Global Chipmakers Forge R&D Alliance Against China's CXMT Rise

Applied Materials EPIC Center. (Photo courtesy of Applied Materials) While global stock markets fluctuated over the news of China’s world-first mass production of DRAM within the year, global semiconductor companies including Samsung Electronics have formed a research and development (R&D) alliance to launch a counterattack. In particular, Samsung Electronics showcased its status and strength as the top memory semiconductor company by unveiling advanced semiconductors in collaboration with Nvidia and AMD. On Oct. 12 (local time), global semiconductor equipment company Applied Materials (AMAT) unveiled the EPIC Center, an R&D cooperation hub involving major semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Taiwan’s TSMC, in Sunnyvale, California, the United States. The EPIC Center, which involves a total investment of $5 billion, is the world’s largest facility for the joint R&D of semiconductor process technology and manufacturing equipment. Founding partners including Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, TSMC, Intel, and Micron, along with innovation partners Broadcom, Advantest, Screen, Kioxia, and Besi, as well as major universities such as Stanford University and UC Berkeley, will collaborate at the EPIC Center. SK hynix President and CEO Kwak Noh-jung expressed his intention to respond to major technological turning points across high bandwidth memory (HBM), DRAM, and NAND through cooperation with AMAT. Such an all-around global alliance is related to the pursuit by China, which aims to secure dominance beyond mere semiconductor self-reliance. China’s technological exchange with Western countries is virtually blocked due to the impact of U.S. export controls on advanced technology, but it is rapidly raising its competitiveness by breaking through this head-on under government leadership. For example, when the U.S. blocked the export of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment from the Netherlands’ ASML to China, China developed its own deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography equipment to boost its competitiveness in fine processes. As a result, CXMT, considered China’s leading DRAM player, is showing remarkable growth, recently announcing the mass production of LPDDR6, a next-generation mobile DRAM. It also declared that it would release the server memory ‘DDR5 RDIMM’ within the year by first applying the next-generation DRAM structure (4F²), for which even Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have not yet announced mass production plans. According to market research firms such as Counterpoint Research, Samsung Electronics ranked first in the global DRAM market with a 39% share and in the NAND market with a 29.3% share in the second quarter of this year. China’s CXMT is recording a 10% share, more than doubling its share from the same period last year (4%) and tightening the reins of its pursuit. Although the industry raised questions about quality and other factors, the market fluctuated. The stock prices of Micron, as well as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, all plummeted significantly after the news of CXMT’s mass production was reported. In response, Samsung Electronics, the market leader, unveiled the results of its cooperation with the global artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor industry, including Nvidia and AMD, at the ‘Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2026’, which opened on Oct. 12 in San Jose, California, the United States. The company introduced its technological competitiveness encompassing foundry processes, such as 2-nanometer GAA wafers, Groq Language Processing Unit (LPU) wafers, and the Nvidia Groq 3 LPX system, along with examples of collaboration with global AI companies. With AMD, it introduced a plan to supplement the memory capacity limits of existing systems by utilizing ‘Compute Express Link’ (CXL) technology. It is evaluated as meaningful in that it demonstrates the expansion of cooperation to verify the technology in actual system environments and improve the performance of AI infrastructure. Samsung Electronics also showcased an open cooperation strategy to co-design AI systems with global customers and partners and verify the technology in real-world environments. “Beyond improving the performance of individual memory products, we will jointly optimize the entire AI system, including the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), memory, and storage,” stated Shim Ho-jun, Vice President of the AE Team at Samsung Electronics. “We are expanding co-design and technology verification cooperation with global customers and partners from the early stages of development.”