commercial chips, has no PLA ties, and that the designation lacked evidentiary support and violated due process. It notes that DoD published a notice in February indicating CXMT would be removed from the list, then withdrew that notice the same day without explanation. It joins suits by Alibaba, DJI, Hesai and WuXi AppTec over the same list. ⚠️ Dated 08-29, one day before this run's window — not previously on the record, checked against both the recent digests and the thread's own timeline. Note what this does to a live expectation: apple-cxmt-senate- deadline asks whether Apple will publicly commit to rejecting CXMT memory per a Senate deadline. The designation that deadline rests on is now contested in court. (South China Morning Post) 2026-08-31
🕓 CXMT has begun small-batch production of HBM3E — the high-bandwidth memory Nvidia H200/Blackwell-class accelerators are built around — the first time a Chinese maker has produced it at all. The Information, citing two insiders, reports Alibaba's T-Head chip-design unit and Cambricon are already testing the silicon for integration into commercial processors as early as 2027. The qualifiers matter as much as the fact: yields are around 25%; CXMT is assessed three to five years behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, who are already in HBM4 mass production a full generation ahead; and CXMT's own ~$8.6bn Shanghai IPO prospectus reportedly earmarked no capital specifically for HBM. Read against this morning's two CXMT items, the picture changes shape. The morning had CXMT beating incumbent gross margins (87.59%) and first to mass-produce LPDDR6. This adds that the same company has now entered the one memory category export controls were aimed most squarely at keeping from it — at a yield that makes it a demonstration, not yet a supply source. (the-decoder, Investing.com) 2026-08-31

Related threads (shared entities)

· Memory Squeeze
· Homegrown DUV