As a multiyear memory crunch pushes DRAM prices higher, Apple has asked the Commerce Department and other U.S. officials for permission to source chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, a Chinese DRAM firm on the U.S. Entity List. HP and Dell are quietly running the same play.
The U.S. export-control wall Apple helped lobby into existence now has a hole in it, and Apple is the one trying to walk through.
Apple has approached the U.S. Department of Commerce, along with other Washington officials, about sourcing DRAM, the main working memory in phones and PCs, from ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), a Chinese chipmaker, according to people briefed on the talks. The contact came more than a month before a June 28, 2026 report in The Next Web. Apple, the White House, and CXMT have all declined to comment.
That silence is itself the story. CXMT sits on the U.S. Commerce Entity List, the trade blacklist that bars American firms from selling to, or in many cases buying from, named Chinese companies without a license, and the Defense Department has separately designated it a "Chinese military company." The lobbying push is therefore not a normal supplier pitch. It is a formal request for a carve-out from a regime Apple itself helped shape.
The pressure behind the request is the memory market itself. Samsung and SK Hynix, the two Korean suppliers that dominate DRAM, have publicly warned that AI-driven memory shortages could persist through 2027 and beyond. Chinese PC makers and memory brands, meanwhile, are snubbing Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix in favor of homegrown CXMT and YMTC silicon, reshaping global DRAM flows while U.S. suppliers stay locked out of their fastest-growing customer base.
Apple is not alone in the queue. HP and Dell are reportedly qualifying CXMT DRAM in parallel, according to industry tracking cited on the SemiWiki forum. That turns Apple's lobbying into an industry-pattern request: at least three of the largest U.S. PC and phone OEMs are now testing or sourcing parts from a chipmaker the U.S. government has named a national-security risk.
The scale of CXMT's rise explains why. A SemiAnalysis deep dive projects CXMT at roughly $50 billion in revenue and an IPO during the current memory supercycle, and forecasts it will surpass Micron to become the world's third-largest DRAM supplier by the end of 2026. For an OEM watching memory bill-of-materials costs climb, CXMT is no longer a curiosity. It is the only large-capacity DRAM supplier outside the Korean duopoly, and U.S. law is the only thing standing between it and Apple, HP, or Dell.
Google is already inside that same supply question. Western AI memory coverage tracks Google's relationship with CXMT as a separate stress point on the AI hardware supply chain, even before any license question is resolved for Apple.
The status question is open. Apple has not said a deal is approved, imminent, or that CXMT would displace any current supplier. Commerce has not signaled a license, a status change, or a general exception. If the department denies, the story still earns its keep: it shows that the Entity List, designed to keep cutting-edge Chinese chips out of U.S. products, has not actually insulated American OEMs from needing Chinese memory. The only thing it has done is make that need visible, on the record, in the form of a license request.
That is the change worth watching next: whether Commerce treats Apple's outreach, and the parallel HP and Dell requests, as a one-off pricing matter, or as evidence that export controls need their own memory-chip carve-out before the supply crunch deepens further.