Chip exports become China's biggest growth driver

China exported $216 billion worth of chips in the first seven months of this year, close to double the figure of a year earlier.

The volume barely moved. The price doubled.

One chip sells for about a dollar

Chinese customs counted 179.44 billion chips worth $177.28 billion leaving the country in the first half. That works out to just under 100 cents apiece. Most of them are memory chips, microcontrollers and power management parts, made on older production lines.

Those are the ones in short supply. Samsung and SK Hynix moved capacity to the specialty memory that AI data centers need, and ordinary memory got expensive. Contract prices for working memory rose by up to 95% in the first quarter, and TrendForce puts the second quarter at another 58% to 63%.

Data centers now take about 70% of all memory chips produced worldwide.

China sells more chips and buys even more

Between January and July China exported $2.58 trillion in goods and imported $1.88 trillion. Imports grew 22%, eight percentage points faster than exports. In machinery and electronics the gap is wider: exports up 21.2%, imports up 29.7%.

A large share of that electronics gets packaged, tested and assembled in China and then shipped out again. That is why both directions climb at the same time.

China is also catching up on the older production generations. In 2025 the country covered about 45% of its own demand for these chips, according to TrendForce, and the target for 2026 is 55%.

Chips up 117%, ceramics down 28.3%

Chip exports rose 117% in July against the same month last year, high-tech goods 40.7% overall. Ceramics fell 28.3% in the same month. Total exports grew 23.9%, and the surplus came in at $112.5 billion, below June's $125.62 billion.

Part of that is shipments pulled forward to the US ahead of possible new tariffs.

For buyers in Europe the math stays simple: same components, higher price. Market researchers expect memory to stay tight and expensive until at least 2027.

The gap between price and volume showed up early in the year: in January and February the volume of exported chips rose 13.7%, their value 73%.

RATHER WATCH THAN READ?

171 Unitree employees are buying $38 million of their own company's stock in its listing, with their own money, locked up for one to three years. Staff hold 10.9% of the company in total.

That is what the new episode of our Robotics News is about, 23 minutes from Shanghai.

Also in it

• A startup founded by former DJI engineers raised $200 million in one month, with no product and not a single sale.

• PaXini is now the best funded touch sensor company in the world at half a billion dollars.

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