Shares of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix have swung sharply this year, caught between clashing bets on AI spending and recurring bouts of concern over China.
The latest slide that triggered a massive sell-off came after Chinese memory maker Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) went public in Shanghai, raising 57.92 billion yuan ($8.57 billion) to fund new chip factories. It then deepened further after reports that a low-profile Chinese firm, Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group, had begun producing immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines for delivery to domestic clients, including CXMT.
The reaction reflects a question now hanging over Korean chipmakers even as they report record earnings: how much of the memory market currently dominated by Samsung and SK hynix can China actually take.
Based on multiple brokerage reports, experts and hints picked up from Samsung and SK hynix’s conference calls, it won’t be anytime soon. But the current landscape might be shaken significantly in the next three to five years.
With CXMT’s listing, other major Chinese chip players may flood the market, including YMTC, and with the funds they raise, they will aggressively scale up production capacity. CXMT’s wafer capacity for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) is projected to double by 2028, according to Hana Securities report, to over 500,000 wafers per month. YMTC, China’s major NAND maker, is projected to expand total capacity from 180,000 wafers per month to 400,000 wafers per month in 2028.
Samsung’s conference call matched the report, which forecast that a meaningful chip supply increase won’t happen before 2028.
“Even with the industry's ongoing capital expenditure expansion, the lead time from new fab construction to actual wafer production runs more than three and a half years, meaning any meaningful supply increase from these expansions will take considerable time — we don't expect a significant supply increase before 2028,” said Kim Jae-june, executive vice president and head of Samsung’s memory business, on Thursday.
Samsung and SK hynix are not sitting idle, however, producing 700,000 units and 550,000 units a month, respectively, as both chipmakers speed up construction of factories already underway or rush to break ground on new ones. For the Yongin chip cluster that encompasses both companies' factories, Samsung will move up the completion timeline for its final fab by seven years to 2040, while SK hynix will cut its timeline by 12 years to 2033.
The two companies have also pledged 800 trillion won ($556 billion) for four new memory chip factories to be built in the southwestern Honam region.
“The DRAM market share gap between Korean chipmakers and CXMT will likely narrow — inevitably, since market share ultimately comes down to production volume,” said chip analyst Lee Joo-wan, estimating that CXMT's market share with DRAM and NAND flash combined will grow to between 15 and 24 percent by the end of next year.
“The real issue is the sheer scale of supply already in the pipeline. They already hold the related chip equipment. A huge amount of it was stockpiled in advance because of U.S. sanctions, and I believe that equipment has been coming online since last year. That's why their market share rose so rapidly in a single year.”
CXMT's DRAM market share stood at just 8 percent in the first quarter of 2026, up sharply from around 3 percent during the same period a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. Samsung currently holds the largest share at 38 percent, followed by SK hynix at 29 percent.
Meanwhile, Roh Geun-chang, head of Hyundai Motor Securities’ research center, said the technological advancements made by China have been “exaggerated” and questioned China's capability to obtain core chipmaking equipment when it is already being heavily blocked by U.S. export controls.
“Global semiconductor equipment makers, including ASML, have no spare capacity for China right now — their output for the next three to four years is already committed to TSMC, Samsung and SK hynix given the scale of their investment,” Roh said. “Even if Chinese firms build new fabs, they'll have buildings without the equipment to fill them.”
And even by China's own claims, doubling capacity would take at least four years, he added — and what the market will look like by then is impossible to know.
What about DUV?
Aishengna, a Shanghai state-owned firm founded in 2023 with no public website, plans to ship about five DUV tools this year and 20 in 2027. The company was built by absorbing teams from Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment and from Yuliangsheng Technology, a startup affiliated with Huawei-backed SiCarrier.
The debut has fueled concern that China's chipmaking capability has matured faster than expected. But DUV tools remain a different technology from extreme ultraviolet (EUV) equipment, which only Dutch manufacturer ASML currently produces at commercial scale.
Lithography is the process that projects a circuit pattern onto the photoresist coating a silicon wafer. DUV machines draw wider lines, and while they can reach down to roughly 7-nanometer chips by exposing the wafer multiple times, they can't produce the finest patterns needed for the most advanced logic chips. EUV machines can draw far finer lines in a single pass, making them essential for cutting-edge logic chips below 7 nanometers, as well as select high-precision layers in the newest high bandwidth memory chips.
“The real question is whether Chinese makers can break into the legacy chip segments Korea has long dominated, like double data rate 4,” said Lee Byoung-hun, a professor of electrical engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology. “In terms of profit margins and adoption, the risk is that they're already capable of breaking into that market right now. I don't think that's something we can avoid.”
Lee said CXMT's rising market share this year was largely expected, driven by its aggressive production ramp-up and heavy subsidy support from the Chinese government — even though the pace has still caught much of the market off guard. He pointed to 10 percent market share as the threshold at which a chipmaker becomes self-sustaining, a level he expects CXMT to reach this year.
“Chinese firms throw themselves at whatever they're told to pursue, the same way they have with AI,” Lee added. “That's the real risk. If China applies its pool of talented engineers to chipmaking the same way, there's no telling how far they could catch up.”
