CXMT expels Huawei-linked SiCarrier engineers from Hefei R&D

A Chinese memory maker throwing Huawei-linked engineers off its own factory floor is the kind of scene you did not expect to read in 2026, and it is the through-line of Reuters' report on CXMT and YMTC. In June, engineers from SiCarrier, a chipmaking-equipment vendor with deep ties to Huawei, were working in the cleanrooms at CXMT's core research and development zone in Hefei, Anhui province. Without warning, CXMT told them to pack their tools and leave. Executives at SiCarrier read it as the outcome of a power struggle with Huawei over price, and per the reporting the two companies still do business, but the engineers have not been allowed back into the R&D zone.

The reason CXMT can afford to be this rude is that it has quietly become the world's fourth-biggest memory maker. It has been charging more than Samsung's roughly $1,240-per-unit price for comparable 64-gigabyte DDR5 server memory modules, and it is building plants in Shanghai and Hefei that would more than double capacity to over 600,000 wafers a month, potentially overtaking Micron by 2030. Q1 2026 revenue was reportedly $7.5 billion, a 719% jump year-on-year, and the company is heading into an $8.6 billion Shanghai IPO. Alongside that, Business Standard's write-up of the same Reuters piece flags a five-year ByteDance supply deal reportedly worth more than $7 billion, on top of a Tencent contract north of $3 billion.

That scale is why the Huawei snub matters beyond gossip. Chinese hyperscalers wanted domestic memory to be cheap and pliable, the political case for building CXMT and YMTC in the first place. Instead they are getting a supplier that behaves like Samsung on a bad day. Reuters says multiple Chinese tech firms have complained to the government that CXMT and YMTC price hikes are delaying product launches, which is a very different problem from the one Beijing set out to solve.

The honest caveat is that we do not have hard numbers on the size of the premium CXMT is charging, the volumes underneath the ByteDance and Tencent contracts, or how dependent CXMT's line still is on SiCarrier tools, so the durability of this pricing power is a guess. What the reporting does give you is the US angle: the Pentagon has designated both CXMT and YMTC as Chinese military companies, YMTC has been on the Entity List since 2022, and CXMT was approved for addition last year with the Commerce Department holding off. If Washington finally moves, the same scale that made CXMT strong enough to expel Huawei's engineers is what will make an Entity List listing hurt the most.