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Memory chips allow computing devices including smartphones, personal computers, servers, and high-performing artificial intelligence chips like Nvidia’s GPUs to store data that is used to perform computations. This crucial function makes memory chips roughly as large and valuable a part of the semiconductor industry as “logic chips” like GPUs and CPUs, with both market sizes in 2025 estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.1 Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 and the ensuing wave of optimism about AI technology, makers of AI chips have seen skyrocketing revenues, profits, and valuations as Silicon Valley companies rush to build data centers to develop and host their AI services. Since 2025, this boom has spilled over into the memory chip industry too, creating memory supply shortages and boosting memory companies from the United States, South Korea, and Japan, but also younger and state-backed Chinese competitors, raising fears of a Chinese-driven supply glut if not even permanent competitive advance in the future. The two key Chinese memory chip manufacturers are ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC)—CXMT went public in July 2026 and is now valued at around $600 billion (688825.SS) while YMTC plans to go public in 2027.2