China’s chip export tally jumped to $177.28 billion in the first half of 2026, according to data from the General Administration of Customs reported by the South China Morning Post. The agency said China shipped 179.44 billion integrated circuits over the period, putting the value increase at more than 96% from a year earlier.
Beijing presented the numbers at a state press briefing as part of a wider trade update, with semiconductors listed among the main drivers of China’s double-digit export growth. The customs administration linked the rise to global demand for AI hardware. The arithmetic points to a less glamorous mechanism: memory prices went up, and customs values followed.
The reported half-year total works out to about 99 cents per exported chip. That is a useful sanity check. China’s IC export basket includes memory, power-management chips, microcontrollers, mature-node parts, and chips assembled, packaged, or tested in China before being shipped out again. That mix is not the same thing as a sudden flood of advanced processors.
Earlier customs releases show the same pattern. In January and February, China’s IC export value rose 72.6% year on year, while unit volume increased 13.7%, according to the same customs data series. In April, export value rose 100.1% from a year earlier, which the figures described as the first monthly doubling on record.
The memory cycle explains a lot of that gap. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have shifted DRAM capacity toward high-bandwidth memory used with AI accelerators and have been reducing DDR4 production. That tightened supply of conventional memory and pushed spot and contract prices higher from late 2025 into 2026. Chinese suppliers such as CXMT in DRAM and YMTC in NAND sell into that commodity segment, so their export prices rose with the market.
DigiTimes reported that China’s IC export growth was 24.7% through the first ten months of 2025, before the monthly growth rates accelerated into the 70% to 100% range this year. That timing tracks the memory price spike more closely than it suggests a sudden change in what Chinese fabs can build.
There is real volume growth underneath the price effect. China produced 484.3 billion integrated circuits in 2025, and the country counted 3,901 domestic chip design companies with combined sales up nearly 30% year on year. Years of mature-node fab expansion have increased output, and exports have become one outlet for chips not absorbed at home.
Customs totals still need a large footnote. A meaningful share of China’s IC exports is processing trade: chips enter China, go through packaging or testing at outsourced semiconductor assembly and test facilities, then leave again. Customs counts the gross value crossing the border. That does not mean all of that silicon was designed and fabricated in China.
Other export categories showed the same AI-related pull. Exports of automatic data processing machines and parts, a bucket that includes computers, servers, and memory modules, rose 41.3% year on year to $138.08 billion in the first half. Industrial robot exports increased 18.6% to 6.29 billion yuan, or $927.7 million, across 141 countries and regions.
U.S. policy is still pressing on the high-end AI side of the market. A Bureau of Industry and Security rule that took effect on January 16 moved license applications for Nvidia’s H200 shipments to Chinese customers to case-by-case review. Nvidia has received orders for more than 400,000 H200 units from ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, according to the reported figures, but had recognized no revenue from those orders as of March.
Wang Jun, a vice-minister at the General Administration of Customs, described the export gains as a demand match for Chinese manufacturing. “The export growth was fundamentally driven by precisely matching ‘Made in China’ [products] with diverse global demand,” Wang said, according to the South China Morning Post. The customs ledger supports the export growth. It also shows why the headline percentage needs reading with a price chart nearby.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
