Thread

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.

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