Once reliant on Korean memory, Chinese smartphone makers are turning to CXMT - South China Morning Post

Ben Jiangin BeijingPublished: 5:00pm, 17 Sep 2026China’s leading memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is gaining ground among local smartphone vendors, with some of its high-end chips finding their way into flagship Chinese handsets as vendors push into the premium market.ZTE-backed Nubia’s NaviX Ultra that went on sale on Wednesday used LPDDR5X DRAM chips from CXMT, the companies announced earlier this month. The handset was dubbed the Nubia Doubao phone due to its integration of TikTok parent ByteDance’s Doubao artificial intelligence assistant.CXMT said the tie-up with Nubia marked the first large-scale use at that level of domestically made LPDDR5X chips, which have a data transfer speed of up to 10,667 megabits per second (Mbps).

The flagship handset, priced from 5,999 yuan (US$885), according to ZTE’s website, was also the first mass-market smartphone equipped with an AI agent, the company claimed. The consumer version of ByteDance’s Doubao smartphone assistant provides the phone with capabilities to respond to spoken instructions and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf.