CXMT sues Pentagon over Chinese military company listing

The Pentagon published a notice in February telling ChangXin Memory Technologies it was being removed from the list of Chinese military companies. It withdrew the notice the same day.

Four months later, on June 8, the Defense Department put CXMT back on the Section 1260H list alongside fellow chipmaker Yangtze Memory Technologies. On Friday, China's top DRAM maker sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing the Pentagon's decision was "arbitrary", lacked evidentiary support and violated its due-process rights.

"CXMT is not affiliated with the Chinese military," the company said in the federal lawsuit. "CXMT designs, produces, and sells its DRAM chips for civilian and commercial use, not for military use."

The suit names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy Michael Cadenazzi. According to the complaint, CXMT spent more than a year providing the Pentagon with information to challenge the designation, which was first applied in January 2025 under the Biden administration and retained by the Trump administration in the June update.

DRAM is the memory used in smartphones, personal computers, servers and AI systems, and CXMT's fight is part of a run of China chip-supply stories we've been tracking through the summer. Taiwan this week indicted nine people over Nvidia B300 servers smuggled to the mainland. Alibaba filed a similar challenge in June. Xiaomi got itself removed by suing in a US court in 2021. Neither the reporting nor the complaint explains why the February removal notice was pulled back within hours.