Apple Is Testing Chinese Memory Chips From CXMT for iPhones and MacBooks

Apple is testing memory chips from China's CXMT in iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads, and it needs Washington's blessing before it can put them in a device.

Here's the collision nobody saw coming: the company famous for controlling every screw and sensor in its own supply chain is now in early talks with a chipmaker the Pentagon calls a Chinese military company. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Apple has held preliminary discussions with CXMT, China's largest memory chipmaker by market value, about buying DRAM for devices sold in China. Apple isn't doing this to save money. And it isn't chasing an edge over rivals. It's doing it because it's running out of options.

The shortage behind all this is brutal, and it's not going away soon. SK Hynix says its HBM, DRAM, and NAND capacity is essentially sold out through the end of 2026. Samsung raised prices on 32GB DDR5 modules from $149 to $239, a 60% jump, and some suppliers are telling customers to expect another 10 to 20 percent tacked on, every month, through the rest of the year. Memory is running out everywhere at once. Data centers now consume roughly 70% of the world's memory chip output, as AI companies buy up capacity that used to go to phones and laptops. Apple already raised prices on Macs, iPads, HomePod, and Vision Pro on June 25, with the MacBook Air jumping from $1,099 to $1,299 and the MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999. Tim Cook told investors on the company's Q3 earnings call that the increases were unavoidable given what he called exponential growth in memory costs. iPhone prices, so far spared, are expected to rise in September.

Washington gets involved

A Pentagon list published in June named CXMT a Chinese military company. That alone would give most boardrooms pause. Then, on July 29, six senators from both parties, Jim Banks, Chuck Schumer, Mike Crapo, Jeanne Shaheen, Andy Kim, James Risch, and Pete Ricketts, wrote to Apple demanding it pledge by August 21 not to use chips from CXMT or Yangtze Memory Technologies. That deadline lands three weeks before a scheduled US-China summit next month, which tells you exactly how political this has become.

Legally, Apple doesn't need government permission to buy from CXMT. Unlike YMTC, CXMT isn't on the Commerce Department's Entity List. But US export-control rules bar American companies from sharing technical specifications with Chinese chipmakers, which means Apple can haggle over price on off-the-shelf CXMT parts, but it can't commission chips built to its own designs the way it does with TSMC or Samsung. That's a real constraint on a company that treats custom silicon as a competitive weapon. Apple is seeking White House approval anyway. Tim Cook and other executives have reportedly lobbied Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent directly, asking them to sign off on CXMT and YMTC parts for devices sold outside the US.

What happens next

Apple isn't first through this door. HP and Acer have already shipped laptops with CXMT memory outside the United States, with no equivalent political blowback, because neither company carries Apple's profile or its national-security scrutiny. That asymmetry is the whole story here. A Chinese chip in an Acer laptop is a supply-chain footnote. The same chip in an iPhone is a headline, and now a summit talking point.

There's also a wrinkle that could make the entire fight moot. CXMT has reportedly maxed out its production for the year and has little capacity left for new international customers, having already committed supply to domestic buyers like ByteDance, Tencent, and Xiaomi. Apple might win the political argument and still not get the chips it needs in time to matter for this product cycle. Frankly, that's the detail worth watching over the next few weeks. Not the letter. Not the deadline - whether CXMT even has room for Apple at all.

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