Inside the Lexar factory in China and its mission to protect our digital memories

The trip to China always starts a few days before the actual trip. Due to internet restrictions, commonly used services such as Google and Meta apps are virtually impossible to access. You need to choose a VPN, buy an eSIM and create your Alipay account, which is one of the few ways to pay for goods and services in the country. Still, nothing beats the excitement of traveling the world to see cutting-edge technology being developed.

After an exciting Computex 2026, which showcased Nvidia’s first Arm-based superchip and Intel’s new processor for handhelds, Lexar invited U.S. media to Shanghai, Suzhou and Shenzhen to preview what it believes will be its next breakthrough technology: mSSD. Lexar opened its factory and labs to us to highlight how seriously it takes the process of creating and testing its processors.

If you’re not familiar, Lexar has been around for 30 years now. Founded in San Jose, California, it is now owned by a Shenzhen-based manufacturer called Longsys and competes with other big players in the market like SanDisk, Sony and Samsung. As the RAM crisis pushes prices higher than many consumers are able to pay, Lexar knows that every drive it builds counts and must be perfect. “What we are seeing is not just short-term disruption, but AI-driven structural change. Our approach is not simply to react to price cycles, but to design products that remain stable, relevant and profitable,” says Van Baer, ​​general manager of Lexar in North America.

While companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google have a high level of consumer mindset, the storage inside our technology isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about, until it fills up. That said, there is a delicate balance between creating brand awareness and letting the products speak for themselves. “What people often don’t see is the amount of detail that goes into validation. For Lexar, testing is not just about whether a card works once, but whether it works reliably over time, on real devices and under stress,” Baer says.

In addition to hearing from executives, Lexar showed BGR its Longforce production line in Suzhou, then took us to its innovation and quality labs in Zhongshan, near Shenzhen. At the first stop, we dressed like factory workers (I could never survive in a factory) to see how the company brings its products to life. The process begins at the silicon level, as Lexar evaluates NAND flash chips to ensure they work before they even enter the assembly line.

Instead of simply testing random samples from a batch, Lexar evaluates each unit in its lineup to measure sustained write speeds, power consumption, and AC outage handling. These products are also tested by subjecting them to extreme temperatures, humidity and joints, physical shock and x-rays.

After another three-hour flight from suburban Suzhou to Shenzhen, our final stop was Lexar’s Innovation and Quality Labs, where products are developed and tested alongside other devices. In the innovation department, Lexar showed off its micro SSD (mSSD) technology, recently launched under the name Lexar Play United States.

José Adorno/BGR

Currently the product comes with an adapter so it can be used on any machine, but Lexar is working to create a new industry standard for portable devices, robots and laptops because the drive is significantly smaller than an SSD. “Looking ahead, we want to continue to bring more innovative consumer storage products to market. For us, innovation isn’t just about specifications. It’s about making storage more relevant and useful in people’s daily lives,” says Baer.

On the testing side, Lexar showed us a few floors full of products. All cameras, computers, AI security cameras, consoles, phones and tablets are organized on shelves and tables. These products must be tested with Lexar technologies to ensure that when consumers purchase a Nintendo Switch 2, phone or laptop, there will be no compatibility issues.

During the trip, Richard Chang, North America Public Relations Manager, and I discussed the importance of creating high-quality storage solutions. He told me that when he was younger he was going to Hong Kong to see family and that on one of those trips the memory card in his camera broke (he said it wasn’t the Lexar one). However, this memory card contained the last photos of a family member who died a few years later, and he lost the last photos he had with him.

As cheesy as it sounds, this conversation resonated with me because in a world where we store so much information on our devices and in the cloud, we are never really prepared for faulty storage, a stolen device, or something that could take away our memories. As Lexar celebrates its 30th anniversary, I also thought about another brand celebrating the same milestone: the Pokémon Company.

On its servers, I still have a few creatures from 2004, from the games “Pokémon FireRed” and “LeafGreen”. Some still live in the Pokémon Home cloud subscription, but others have been transferred to “Pokémon Legends: ZA,” stored in the corner of a Lexar microSD card. It’s a fond memory, made up of bytes, and now I can rest assured, on the way home, that Lexar also puts the same care I took on those games 22 years ago into its products.