Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for approval to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese DRAM maker that the Pentagon says has alleged ties to the People’s Liberation Army, according to the Financial Times, which cited six people familiar with the matter.
The request matters because Apple’s hardware economics are being hit by rising memory prices. The company raised prices for MacBooks and iPads on Thursday and said “unsustainable” memory costs forced it to pass more of the bill to customers. The FT reported that the move erased $263bn from Apple’s market value, its second-largest one-day drop.
Apple is not legally barred from buying chips from CXMT, or from YMTC, another Chinese memory company, according to the FT. The problem is Washington’s machinery of suspicion, which can be messy even when it is not yet a formal ban. The Pentagon has placed both companies on its 1260H list of Chinese Military Companies, a roster of firms it says have links to China’s military and pose national security concerns. The list usually creates reputational and political risk rather than an immediate prohibition.
The legal risk is what could come next
The sharper tool is the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which can restrict trade with named companies. The FT reported that the Commerce Department last year planned to add CXMT to a package of Chinese companies targeted for that list, but the White House told it to wait while trade negotiations with China were under way.
Apple approached the Commerce Department more than a month ago, one person told the FT. The company has also been pressing other officials and Washington allies, according to the report. Most of the people cited by the FT said it was unclear whether Apple could win a firm assurance from the administration, especially a promise that CXMT would not later be placed on the Entity List.
The lobbying follows President Donald Trump’s meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. The FT reported that the US had held back on new technology export controls affecting Chinese companies before that summit and in the months before an earlier Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea in October.
The politics are already ugly. Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House China committee, told the FT that “Apple choosing to partner with a Chinese military company would be a grave mistake.” He said helping the Chinese Communist Party dominate critical supply chains would make the US technology industry and economy more dependent on China.
Apple wants leverage in a tight memory market
Apple currently depends on Micron in the US and Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea for DRAM used in its devices, according to the FT. Outside China, that market is concentrated in those three suppliers. CXMT, which has received regulatory approval for a Shanghai listing, is positioning itself as China’s national memory champion and a challenger to the incumbent DRAM makers.
The pricing swing has been brutal for buyers. DRAM prices fell in 2023 during a supply glut, letting companies such as Apple build inventory cheaply. The AI buildout then changed the allocation game. Big Tech spending on AI infrastructure has pushed demand toward high-bandwidth memory, the advanced DRAM used in AI systems, contributing to a shortage of conventional memory for consumer electronics, according to the FT.
Apple faced a similar political blowback in 2022 when it considered using YMTC memory chips in iPhones sold in China. Marco Rubio, then the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, told the FT at the time that Apple was “playing with fire.”
Apple declined to comment to the FT. The White House did not respond to the FT’s request for comment.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
