• Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy Chinese memory chips from CXMT, as an AI-driven price surge eats into its hardware margins.
• CXMT sits on the Pentagon’s military blacklist, and Apple wants assurance it won’t face tighter export curbs before it commits.

Apple’s push for memory chips from China comes down to a problem money alone can no longer solve. The company is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to source memory from ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s largest DRAM maker, according to the Financial Times. Six people familiar with the talks told the paper that Apple approached the Commerce Department more than a month ago and has worked other channels in Washington since. 

Apple declined to comment, and the White House did not respond to the FT’s request. That a company spending tens of billions a year on memory is courting a Chinese supplier Washington has singled out on national-security grounds is a measure of how tight the market has become.

The AI memory squeeze behind Apple’s China memory chips push

The root cause sits in the data centre. Hyperscalers expanding their AI build-outs have been locking up memory supply with multi-year contracts and large prepayments, and chipmakers have shifted output toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI servers need. That has drained the pool left for phones and laptops and sent prices climbing. 

TrendForce expects DRAM contract prices to rise 58 to 63% in the second quarter of 2026, with enterprise SSD prices up 48 to 53%. Even Apple, long able to use its scale to secure favourable pricing, now finds itself queuing behind deeper-pocketed AI buyers. Chief executive Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that price rises were “unavoidable,” saying the company had tried to shield customers but that “the situation has become unsustainable.” 

Apple has since raised prices across much of its hardware. Morgan Stanley estimates a 15% bump for US smartphone and PC prices this year, and rivals from HP to Dell have moved on pricing too. Cook has also signalled where Apple might look for relief. 

Asked whether national-security restrictions on Chinese memory suppliers should be loosened, he said: “I think everything needs to be on the table,” adding, “I think we should look at all supplies.” CXMT is the obvious candidate. It already ships DDR5 to Western brands such as Corsair at prices that undercut the established players.

A blacklist that isn’t quite a ban

Here is the part most headlines flatten. Apple is not currently barred from buying CXMT chips. CXMT sits on the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list of “Chinese military companies,” a designation that carries reputational weight and blocks Defence Department contracting but does not stop a private firm from doing business with it.

What Apple wants is insurance. The sharper risk is the Commerce Department’s Entity List, a separate and far stricter regime that would force US buyers to obtain licences and could cut CXMT off as a supplier overnight. Apple is seeking a guarantee that CXMT will not land there before it builds any dependency on the company, the FT reported.

The distinction is not academic. Reuters has reported that CXMT and more than 100 other Chinese firms, among them AI developer DeepSeek, cleared the interagency review needed for an Entity List addition but have not appeared on the published list. That list has not been updated since October 2025, the longest gap in more than a decade, which Philip Luck of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies has cast as trade policy crowding out a national-security tool. 

That limbo is exactly the uncertainty Apple is trying to price out.

Why the timing is fraught

The 1260H list itself has been unstable. CXMT was added to the Pentagon’s January 2025 list. An update published in February 2026 would have removed CXMT and fellow chipmaker YMTC, before the Pentagon withdrew it after pushback from China hawks. The June 2026 revision kept both on. A supplier whose status flips with each Pentagon notice is a hard thing to build a supply chain around.

Apple has been here before. In 2022, it explored buying NAND flash from YMTC for iPhones sold in China, then shelved the plan after the Biden administration tightened export controls and lawmakers raised security concerns. YMTC ended up on the Entity List. That history explains why Apple wants something in writing this time, and why Congress is expected to push back if the administration provides it.

A decision either way will show how far the administration will bend its own China chip controls to ease the squeeze on one of its biggest companies. Apple has done the asking. Washington has yet to answer.