Anhui eyes technology behind manufacturing

I grew up in Anhui province. For much of my childhood, it was not the province people mentioned when they talked about the cutting edge of Chinese manufacturing.

Anhui was better known for rice fields, coal mines, traditional factories and, for many families, sons and daughters who left for richer coastal provinces to find work.

So when ChangXin Memory Technologies made its stock market debut this summer in one of Asia's biggest IPOs of the year, what caught my attention was not the surge in its share price. It was the fact that the company came from Anhui.

CXMT was founded in Hefei in 2016. A year later, construction started on its first DRAM — dynamic random access memory — production base. A decade after it was founded, the company arrived on Shanghai's STAR Market as one of China's most closely watched semiconductor companies.

To me, that journey is not simply the story of a successful chipmaker; it is shorthand for how my home province has changed.

When I was younger, Anhui often seemed to sit one step behind the industrial centers surrounding it. To the east was Jiangsu province, packed with factories and foreign investment. Further south was Zhejiang province, famous for private entrepreneurs.

Today, traveling around the province as a reporter, I hear very different vocabularies related to Hefei. DRAM. Electric vehicles. Quantum computing. Artificial intelligence. Advanced displays. Humanoid robots. Commercial spaceflight.

The change is not simply that Anhui now has newer factories. It is that the province is trying to move deeper into the industrial chain.

That is why CXMT matters. Memory chips are almost invisible to consumers. Nobody walks into a shopping mall asking to admire a piece of DRAM. Yet these chips sit inside phones, computers, servers and data centers powering AI.

They are also among the most difficult products in modern manufacturing. The global DRAM market has long been dominated by Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology. Breaking into that club requires not only billions of dollars, but years of process development, engineering talent, equipment, materials and manufacturing discipline.

For decades, one of China's great industrial strengths was its ability to put things together at extraordinary speed and scale. It could make televisions, phones, laptops and, later, electric vehicles.

But many of the most valuable technologies buried inside those products came from somewhere else. What I see in Anhui today is an attempt to change that equation.

The goal is no longer just to build the car. It is to make the chip inside the car, the software controlling it, the battery beneath the floor, the sensor watching the road and perhaps, one day, the robot assembling it.

Hefei is sometimes described as China's "venture-capital city", famous for local government funds willing to make large and sometimes risky bets on emerging industries. There is some truth to that.

But after spending more time inside factories and talking to companies, I have become less interested in the moment when the money arrives. The more important question comes afterwards.

Can a subsidy create an engineer? Can an investment fund create a supplier that understands an obscure production problem? Usually, it cannot. Those things take time.

Local governments across the country are rushing into semiconductors, robotics, AI, low-altitude aviation and other fashionable industries. It is relatively easy to announce a fund, break ground on a factory or unveil an industrial park. It is much harder to build an industry that can survive after the slogans fade.

I saw a province that, for much of my childhood, watched capital and talent flow outward now trying to pull both back in. And I saw a change in the question Anhui is asking itself.

It is no longer simply: What can we manufacture?

It is becoming: How much of the technology behind manufacturing can we make our own?

It may ultimately matter far more than the IPO.