When an $8 billion factory in eastern China’s Anhui province revealed it had found customers for its dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, high-tech pundits from across the country broke out the champagne.

Four years after its founding, Changxin Technology Co. Ltd. finally came of age by becoming China’s first-ever company to design and produce the chips that are a central component of most computing devices.

The Hefei-based company began mass producing the chips last September, though the May revelation finally confirmed that China could compete with global giants like Samsung, Hynix and Micron — the world’s three largest DRAM makers that collectively control 90% of the market.

The news was hailed as a significant development for both Changxin and China’s semiconductor industry, which has suddenly gone into overdrive to become more self-sufficient in the face of increasingly stringent technology export restrictions from the West, led by a campaign from the U.S.

China is pouring billions of dollars into building a semiconductor sector that can produce both memory and logic chips, the two biggest categories of high-tech chips. Of those two, memory is the simpler and thus perhaps the easier one for China to enter and quickly gain market share.

Read the full story on Caixin Global later.

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Contact reporter Mo Yelin (yelinmo@caixin.com)