According to information from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) website, Yangtze Memory Holding Co., Ltd. has filed a report for its guidance period ahead of an initial public offering (IPO). The progress of Yangtze Memory's IPO is drawing significant market attention. Its wholly-owned subsidiary, Yangtze Memory Technologies, was recently included for the first time in the "2025 Global Unicorn List" by Hurun Research Institute, with a valuation of 160 billion yuan. It ranked 9th among China's top ten unicorns and 21st globally, becoming the highest-valued new unicorn in the semiconductor sector.
On April 16th, industry sources indicated that since the fourth quarter of last year, a phenomenon of "competing for supply" has emerged between ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory, and this situation is reportedly ongoing. Specifically, downstream customers are required to make payments first to distributors. Once the funds are received, the distributors join a queue within the production scheduling system and are notified for goods pickup when inventory becomes available. Industry chain sources noted that these changes are largely in sync with the current upward trend in memory chip prices.
On May 15th, during an earnings briefing, SMIC stated that it has not observed any loosening in the memory market. This could be due to the development speed of the AI industry exceeding the company's forecasts from the previous quarter. Alternatively, it is possible that inventory held by memory intermediaries has not yet been released and may even be increasing further, although this is speculative and not strongly supported by specific data.
A CITIC Securities research report noted that with NVIDIA's Rubin entering mass production and the next-generation Feynman further boosting demand for computing hardware, server architectures are shifting from being training-dominant to balancing both training and inference. The architecture is evolving from GPU-dominant to a GPU+LPU (Language Processing Unit) model. NVIDIA has also introduced storage cabinets, CPU cabinets, and LPX cabinets, achieving further optimization of system solutions. ASICs from companies like Google, AWS, and Meta are also accelerating their iteration cycles.
Demand for computing chips continues to grow robustly. Advanced processes, advanced memory (like HBM), advanced packaging, PCBs, and optical communication remain the segments with the most significant demand increments and technological innovation. Companies like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel are developing and expanding production for 2nm advanced processes. HBM is evolving to HBM4, giving rise to custom chips, and advanced packaging forms like CoWoS and CoW-P are emerging. The supply and demand for CPUs and traditional memory are also gradually tightening.
According to the prospectus released by Changxin Technology on May 17th, benefiting from sustained growth in computing demand and rising DRAM prices, Changxin Technology is forecasted to achieve a net profit attributable to the parent company of 50 to 57 billion yuan in the first half of 2026. The storage industry is experiencing rapid growth, and Huatai Securities believes upstream materials may also benefit.
With the current expansion of production by wafer fabs and memory companies, alongside the development of chips towards new memory technologies, advanced processes, and advanced packaging, the global semiconductor materials market is poised for rapid growth. Currently, the localization rate of semiconductor materials in China remains relatively low overall. However, with increasing requirements for supply chain autonomy and the growing competitiveness of domestic products, the localization rate is expected to rise.
Related Hong Kong-listed stocks in the storage industry chain include: SMIC (00981), HUA HONG SEMI (01347), GIGADEVICE (03986), and MONTAGE TECH (06809).
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