The China Securities Regulatory Commission has disclosed information on its website indicating that Chinese memory chip maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Holding has begun pre-listing tutoring, formally starting its A-share IPO process. CITIC Securities and CSC Financial are serving as its advisors.

Founded in 2016, YMTC Holding is a memory integrated device manufacturer (IDM), with businesses spanning chip design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, and system solution products. Its wholly owned subsidiary, Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), is valued at more than RMB 160 billion (USD 23.5 billion).

YMTC is central to YMTC Holding’s development. The company has made several advances in memory chip technology, supporting its product innovation.

In October 2017, YMTC designed and manufactured what it described as China’s first 3D NAND flash memory through a combination of in-house R&D and international collaboration.

In September 2019, the company began mass production of its second-generation triple-level cell (TLC) 3D NAND flash memory, which uses its proprietary Xtacking architecture.

In April 2020, YMTC announced that it had completed R&D for two third-generation products, covering TLC and quad-level cell (QLC) flash memory. The company said its X2-6070, its first third-generation QLC flash memory product, had the industry’s highest input-output speed, highest storage density, and highest single-die capacity at the time of its release.

YMTC’s self-developed Xtacking architecture is one of the company’s key assets. The architecture uses wafer bonding, a technology that can improve transfer speed, storage density, R&D efficiency, and production cycles.

Before Xtacking was introduced, 3D NAND products on the market mainly used traditional side-by-side architecture or CMOS-under-array (CuA) architecture. YMTC applied wafer bonding to 3D NAND flash memory after nine years of technical accumulation in 3D integrated circuits and four years of R&D validation.

According to the company, YMTC’s technology enables billions of metal channels to be connected within an area the size of a fingernail, merging two components into a single unit while delivering reliability comparable to processing on the same wafer. As layer counts continue to rise, 3D NAND flash memory developed and manufactured using Xtacking could gain cost and innovation advantages.

Amid rising global artificial intelligence demand and higher hardware costs, memory chips are entering what analysts have described as a new industry upcycle. According to a CITIC Securities research report, strong AI-driven demand is expected to keep memory demand robust in the near term, while memory chip price increases are expected to continue throughout 2026 and serve as an industry catalyst. Morgan Stanley has said bottlenecks in the AI value chain are shifting from GPUs to memory, packaging, and network bandwidth, and that sustained growth in memory demand could continue for at least three to five years.

Since its founding, YMTC Holding has completed multiple funding rounds. Its cap table includes state-owned, private, and industrial investors, including phases one and two of China’s Big Fund, five major state-backed banks, and various venture capital and private equity firms.

This article was adapted based on a feature originally written by and published on IPO Zaozhidao. KrASIA is authorized to translate, adapt, and publish its contents.