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Apple is reportedly targeting Chinese fab CXMT for LPDDR5X memory, threatening Micron’s $12 billion mobile segment despite its 85% gross margins.
SanDisk and Western Digital sold off sharply as Apple’s CXMT talks erased the assumption Chinese supply cannot undercut memory pricing floors.
Carter Worth flagged four 20% drops in Micron since March and warned normalized margins could collapse from 85% toward 29% as capacity floods in.
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The story rippling through memory stocks this week began on CNBC’s Fast Money on June 29, where the panel dug into a report that Apple is trying to source memory chips from Chinese manufacturer CXMT. The company Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) wants to buy from is not yet on the US entity list, unlike YMTC, which already is.
For Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU), whose Mobile and Client segment just did $11.521 billion in a single quarter, that is a shot across the bow.
Micron’s fiscal Q3 2026 revenue landed at $41.456 billion, up 345.7% year over year, non-GAAP EPS at $25.11, and GAAP gross margin at 84.6% against 37.7% a year earlier. Guidance was, if anything, more startling. $50 billion in revenue and $31 in EPS for the next quarter. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra called out “multi-year Strategic Customer Agreements” that he said would make the earnings stream more durable, and the numbers, per the Q3 8-K press release, do back him up.
Now imagine Apple, the world’s most powerful buyer of LPDDR5X mobile memory, quietly pointing a slug of that demand at a Chinese fab that undercuts everyone on price. Apple sits on a $4.31 trillion market cap and, according to Tim Cook, is fighting through what he called a “100-year flood” in memory pricing. Cheaper Chinese chips solve his margin problem. They also punch a hole in Micron’s most consumer-exposed segment.
On the CNBC panel, Christina Partsinevelos made the counter-case that Micron’s real growth engine is high-bandwidth memory for AI training, which dwarfs iPhone DRAM in both dollar terms and margin. She noted that “just 3 years ago, Micron was losing money on every chip,” and now “gross margins are well above 80%.” That gap is the whole problem. Margins that fat are an invitation for every competitor with a fab to add capacity, and the host warned that “you could see this collapse and prices take effect way before supply hits the market.”
Carter Worth’s chart-based read was blunter. He flagged “4 instances since March where it’s dropped 20% within a 2-3 day period” and recommended trimming. Micron’s own tape agrees: shares are up 838.82% over the past year and were down 9.67% today alone. Polymarket’s most-traded contract for this week now shows a 50.5% probability of MU touching $1,020 and a 50% shot at $990, which is the crowd pricing in exactly the two-day flush Worth described.
Samsung and SK Hynix already control 60% of the memory market and are bringing capacity online at scale. SK Hynix lists in the US on July 10, with proceeds potentially funding China expansion. Micron’s answer, the fab in Clay, New York first announced in 2022, won’t be ready until 2030. That is the awkward part.
The $52 billion CHIPS Act was designed to keep advanced memory production onshore, and Apple sourcing from a Chinese supplier that has not yet been sanctioned undermines the whole premise. Once a customer of Apple’s scale qualifies CXMT, unwinding that relationship in any future entity-list expansion becomes a years-long problem.
The read-through touches NAND, too. SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) has ridden the same wave, up 857.84% year to date on datacenter NAND pricing, and Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) is up 271.05% YTD on HDD demand for AI training data. Both fell hard today alongside Micron. The AI thesis still holds. What shifted today is the market’s assumption that memory pricing has a floor Chinese supply cannot reach.
If Worth is right that Micron’s normalized gross margin looks a lot more like 29% than 84%, the cycle turns regardless. The live question is whether an Apple-CXMT handshake pulls that turn forward by a year.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Omor Ibne Ehsan is a writer at 24/7 Wall St. He is a self-taught investor with a focus on growth and cyclical stocks that have strong fundamentals, value, and long-term potential. He also has an interest in high-risk, high-reward investments such as cryptocurrencies and penny stocks.
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