This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I mean... Also assuming this is all real, and the rushed schedule doesn't produce low quality botched RAM sticks that die in six months.
When it comes to products from China, they can be incredible; unprecedented quality for so much cheaper! Or they can be exactly what everyone says they are and end up in a landfill after a short amount of time.
It's quite the coin flip.
But quick delivery would lead a bubble pop....
Just like back in 2008 the investors will try to fake it until they can't and the entire economy will crash over the whole world.
China making a crap ton of RAM won't help with that.
"assuming all current projects are completed on schedule"
From the article. This is the single largest fallacy one can engage in in engineering.
"CXMT is projected to produce about 350,000 DRAM wafers per month by the end of 2026, assuming all current projects are completed on schedule."
This is a small blurb on a random tech site, it's just giving a simple 'if all goes well' projection.
I'm sure they're not setting the entire undertaking up so that if one thing ends up slightly delayed everyone's heads will explode. It seems likely that they also have projections that take varying delays with varying parts and numbers of parts of the project into account, but that someone writing a small blurb on a tech site isn't really privy to the entirety of their forecasting.
I don't think they need you to rush in and save them from their folly.
Why would you assume any of that? If there is one constant in large-scale engineering projects, it is project managers over-promising on what their teams can deliver. In this case, they are promising a miracle salvation from the global DRAM shortage, so a measure of scepticism is, I believe, warranted.
Everything, everywhere, doesn't always happen as it does in your frame of reference and experience. I find it unlikely that you're genuinely an expert in engineering projects of this sort and specifically in exactly how they're undertaken in China with large scale government support.
Watch how quickly the US government will try to ban them in the name of security. They'll claim that they transmit RAM data to the Chinese government 😛.
I hope they do. More for the rest of the world. If Americans want RAM they should start looting data centers.
They don’t use the same kind :(
This shit is so over. This gang ain't gonna collude on price with Micron. They're in for eating Micron. First its market share, then its IP by buying it for pennies on the dollar.
Especially pay attention to the CCP's directive to share IP among RAM manufacturers. They appear to be looking at this problem as a supply shortage of an essential component for the rest of the economy, which it is. But that also means they aren't playing for profit.
aren't playing for profit
CXMT is probably the most profitable tech company in China right now.
I meant the CCP isn't, not CXMT.
After watching recent ram cartel investigation from gamernexus: fuck them. They got what they fucking deserve.
i seem to recall micron getting in trouble a while back for this same thing hmm… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
And it happened again in 2018 and they were acquitted, and now there's this and I doubt anything will come from it
A smart decision which the Americans are probably not gonna make would be to nationalize Micron once they become unviable for-profit business, in order to keep the competency and ability to make RAM, which is an essential economic input these days. Instead I think they'll just let the CXMT gang buy them at that point, just like they've let that happen to so many important firms. That's unless democratic socialism has taken enough control of the US political power.
nationalize Micron
No, no, no, you don't understand, that doesn't happen in the US.
What will happen is that they'll get a trillion dollar bailout, a yuuuuge amount of protectionary tarrifs on overseas competitors and then some other company will scoop them up with no obligations.
And then - and this is very important - maximum profit will be extracted from consumers, who end up being measurably worse off.
ability to make RAM, which is an essential economic input these days
It's kind of cool to think about...that we're living in the silicon age. The next step after bronze and iron and steel. We're still making useful things out of rocks...but different rocks, and now we boil water to use them. Like a stone soup, which itself is based upon a pre-revolution French folk-tale about the joys of communism....but now the government is "encouraging" manufacturers to throw in their vegetables. I don't think government strong-arming the peoole was a part of the original tale but I could be wrong.
Having actually done this, the clean room part is super easy. Getting all the equipment in and running is extremely hard. Finding out all the things you messed up along the way and getting actual yields is extremely hard and also time consuming. So I'd like to know where along that process they are doing the timeline comparison.
Micron doesn't seem interested in competing for consumer memory anyway, since they exited the consumer memory market. Latent demand exists for memory at not-outrageous prices so good for CXMT for filling that niche.
Do you think they'll stop expanding after filling the consumer memory market though?
I don't think so, domestic electronics manufacturers have an enormous need for memory that is performant but doesn't necessarily need the top-of-the-line, and probably China's government is pushing to reduce the need for imported memory components from Korea or Taiwan as well, so demand for production is there coming from both the private and public sector.
That's what I'm thinking too. They're gonna go as far and as wide as they can go.
CXMT will also sell at outrageous prices. It's free money.
CXMT will sell the chips to memory manufacturers in China for "domestic use only" at near cost price as directed by the CCP.
Those manufacturers will construct consumer ram modules and sell them locally, and there will be grey market exports to other countries for ridiculously low prices compared to everyone else.
This way the CCP props up domestic supply, and chips away at foreign manufacturer market share by turning a blind eye to the massive grey market export of RAM.
Yeah, they are currently engaged in a major spat with Huawei, which is accusing them of price gouging HBM supplies. Sounds familiar...
Standing by for "Chinese memory is spying on you, don't buy it".
If this memory is high quality, it will become very popular with consumers and still have high prices. No reason to lower it a lot for consumer market if they are alone there. Maybe make it 10% cheaper.
Or as they did with cobalt alloys: use slave labor to flood the market and push out all competition, then rug pull and cut off all supplies.
They're in the middle of this process with electric vehicles as well.
Another thing they like to do is make manufacturing deals with foreign companies in order to steal the technology for the state, which there is a lot of opportunity to do in the Silicon industry.
use slave labor to flood the market and push out all competition, then rug pull and cut off all supplies.
So, the Walmart model.
I can tell you're making an analogy of how Walmart pushes out smaller stores in towns,
but after Sam Walton died Walmart has sold primarily Chinese products,
so, yes, exactly, in more ways than one.
Watch international* ram be banned like international* EVs
*Chinese
Ram prices would still fall since other countries would not ban it and would put less stress on the current supply that already exists.
Considering Micron is the only US manufacturer, and they no longer produce consumer ram, this would just mean you literally could not buy any electronics that relied on ram. I doubt that would happen. Chinese ram, maybe
Competition is good. Hopefully an end to memory manufacturer price collusion is near. I’m not holding my breath for it though.
It hasn't felt t like there's been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last.. decade? Definitely not following moores law (if that even applies here). So if youve spent your time price fixing for the western market instead of developing technology to keep you ahead, then second rate competitors will eventually catch up and cut a huge portion of your market share, and enjoy those inflated prices instead of you. This of course is my very uninformed take, and probably completely inaccurate.
It hasn't felt t like there's been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last.. decade?
In memory? There's been a ton of improvement, even if most of the coolest stuff isn't making it into DIMMs that are installed in user laptops/desktops.
Advanced packaging technology has allowed chip manufacturers to put different silicon dies together with increasingly high performance (high bandwidth, low latency) connections in the same package, including with some three dimensional stacking. That way they can mix and match different silicon dies for greater cost effectiveness, yield, performance, etc.
This also means that in-package memory is now the standard in certain chips. Apple's M-series silicon has its memory packaged right into the CPU/GPU package, as a system-in-a-package, so that the connection between the logic and memory is comparatively much higher performance, several times higher bandwidth than desktops or laptops that don't follow that kind of architecture.
Similarly, in data centers, the AI boom has caused all the memory manufacturers to switch their production lines to high bandwidth memory, where they vertically stack a bunch of DRAM chips on each other, with ultra-fast, high bandwidth connections, so that they can shove terabytes of memory into these data center servers. These recent generations have been improving speed and bandwidth in ways that make consumer level DDR5 RAM look like child's play.
So they're improving things. Just not in ways that really show up in DIMM sticks.
To be honest DRAM was dirt cheap for quite a while and the profit margins of those companies were razor thin. Only recently they saw a surge in demand and they are exploiting it to enrich themselves but also increasing the manufacturing capacity is a lengthy and costly process which I presume some of those companies are actively trying to delay, in order to preserve their fat profit margins now.
Competition is good though and hopefully will lower the price overall faster.
