Thread

1. 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. 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.

         1. 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?

            1. 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.

               1. 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.

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