Apple is asking the Trump administration for a waiver to buy DRAM chips from CXMT, a Chinese memory manufacturer the Pentagon blacklisted over ties to the People's Liberation Army. The Financial Times broke the story, and it's a tell about just how bad the memory price crunch has gotten.
Why Apple is willing to risk the reputational blowback
RAM and NAND prices have been climbing for months. Apple just raised prices on almost every product this week — MacBooks, iPads, iPhones, the works. When a company that typically absorbs component cost increases starts passing them through, you know the spot market is ugly. CXMT offers a cheaper alternative to Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, but the baggage is heavy: a Pentagon blacklist means any business with CXMT is effectively a national-security question.
The legal gray zone nobody wants to talk about
Legally, Apple isn't barred from buying from CXMT. The blacklist doesn't carry an automatic trade prohibition — it's a reputational and political risk. But making that kind of purchase without an explicit exception from the administration would be walking into a PR firestorm. So Apple is going through the official channel: asking Trump's team for explicit permission. That's a smart move if they're serious, but it also hands the administration leverage.
What this tells us about the memory market
Memory prices aren't just high — they're high enough to make one of the world's most profitable hardware companies court a PLA-linked supplier. That should worry every datacenter operator and PC OEM. If Apple is this desperate, the rest of the industry is feeling the heat. Expect more creative sourcing, more price hikes, and more political entanglements in the memory supply chain over the next year.
Source: Apple wants permission to buy memory from a blacklisted Chinese supplier
Domain: theverge.com
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