Thread

Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

562 points · 458 comments · giuliomagnifico

shevy-java · 1789929023 · focus · HN ↗
About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over 3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
1. pfdietz · 1789929223 · focus · HN ↗
  What abuse? Responding to supply and demand fluctuations isn't abuse, it's the proper operation of the market.
  1. dumberquestions · 1789929671 · focus · HN ↗
    Would if one industry gobbles up an important resource to the point that other consumers lose practical access to it, shouldn't there be limits?
    jefftk · 1789929860 · focus · HN ↗
    No. The other industries can bid for access to the resource, and under most circumstances, whether they are willing to bid higher tracks importance. Sometimes there are cases where something has significant positive externalities and so people are not willing to bid high enough, and then we can talk about some kind of government intervention (typically a subsidy that attempts to track the value of the externalities) but I don't see that applying here.
    [deleted] · 1789930838 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    pfdietz · 1789929861 · focus · HN ↗
    If others are willing to pay more, that a signal that more value is created if the resource goes to them rather than to the more price sensitive customers.
    applfanboysbgon · 1789930621 · focus · HN ↗
    This logic falls apart completely when gamblers allocate one trillion to bidding up the price, denying access to the resource to people who are responsibly spending their own money. The ideal world of the imaginary perfect free market never takes into consideration the messiness of the real world, like the fact that people will spend extreme sums of money irrationally. It can take years for this effect to correct, damaging the market severely in the meantime.
    Alternatively, the money invested can be rational because it prices out competitors and establishes a monopoly, after which point the monopolist earns their absurd investment back with complete control of the market. This is also bad.
    pfdietz · 1789932145 · focus · HN ↗
    You can reach any conclusion you want if you assume others are behaving irrationally. But why should I assume they are wrong instead of you being wrong?
    pixl97 · 1789933565 · focus · HN ↗
    This has zero to do with the company that is making the product and all to do with the company buying them.
    The problem you have here is hundreds of different companies are doing the "gambling" in a non collusionary manner so it's going to take decades in court to prove it. Are you saying governments should do an authoritarian take over of RAM allotment?
    pfdietz · 1789936461 · focus · HN ↗
    And even if the companies are "gambling" (and what company doesn't do that) it doesn't mean the gambling is irrational.
    [deleted] · 1789945120 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. joshheitzman · 1789930909 · focus · HN ↗
    Where is the additional supply resulting from the sustained increase in demand?
    ErneX · 1789931837 · focus · HN ↗
    Some are building new fabs, example:
    <a href="https://news.skhynix.com/en/fab-facility-investment-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://news.skhynix.com/en/fab-facility-investment-2026/
    It's not an overnight thing obviously.
    DonsDiscountGas · 1789935876 · focus · HN ↗
    Check the article we're commenting under
    Dylan16807 · 1789956155 · focus · HN ↗
    No, this article is not about new fabs.
2. digdigdag · 1789929314 · focus · HN ↗
  > Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
  Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.
  No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
  1. carlm42 · 1789929936 · focus · HN ↗
    Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.
    daedrdev · 1789932137 · focus · HN ↗
    Several of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel.
    lovich · 1789932789 · focus · HN ↗
    Is there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product.
    Especially not for consumer goods.
    wmf · 1789934076 · focus · HN ↗
    If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.
    srdjanr · 1789939407 · focus · HN ↗
    I missed that this is happening, is it really? I thought it's 5X for everyone
    wmf · 1789939628 · focus · HN ↗
    Supposedly OpenAI is paying 2025 prices.
    niltecedu · 1789978796 · focus · HN ↗
    So you mean people with contracts are having their contracts honoured.... thats just normal business.
    SideQuark · 1789959509 · focus · HN ↗
    And on that page govts have tried and failed at it also. Thinking the current prices are the result of fixing and not insane demand is surely going to lose in court. It’s trivial to show massive demand, and thus production line changes, as the driving forces here.
    If you look over all such lawsuits, they extremely rarely succeed.
  2. CamperBob2 · 1789929947 · focus · HN ↗
    No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
    I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.
    bunderbunder · 1789930416 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find and close whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.
    pfdietz · 1789933329 · focus · HN ↗
    Your attempts to insult what they are doing doesn't show they did anything wrong, but it does impeach the validity of your own argument.
    CamperBob2 · 1789934164 · focus · HN ↗
    Hit dog hollers, sounds like.
    pfdietz · 1789934940 · focus · HN ↗
    That's abuser logic.
    CamperBob2 · 1789935269 · focus · HN ↗
    The funny thing is, we're mostly in violent agreement, going by your other comments. This is a weird point to disagree on... so weird, in fact, that it's easy to believe you are associated with OpenAI. Hence my follow-up comment.
    What Altman did, and the way he did it, was not OK. Unless you believe that humanity's adoption of AI-based intellectual work is best served by concentrating an enormous amount of power in one company at the expense of everyone else, turning the market into a literal zero-sum game. Do you?
    rangestransform · 1789934837 · focus · HN ↗
    Apple used to do the same thing with TSMC’s newer process nodes, and nobody really complained because people were getting superior products. I happen to like US antitrust enforcement that considers consumer benefit primarily.
  3. newsclues · 1789930287 · focus · HN ↗
    How much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed?
    Can that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest?
    m4rtink · 1789950072 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, thats kinda how strategic reserves work - so that say food manufacturers just don't dump all the cheap food to sell crack instead & everybody starves to death.
  4. m4rtink · 1789949612 · focus · HN ↗
    The same governments that dumped bilions into to these companies and gave them insane tax breaks.
  5. rtpg · 1789950327 · focus · HN ↗
    The same major memory makers got prosecuted for cartel behavior by the DoJ a little over 20 years ago[0].
    One might say "well what specific law have they broken" and I don't know and I don't know if they have, but at the very least the power of the State _could_ be used to force behavioral changes in some ways or another.
    [0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
  6. ozgrakkurt · 1789979168 · focus · HN ↗
    It is funny how regular people are trapped into legalism while companies are seeing things as a two sided fight.
    You can’t demand anything with this mentality.
    “The current situation is messing up the economy for a very large portion of us” is universally a good enough reason
3. jeroenhd · 1789931225 · focus · HN ↗
  It's not just normal consumer memory. Everything with a chip in it is getting more expensive because of the AI circlejerk. When Bitcoin screwed over consumers, at least normal memory prices weren't affected (though that time a shitcoin based around storing large amounts of data made the rounds, hard drive prices did take a brief hit).
  Everything is affected by the endless thirst for RAM by AI companies and the accompanying hyperscalers. I'm honestly disappointed governments aren't doing more to keep the price of consumer goods in check.
  I guess the AI companies telling the world how good they are at accidental cybercrime and fraud is creating enough FUD to let the AI industry run wild.
4. yread · 1789932938 · focus · HN ↗
  3x? I bought 128GB DDR5 SODIMMs for 300 eur. Now it's 4000 eur.
  1. mrlonglong · 1789936792 · focus · HN ↗
    Damn you were lucky. I bought 96GB DDR5 last year for £600 UKP. They're now retailing for three times that.
    Bastards.
    yread · 1789991257 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah the 300 already felt like a splurge - it's the max. 96 was less than 200 I felt kinda stupid not just going with that. Imagine 96 of anything now for less than 200
    mrlonglong · 1790023924 · focus · HN ↗
    I just checked the latest pricings. 48GB DDR5 SODIMM now selling for £2,400.

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