Sen. Tom Cotton is urging Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to place Chinese memory maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) on the Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List. This action would restrict U.S. firms from doing business with CXMT and block the company's access to U.S. technology.
CXMT ranks as the world's fourth-largest producer of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, which powers computers and smartphones. The company's market share jumped from 4% to 10% by revenue between the second quarter of 2025 and the same quarter of 2026, according to Counterpoint. In July, CXMT went public and became China's most valuable listed company.
Cotton wrote that CXMT "poses a growing risk to our economic prosperity and military superiority" and noted the company's push into high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a product that powers AI chips from Nvidia, Google, and Amazon Web Services. Though CXMT's HBM production yields are low at 20% to 30%, the company has begun manufacturing these chips. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron currently dominate the HBM market.
CXMT already appears on the Pentagon's "1260H" list identifying Chinese companies with military ties, but this designation carries fewer restrictions for U.S. businesses than an Entity List placement would. The Wall Street Journal reported in August that Apple was considering using CXMT's memory in iPhones and Macs due to global memory shortages driven by AI demand. An Entity List designation could block such arrangements.
Kyle Chan, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies China's technology development, said placing CXMT on the list would help slow China's chip development by cutting off financial and technological resources.