The customs administration attributed the surge to global demand for AI hardware, but the underlying numbers point more towards a worldwide memory price boom that has inflated the value of the commodity-grade chips that China exports in volume.
The half-year value figure implies an average of roughly $0.99 per exported chip, which reflects the composition of China's IC exports: memory, power management, microcontrollers, and other mature-node parts, along with chips packaged and tested in China for re-export, rather than advanced processors.
Earlier customs releases this year show the growth is being driven by prices rather than shipments. In January and February, IC export value rose 72.6% year on year while volume grew only 13.7%, according to the same customs data series. In April, export value rose 100.1% year on year, the first monthly doubling on record, as price increases across AI servers, data centers, and memory spread through the supply chain.
Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have redirected DRAM capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators and are phasing out DDR4 production , tightening supply of conventional memory and pushing spot and contract prices sharply higher through late 2025 and into 2026. Chinese memory makers, including CXMT in DRAM and YMTC in NAND, sell into exactly that commodity segment, so their export quotations have risen alongside global prices. China's IC export growth ran at 24.7% through the first ten months of 2025 per DigiTimes , before accelerating to the 70% to 100% monthly rates recorded this year, a timeline that tracks the memory price cycle, not any step change in Chinese output.
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Volume growth is real, however, if far smaller than the value figure suggests. China produced 484.3 billion ICs in 2025 and counted 3,901 domestic chip design companies with combined sales up nearly 30% year on year, as a years-long buildout of mature-node fab capacity reached scale and exports became the outlet for output exceeding domestic demand.
It’s worth noting that a meaningful share of China's IC exports is processing trade, in which chips are imported, packaged or tested at Chinese OSAT facilities, and re-exported. These are counted in customs figures as gross value crossing the border, not domestically designed and fabricated silicon, and are therefore somewhat misleading,
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-claims-chip-exports-nearly-doubled-to-177-billion-in-the-first-half-of-2026#main
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