Micron Technology was dropping again Tuesday. Comments from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about the progress of Chinese memory chips likely weren't helping.

Micron shares were down 5.7% at $952.50 in early trading. That comes after a 3.9% drop the previous day following a report China's ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, was developing a new cell architecture named "4F square" for server memory.

American depositary receipts of South Korean memory-chip company SK Hynix were falling 5.7%. Samsung Electronics dropped 7.4% in local trading in South Korea.

It remains to be seen what volume and quality of production CXMT can achieve. But Musk at least sees the Chinese memory company as a serious player.

"When China figures out how to manufacture a product, their ability to scale is often greater than the rest of the world combined," Musk wrote in a post on social-media platform X. "Maybe RAM [random-access memory] will be different, but RAM was a low margin commodity only 3 years ago."

CXMT's design is reportedly aimed at increasing the density of its dynamic random-access memory products, which would make its server hardware more competitive. DRAM is short-term working memory that computers and AI hardware use to manage active data and running processes. It accounts for about three quarters of Micron's revenue.

"Overall, it's not clear if this technology is commercial - and we know that Samsung and Hynix have also worked on it as well," wrote Jefferies equity sales specialist William Beavington in a research note.

In addition to the challenges of bringing a new memory-chip architecture to market, it's unclear whether U.S. manufacturers would get government approval to buy CXMT-produced memory and, in any case, the Chinese company gives priority to domestic companies.

Musk also noted that CXMT may find it more difficult to match Micron and other Western companies when it comes to high-bandwidth memory -- the specialized DRAM which is used in artificial-intelligence servers. That should limit its threat to Micron's market share.

But after rising more than fivefold in the past 12 months, Micron is a volatile stock.

"With CXMT seeming to be moving rapidly on both technology transition and capacity expansion, sentiment to DRAM could stay weak, apart from broader AI investment concerns," Jefferies' Beavington wrote.