Thread

The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

62 points · 69 comments · perelin

N_Lens · 1789618282 · focus · HN ↗
The big companies are insulated because they've locked in multi-year supply contracts with ram manufacturers - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon (All on 3-5 yr contracts). OAI's deal with Samsung & SK Hynix is also colossal - locking up roughly 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of world output (Stargate project).
Apple got caught out because it had a shorter contract that ended in the beginning of Q3, and they've tried to source their RAM from Chinese CXMT who declined because all capacity was already locked in contracts. They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia.
Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions.
1. discordance · 1789619859 · focus · HN ↗
  China's pretty good at bending the curve. I expect that by the end of 2027 we'll see a lot more available for consumers. As others have pointed out, this might not be available in US markets.
  "CXMT currently has two 12-inch DRAM fabrication plants — or fabs - in Hefei and one in Beijing, with a combined capacity of about 300,000 wafers per month.
  With the new Shanghai facility and other new capacity, CXMT will double its DRAM wafer output to approximately 600,000 wafers per month, all three sources added."
  <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cxmt-wins-3-billion-memory-supply-deal-with-tencent-sources-say-2026-06-29/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cxmt-wins-3-billi...
  1. rdedev · 1789620309 · focus · HN ↗
    This is probably my ignorance but why are we assuming that CXMT capacity will also not be gobbled up for datacenters?
    quux0r · 1789620944 · focus · HN ↗
    If I'm not mistaken I believe that CXMT's fabrication process is not suitable for manufacturing within the super tight tolerances that are needed for data center HBM, but I may be mis remembering. I think I recall a chart from somewhere showing that frontier memory manufacturers could achieve something like double the memory throughput for example.
    jauntywundrkind · 1789628078 · focus · HN ↗
    allegedly the yields are not great <a href="https://www.techpowerup.com/352511/cxmt-reportedly-struggles-with-hbm3e-yields-are-only-25" rel="nofollow">https://www.techpowerup.com/352511/cxmt-reportedly-struggles...
    but i feel like this will not last that long and that cxmt will be layering dram for hbm stacks with abandon, like everyone else, uninterested in selling ram to anyone else.
    meanwhile now we are seeing vertically stacked ram in regular dimms too, for 512GB sticks. once again increasing the multipliers of how many ram chips go into servers. <a href="https://www.techpowerup.com/352730/micron-develops-512-gb-ddr5-rdimm-server-memory-reaching-9200-mt-s" rel="nofollow">https://www.techpowerup.com/352730/micron-develops-512-gb-dd...

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