Chinese EV maker Nio Inc. has committed 158 million yuan ($23.3 million) to the initial public offering of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s largest DRAM manufacturer.
The investment was made alongside a strategic supply agreement for automotive-grade memory chips as soaring prices squeeze margins across the EV industry.
Both companies will cooperate on automotive-grade LPDDR4X and LPDDR5X memory products — components central to smart cockpits, advanced driver-assistance systems and infotainment platforms in modern EVs.
Nio‘s founder and CEO William Li told Chinese media outlet Yicai on Wednesday that the collaboration is progressing smoothly.
“Working with CXMT will help strengthen the stability and resilience of Nio‘s supply chain,” Li stated.
Memory chip costs have emerged as one of the most significant cost pressures facing automakers this year, with contract prices for DRAM nearly doubling in the first quarter compared with the prior period.
Li has been vocal about the financial strain.
In January, shortly after Nio reached its one-millionth production vehicle, the founder said rising memory prices were the single biggest cost pressure of the year and that automakers were being forced to compete with AI computing centres, smartphones and the consumer electronics industry for supply.
Just last week, Li disclosed that rising raw material prices had added nearly 20,000 yuan ($2,900) to the production cost of each ES8 — the brand’s best-selling SUV — and that fully offsetting the increase would require raising the vehicle’s selling price by approximately 30,000 yuan ($4,500).
Nio is working with supply chain partners to hedge costs and keep prices stable rather than pass increases on to consumers, Li said at the time.
CFO Stanley Qu flagged the pressure as early as March, telling analysts on Nio‘s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call that rising costs for memory chips, lithium carbonate and metals were beginning to feed through.
By the first-quarter 2026 earnings call in May, Qu estimated raw-material inflation would add approximately 10,000 yuan or more per vehicle from the second quarter onward.
IPO Details
Nio Power Technology (Hefei) Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the Shanghai-headquartered EV maker, was allotted 18,244,803 shares in CXMT’s offering — roughly 0.3% of the initial placement — subject to an 18-month lock-up period, according to an offering announcement published by CXMT on Wednesday.
Nio joins Xiaomi, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Meituan, Chery and ZTE on the chipmaker’s strategic investor list.
CXMT priced its STAR Market IPO at 8.66 yuan per share, issuing approximately 6.688 billion shares, or 10% of post-IPO share capital.
At the offer price, the company carries an implied market capitalisation of approximately 579 billion yuan ($86.9 billion).
A 15% over-allotment option, if fully exercised, would expand the offering to 7.7 billion shares and raise up to 66.6 billion yuan ($10.0 billion) — surpassing SMIC’s 2020 listing to become the largest A-share IPO by a Chinese semiconductor company, according to Bloomberg.
Book-building began on Tuesday, with public subscriptions set for July 16.
CXMT’s Growth
CXMT is the world’s fourth-largest DRAM producer, holding a 7.7% global market share in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to research firm Omdia.
Revenue reached 50.8 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) in the first quarter of 2026 — a 719% year-on-year increase — as the company swung from a net loss of 2.8 billion yuan a year earlier to a net profit of 33 billion yuan.
For the first half, CXMT guided revenue of 110 billion to 120 billion yuan ($16.5 billion to $18.0 billion), with net profit of 50 billion to 57 billion yuan.
Headquartered in Hefei, Anhui province, CXMT was founded in 2016 by Zhu Yiming — who also founded GigaDevice Semiconductor.
GigaDevice x Nio
Nio signed a separate strategic partnership with GigaDevice in June covering automotive-grade memory chips, microcontrollers and next-generation electronic architectures.
GigaDevice holds approximately 1.8% in CXMT, according to SemiAnalysis.
The overlap between the two companies — shared founder, shared Hefei base, and now shared Nio partnerships — deepens the automaker’s integration into China’s domestic semiconductor supply chain.
Nio and CXMT are both products of Hefei’s venture capital model, in which patient state capital backed strategically important industries before they were commercially viable.
Hefei provided approximately 80% of the initial funding for CXMT’s first phase and separately rescued Nio with a landmark investment in 2020 that helped the EV maker survive a near-fatal cash crisis.
Broader Chip Push
Co-founder and President Lihong Qin has disclosed that Nio vehicles now use more than 4,200 semiconductor chips each — up from roughly 3,200 in the company’s earliest models.
Rising chip counts, driven by higher-voltage architectures, more powerful computing platforms and increasingly complex ADAS systems, explain why supply security for components such as DRAM has become a strategic priority rather than a routine procurement matter.
Across its semiconductor partnerships this year, Nio has moved beyond conventional supplier arrangements into platform-level joint development structures.
The CXMT investment and procurement agreement follows that model — combining an equity stake with a long-term supply commitment designed to align incentives during a period of sustained supply tightness.
Earlier this year, Nio also signed a vehicle-chip industrialisation partnership with Lontium Semiconductor and has registered multiple chip subsidiaries across Anhui province.
S&P Global has warned that by 2028, production of legacy DDR4 and LPDDR4 memory — the types currently designed into the majority of vehicles planned for that year — will be rapidly phased out.
