ChangXin Memory Technologies has started mass producing LPDDR6, the newest generation of phone memory, and that the first device to use it is the Xiaomi 18 Fold. CXMT posted the announcement on Weibo. Xiaomi confirmed it on its own Weibo account and said the phone launches in September.
SK Hynix said in July that it would begin LPDDR6 mass production in the second half of 2026, with Xiaomi named as its first customer. Samsung has announced an LPDDR6 part of its own. CXMT only reached mass production on the previous generation, LPDDR5, less than a year ago, and it has beaten both of them to a named launch device.
Who CXMT is
CXMT is a DRAM maker founded in 2016 in Hefei, eastern China. DRAM is the working memory in a phone or a laptop, the part quoted as “12GB RAM” on a spec sheet. By shipments last year CXMT was the world’s fourth largest DRAM maker with about 8% of the market, behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. It listed in Shanghai in July and closed its first day of trading up 466%. Its first results as a public company put half-year revenue at 150.31 billion yuan, roughly USD 22.4 billion, up 874% on the same period last year.
Memory is the reason phones cost what they cost right now. We have written about DRAM prices pushing up Redmi and Galaxy A prices, about the end of cheap phones, and about Transsion raising TECNO and Infinix prices on purpose while Kenyan smartphone shipments fell 16% year on year in the first quarter of 2026.
What the new memory does
LPDDR6 is the standard JEDEC published in July 2025. It runs between 10,667 and 14,400 megatransfers per second, against a ceiling of about 10,700 for LPDDR5X, and it splits the memory into wider channels so more requests can run at once. That buys headroom for on-device AI and for games, the two things that hammer memory hardest.
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It needs a processor that can talk to it. Xiaomi announced the Xring O3 on 24 August, built by TSMC on a 3nm process, with ten CPU cores and no small efficiency cores at all. It is the first phone chip designed for LPDDR6 and it drives the memory at 113.8GB/s. Xiaomi claims an AnTuTu score above 5.2 million, which would be higher than any phone chip on sale.
Xiaomi expects to ship only 200,000 to 300,000 Xring O3 chips. For a company that sells tens of millions of phones a quarter, that makes this a demonstration rather than a product line. The same chip goes into the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max.
What it means for Kenya
Nothing right now. Xiaomi has never sold a foldable outside China, and when it launched the 15S Pro with its first in-house chip in 2025 it said those phones would stay there. Unless 3rd party retailers take up, finding the Xiaomi phones locally will mean self importation.
Also, DDR memory, the kind sold into PCs and AI servers, made up 46.3% of CXMT’s main business revenue in the first half, up from 31.9% last year. The demand pulling memory away from phones is the demand CXMT is growing into fastest.
Between 22 to 24 September, Qualcomm will be launching the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro at its Snapdragon Summit. It supports LPDDR6 as well.
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