Chinese Tech Giants Seek 10-Year Memory Deals With Samsung and SK Hynix
Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are pursuing decade-long memory supply contracts with Samsung and SK hynix due to the inadequacy of Chinese domestic hardware.
Alibaba Group, Tencent, and ByteDance are seeking long-term agreements spanning 10 years with Samsung Electronics and SK hynix to secure server DDR and LPDDR memory. These contracts, intended to run through 2035, indicate a lack of confidence in domestic Chinese suppliers such as ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and YMTC.
Chinese cloud providers assess domestic manufacturers as lacking the product competitiveness and mass production scale necessary for high-performance AI servers. While CXMT has provided limited LPDDR6 RAM to Xiaomi, major firms continue to prefer overseas hardware for its technological superiority. This preference extends to the GPU market, where these companies reportedly ordered over 3 million NVIDIA RTX PRO 5500 GPUs, bypassing Huawei's Ascend alternatives.
Samsung Electronics is reportedly leveraging its market dominance by applying a 25 percent premium on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI data center customers as it establishes these long-term supply arrangements.
