<body><p>STORY: :: Why are Asian chip stocks tumbling amid new competition from China?</p><p>:: July 28, 2026/Singapore</p><p>:: Gregor Stuart Hunter/Market Correspondent</p><p>"So the market has a new chip champion this week and it's CXMT, which raised $8.6 billion in a listing in Shanghai on Monday and then promptly rallied almost 500%, vaulting it into the ranks of some of the biggest companies on earth. It's now the biggest listed company in mainland China. It's bigger than MasterCard, it's bigger than Intel."</p><p>"So why are Asian chip stocks tumbling amid this new competition from China? It really boils down to the arrival of this new entrant in the market that, first of all, has just raised a load of capital to expand, and second of all if you're an investor and you like the chip theme, you probably own a lot of Asian chip makers to begin with. So if you want to buy CXMT's shares, you're gonna have to make room for something in the portfolio, which probably means dumping Samsung or SK Hynix or TSMC or another name like that. And that's ultimately why the market seems to be having such trouble digesting this new arrival."</p><p>"But for now, they'll have to wait as it's listed in Shanghai, that means most global investors won't have immediate access to the stock."</p><p>:: How does Apple's lobbying fit into this?</p><p>"So Apple has been asking the Trump administration reportedly for a bit of leeway in terms of what memory it can use in its products. Remember that Apple recently had to hike prices across a range of its devices, principally because the cost of memory is getting so high because it's also competing with the AI industry for memory chips. On the other hand, a US company like Micron is quite keen to keep Chinese memory out of US supply chains, so is putting equal amounts of pressure in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is caught in the middle."</p><p>:: Is the AI-driven semiconductor rally sustainable?</p><p>"A lot of investors have been worried about a question that essentially boils down to how much debt is being racked up by the tech sector to fund its build out of AI tools. And more importantly, how is that gonna be paid back?"</p><p>"We'll get some indication from the big tech companies this week as to how that expansion is going. We've got earnings coming up from Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, as well as some of TSMC suppliers. And they should give us an indication of how much capital expenditure they expect. How much more money, in short, are they gonna keep putting into AI throughout the next few years?"</p></body>
