On October 12, the chairman of China's CXMT presented a denser DRAM design in Shanghai. Three days later the Kospi closed down 7.57% and halted trading for 20 minutes: the market read the news as a threat to the memory oligopoly that feeds AI GPUs.
At the 4th Integrated Chip and Chiplet Conference in Shanghai, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) chairman Cao Kanyu said the company is preparing a server DDR5 RDIMM module based on a 4F² DRAM cell architecture, to launch before the end of 2026 (TechNode, TweakTown). This is the company's own announcement: there is no product on the market yet, nor independent testing of performance or manufacturing yield.
In DRAM, "F" is the minimum feature size of the process, and each cell's area is expressed in multiples of F². Most current DRAM uses a 6F² design. Moving to 4F² cuts the area per cell by a third and allows up to 50% more cells in the same space; sources cite a density increase of 30 to 50%. Getting there involves vertical gate-all-around transistors and, according to coverage, hybrid bonding is being explored to optimize the cells and the peripheral logic separately.
On October 15, according to IBTimes and CNBC, the Kospi fell 7.57% to 5,554.22 (with an intraday low of -9.29%), triggering the level-1 circuit breaker that halted trading for 20 minutes, the tenth of the year, and foreign investors sold 3.62 trillion won (about $2.68 billion). Samsung lost 9.5% and SK Hynix 11.1% that day. It wasn't only CXMT: U.S. September CPI (3.7%) raised fears of rate hikes, and concern about a memory oversupply from 2029 was circulating.
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG, and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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