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Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026

394 points · 443 comments · speckx

ocd · 1790861971 · focus · HN ↗
I'm not a business guy, but I think I would be very worried if I created any opening (even on the very long term) for competition to justify itself being built up to meet demand (or national security requirements of other countries) on an industry I mostly control, because I prioritized extremely high prices for a few years that might have the effect of changing the arithmetic for potential competitors that wouldn't have done it before.
It makes me consider whether there would be retaliation in later years against the US intellectual property system in countries other than China. While RAM is a tangible product, the areas it serves aren't really.
1. Tuna-Fish · 1790863383 · focus · HN ↗
  They are not prioritizing extremely high prices. TSMC has a similar waiting list, so does ever other tool manufacturer. Memory capacity is being increased approximately as fast as it can be.
  1. alephnerd · 1790864000 · focus · HN ↗
    There's no point bringing this up.
    Whenever anyone does, there are dozens of posts acting conspiratorial on HN.
    martin8412 · 1790864388 · focus · HN ↗
    It has honestly gotten frustrating to even read anything on the internet these days. It’s just conspiracies upon conspiracies all the time, and it’s constantly in your face.
    If only they were good conspiracies with some weight to them, but no, they fall apart if you have a rudimentary understanding of the subject.
    kuerbel · 1790865290 · focus · HN ↗
    It's easier to bear that there might be a conspiracy, than that this outcome is the result of chaos and stupidity and greed. Also it makes you think you are smarter than anyone else.
    alephnerd · 1790866018 · focus · HN ↗
    Fundamentally, it comes down to whether or not you think "AI/ML" can disappear tomorrow and the world would continue to run as normal.
    From what I have seen, it cannot. It has become foundational the same way Internet 1.0 (eg. Email, Static HTML, Web Directories, SSL) became foundational for a significant portion of the global economy in the 1990s and 2000s.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790867781 · focus · HN ↗
    AL/ML isn't going away, but what that means for demand for various types of memory remains to be seen. LLM are clearly a commodity, and once they are "good enough" then it'll just be about price, meaning that smaller and less memory hungry models will win.
    It's a bit like the Sun/etc workstation market vs PCs, and high end expensive PCs vs cheap ones. Once the cheap PCs became "good enough" then they naturally dominated.
    bigstrat2003 · 1790871949 · focus · HN ↗
    Not only could the world run as normal without AI as we have it today, it would run better. The tech we have is a net negative, slowing things down and making things harder without providing value.
    jorvi · 1790888635 · focus · HN ↗
    All the big techs have accelerated zilch in actual features released or user-facing bugs fixed. All that seems to have accelerated is cybersecurity offense and defense.
    And these are supposedly the most brilliant corporations around, so other companies are seeing even less gain.
    I stick with my theory that LLMs are GPU-like, not CPU-like. They will rarely solve a problem like an adept, but they can solve 1 000 000 million low-hanging fruit problems within a second in a way that there was just not enough eyeballs for before. They can also brute force problems.
    foltik · 1790865999 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
    martin8412 · 1790876698 · focus · HN ↗
    Which was caused by the exact problem they’re trying to avoid by not going on a spending spree to increase manufacturing capacity.
    They had built way too much capacity during the 90s and were losing money on every chip because they couldn’t run the fabs at full capacity. That’s why they colluded to increase the price to save their collective hides.
    A new competitor wouldn’t be able to enter the market and lower the prices without also losing money. That’s not the case today, the Chinese are trying hard to do just that.
    rnd0 · 1790907267 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, that.
    Conspiracies have been documented enough times that it is totally valid to surmise that there's one in place at any given time, about any given field.
    A quick inquiry to google on 'proven conspiracy theories' returned ten results just on google's AI. And it left out Iran-contra -presumably for the sake of brevity.
    Sorry, to think there's a conspiracy isn't so whacky and unhinged as people want to make it out to be.
  2. nullocator · 1790866240 · focus · HN ↗
    You can find public statements in the last 12 months from Samsung and Hynix about their aversion to scaling out production or increasing supply because they are concerned about profits.
    Hard to know who to believe, on one side there are the absurdly high prices and statements from companies and on the other hand there are strangers posting on HN that it's actually all fine.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790867412 · focus · HN ↗
    The memory business has always been extremely cyclical, and I doubt this time will be any different. The manufacturers have learnt this, and therefore to avoid boom followed by bust they try build for what they perceive to be longer-term more sustainable demand, not just knee-jerk increase demand to meet an immediate shortage.
    The risk to any of the manufacturers, especially those with most market share, would seem to be if they are not all acting in sync. Micron's consumer brand, Crucial, had a great reputation, but now they have exited that business in favor or devoting all their capacity to currently higher margin products... will this come back to bite them later if they want to re-enter the consumer business?
    creativeSlumber · 1790868773 · focus · HN ↗
    What's different this time is that LLMs require orders of magnitude more memory than we could have ever used before. And I think it's getting obvious by now that inference will move to local compute, So everyone's laptops and phones would need a lot of memory.
    jerf · 1790869865 · focus · HN ↗
    The question the memory manufacturers have is, sure, we have all these orders out to the next three years... but will they actually be there to pay when the memory is delivered?
    The memory manufacturers have been through bubbles before.
    I don't deny that AI is "real", in that there is certainly something there, but I would hate to be the guy betting billions or even trillions of dollars that we're not in a demand bubble well in excess of what is justified by that tech at the moment and expanding capacity is a great idea. Of course, I would also hate to be the guy saying "no we shouldn't expand capacity" when it turns out that, yes, we should have, but the staggering profits being made in the meantime would cushion that blow pretty well.
    booty · 1790869940 · focus · HN ↗
    > And I think it's getting obvious by now that inference will move to local compute
    From the bottom of my heart, I hope that's the future.
    I'm not convinced that will be the case. The AI companies don't want you to have local control. They want you to subscribe to a service that they can change at any time.
    I grit my teeth when I type this, but (god help us) I think Apple is maybe the best (least bad?) hope here. They are the only big player with the hardware chops and without a current vested interest in getting you addicted to monthly AI subscriptions. I'm not saying this is highly likely... I'm just saying that out of the current major players, they're the ones with the ability and motivation to move in this direction in the near future.
    The next best hope is probably just nVidia or AMD catering to the consumer market once again, after the AI bubble bursts or the datacenter market reaches saturation.
    The outside hope is that some startup makes a business out of burning open weight LLMs to silicon like ChatJimmy... although ChatJimmy was bought up by AMD AFAIK.
    nostrademons · 1790872119 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't really matter what the AI companies want, if they misjudge the market somebody will just start a competitor and take it.
    The relevant questions are: 1) Where are the economies of scale in the technology stack? 2) What's "good enough" to consumers, and how does that stack up with the relevant computing power needed? 3) What are the transaction costs along various system boundaries?
    I think that the biggest force keeping inference in large centralized services is simply that provides a better product for the average user who doesn't care about local control (and the average user doesn't care about local control; indeed, for most people it's a misfeature, as then they have to administer their own hardware). HN is full of nerds that want to own their own stack; they're willing to put up with a little loss of capability to run Qwen 3.8 locally. But from the folks I know that have tried it vs. Claude vs. Codex vs. Antigravity, the local models are still pretty weak compared to what you can get by paying for a service. Most people will just pay for the service until the performance becomes indistinguishable and the price becomes less.
    famouswaffles · 1790893336 · focus · HN ↗
    >It doesn't really matter what the AI companies want, if they misjudge the market somebody will just start a competitor and take it.
    The vast majority of people are uninterested in local vs non-local models (not just LLMs but ANNs in general), only the services the models are providing. Even if performant local models can actually be served on device quickly, if the frontier labs don't want to go that way, they simply can and there's little threat the market can be taken from them that way.
    If you can serve local models, the 'advantage' is that they can be run on the users device without that incurring any cost to you thus allowing flexibilty in pricing, but if such models can be made then whatever cost would be incurred to labs running on their own servers would be a rounding error and also inconsequential to them. That is to say, they can also compete with you on pricing. So unless someone comes along with something the frontier labs can't figure out or replicate, then it doesn't matter. Open AI might be 'forced' to drum down prices but only in situations where costs have also been drummed down.
    booty · 1791208140 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't really matter what the AI companies want, if they misjudge the market somebody will just start a competitor and take it.
    This kind of "free markets solve everything" magical thinking is cool when we're talking about lemonade stands, but unfortunately it just isn't reality when we're talking about markets with a really big moat such AI model training.
    Even if you made the US the freest market ever, you have the small problem of your free-market hero startups needing to compete with state-sponsored models from China.
    (Also, free markets depend on savvy consumers to function properly. We assume that consumers will not choose lemonade that poisons them, for instance. This works well for lemonade stands -- one assumes consumers will steer clear of the lemonade stand ringed by corpses -- but works less well when the product is more complex and people don't understand it. You know, like AI.)
    nicoburns · 1790876878 · focus · HN ↗
    > LLMs require orders of magnitude more memory than we could have ever used before
    That's true. But will anyone have any money to pay for the LLMs? The AI market is currently being heavily subsidised by, ultimately, everyone else. But the economy in general is looking extremely dire at the moment, and that seems unlikely to last.
    sssilver · 1790880729 · focus · HN ↗
    > the economy in general is looking extremely dire at the moment
    Can you elaborate on this? What about the economy is looking dire?
    nicoburns · 1790885705 · focus · HN ↗
    Basically everyone I know who doesn't have a tech job is struggling for money / feels like the world is unaffordable for them atm. Those without jobs are struggling to get them. And those with jobs are scared to change even if they don't like them.
    And from what I read in the media, a lot of the economic indicators are backing this up: discretionary spending is down, private debt levels are rising, etc. All signs that the slack in the system is disappearing.
    kube-system · 1790877320 · focus · HN ↗
    That's what people thought about a year ago, but with the amazing strides that smaller models have taken over the past year, people are now starting to question that.
    [deleted] · 1790877160 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. muddi900 · 1790867504 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not true. Semiconductor industry saw a similar supply crunch during covid and spent heavily for capacity. And when the crunch tapered off, they were left holding the bag.
    Micron would probably not even exist, or be a sticker brand for some Chinese conglomerate if not for this supply shock.
    They are a lot more reticent this time around.
    CamperBob2 · 1790871639 · focus · HN ↗
    Nobody is holding any post-COVID bags right now. Every fab and factory is either running balls-out or waiting on something.

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