BEIJING—China is putting $24 billion toward building a world-class semiconductor industry, exploiting a partnership with a U.S. company for the production of memory chips used in a wide array of electronic devices.

On Monday, XMC, a contract chip maker owned by the Chinese government, will break ground in the city of Wuhan for the first Chinese-owned plant dedicated to producing the most widely used memory chips, an XMC spokesman said.

XMC last year partnered with U.S. flash-memory maker Spansion Inc. to co-develop next-generation chip technologies. Spansion later joined with Cypress Semiconductor Corp. as part of an all-stock merger valued at $5 billion.

Chinese companies currently account for minimal production of memory chips, which are used to store data in electronic gadgets. Semiconductors in general have become a major target for Chinese policy makers as they promote a shift from low-end manufacturing to more-advanced sectors

Beijing, which has established a national fund to support the semiconductor sector, also has pushed technological self-sufficiency following Edward Snowden’s revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency exploited backdoors in some U.S. technology products to spy on foreign governments. Memory chips are not a primary target for hackers, but theoretically could be hacked, according to cybersecurity experts.