China's biggest DRAM maker is about to raise $4.3 billion on Shanghai's STAR Market, and it's riding the same AI memory boom that's rewriting Samsung's and SK Hynix's earnings.
ChangXin Memory Technologies opens subscription for its Shanghai listing on July 16, and the numbers alone make this the biggest domestic chip story of the year. CXMT is targeting 29.5 billion yuan, about $4.3 billion, in what will become the second-largest fundraising in the history of the STAR Market, behind only Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, and the largest A-share listing anywhere in China this year, according to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
The company needed a boom to make that case, and it got one. CXMT posted a first-quarter net profit of 33 billion yuan, reversing a 2.83 billion yuan loss from the same period a year earlier. Revenue jumped 719 percent year over year to 50.8 billion yuan. That kind of swing doesn't happen because a company got better at selling memory chips. It happens because the price of memory itself exploded.
Every major AI buildout runs on data centers stacked with DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, and demand has outrun supply for two straight years. DRAM contract prices are projected to climb another 13 to 18 percent this quarter, and CXMT, the world's fourth-largest DRAM maker with a 7.67 percent share of the global market as of the fourth quarter of 2025, is riding that wave as hard as anyone.
The mechanics of the offering are straightforward. Preliminary price inquiry ran July 13, book building opened July 15, and both institutional and retail subscriptions open July 16 under the ticker 688825. Payment is due by July 20. CXMT plans to sell roughly 6.69 billion shares, about 10 percent of its enlarged share capital, at a valuation approaching 300 billion yuan, or roughly $42 billion.
That valuation traces back to a decision nobody in Chinese venture capital wanted to make. When Zhu Yiming and the Hefei municipal government launched what was internally called the 506 project in 2016, private investors saw DRAM manufacturing as too capital-intensive and too risky to touch. Hefei took the bet anyway, reportedly holding an 80 percent stake in the first phase of the 150 billion yuan wafer fab that became CXMT.
Zhu isn't a typical state-backed executive. He studied physics at Tsinghua, did graduate work in electrical engineering at Stony Brook, worked in Silicon Valley at a chip firm called MoSys, then went home in 2005 with a set of SRAM patents and $100,000 to found GigaDevice, now one of the world's top NOR flash suppliers. CXMT's actual manufacturing know-how has an even stranger backstory. It descends from Qimonda, the German DRAM maker that collapsed in the 2009 financial crisis. A Canadian patent firm bought roughly 7,000 of Qimonda's patents for about 30 million euros, and CXMT lured Karl-Heinz Kuesters, a 24-year veteran of Siemens, Infineon, and Qimonda, to Hefei to run the same stacked-capacitor architecture he'd spent his career developing in Germany. That's the technology CXMT builds its chips on today.
The Part CXMT Still Can't Win
Here's the thing nobody selling this IPO wants to dwell on. DRAM is the easy half of the memory business right now. High-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips that sit next to Nvidia's GPUs, is where the real AI money is, and CXMT isn't close to competing there yet. SK Hynix holds more than half of global HBM share and has locked in roughly two-thirds of the orders for Nvidia's next-generation HBM4, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Samsung, the perennial laggard of this cycle, is still expected to post an 18-fold jump in second-quarter operating profit on HBM demand alone. Chinese suppliers, CXMT and YMTC among them, together account for an estimated 5 to 10 percent of HBM output, almost entirely in older, lower-end variants, and Washington's export controls are built specifically to keep it that way.
CXMT says it's racing toward HBM3E capability, and its prospectus makes clear the money raised this month is meant to fund exactly that push. Whether it gets there is the real question hanging over the largest chip listing China has seen since SMIC. The DRAM boom paid for the ticket. HBM is the fight CXMT still has to win.
Also read: Zhipu raises $4 billion in Hong Kong days after its stock surged nearly 1,500 percent • Lovable is in talks to double its valuation to $13.2 billion in six months • Apple Commits $30 Billion to Broadcom for Chips Made in Colorado
