This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
China stealing anything loses any bite when you realize every AI company stole everything and is supported by the Government.
RAM prices will fall now, this is good news. Fuck the cartel.
Okay, where can I buy them, below the price of "western" RAM?
This was easy to predict.
Chinese government is not stupid. They have a strategy (more so than USA does). Years ago that was to dominate global manufacturing and supply chains. They were successful. Now the goal is to reach parity with Western chipmakers and/or get ahead. It's happening.
The AI boom was like a golden gift to them. Semiconductor prices are through the roof. So if they can produce almost anything at all in quantity it will sell for inflated prices.
While the tech companies of the world jerk each other off with AI, China is building DRAM capacity. CXMT is the first and will not be the last. They will scale quickly. If they have the process perfected they will build a fab in the time it takes USA to conduct the environmental review for the consideration of allowing a permit application to build a fab. They will not build one fab they will build 5 or 10. I'm proud to be American and I love my country but I compare USA to China on the ability to execute large projects like this and China will win every time. We have too much red tape, too many lawsuits and insurance and moving parts. China executes faster and more decisively.
So give it a year or two and China will have a fleet of pretty good fabs. They will sell memory for way less than what the others do. And then just as China made themselves indispensable for manufacturing, they will make themselves indispensable for DRAM.
Much of that red tape is there for good reason. It protects our natural resources and our citizens. I don't disagree the US could do better, but things like environmental studies are important to ensure healthy growth, not just rapid. AI data center bullshit happening right now is a perfect example of the impact and destruction of steamrolling these things.
In general I agree- the concept of red tape, environmental evaluations, etc is a good thing.
But we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
Key is to find a middle ground- that lets a fab be built in an environmentally friendly way but also rapidly.
There's also the issue of things not necessarily having to be the MOST profitable thing ever. Memory manufacturers decided to go to the highest bider because money. I suspect Chinese company will be quite happy to just flood the market with cheaply priced (relatively speaking) products and just get everyone's money.
I suspect Chinese company will be quite happy to just flood the market with cheaply priced (relatively speaking) products and just get everyone's money.
And will still be able to make a very healthy profit by doing that.
The quest for "max_profit" is not (and never has been) sustainable.
This 100%.
HBM has massive profit margins. It's also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.
China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory 'only' 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, "They give us a price every month or something, and they say 'you can buy that many' and it's yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again." Source interview. If China says 'we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs' and the quality is decent then it doesn't matter if it's slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.
And play that ahead.
The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there's less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.
If I recall correctly is also on road to match western prices.
Unfortunately because of the wonderful policies by sequential US governments, US citizens will not be able to buy Chinese chips because obviously the chips will spy on you just like Chinese EV's, routers, phones, toasters, drones, etc. But all the good things by American tech companies whom totally respect your privacy, like Google scrapping all spirit airlines communication, or Flock camera drones, is just fine.
Good, more for the rest of the world.
Nothing a import ban can't fix.
Nothing a import ban can't fix.
Just because the US bans something, that doesn't stop the rest of the world from buying.
No shit. What I want though is memory prices to go back down here.
What I want though is memory prices to go back down here.
A price war might lead in that direction.
Just like that price war between american cars and all those Chinese ones they let be imported. The whole point of import bans in the US is to prevent a true free market.
While making sure to write the ban in ways that doesn't stop machines being assembled there just not in ways that lowers prices
Yeah that's probably a sad truth for those in the good ol' USA.
There is so much over investment in memory its going to be dirt cheap again in 2028
This is simply not true. All the major players are not investing in production. They are simply letting the demand stack and prices to rise.
China entering the market will help some, but expect these chips to be banned quite quickly in the western world for fear of communists. They are already blacklisted by many companies.
Yes they are. Samsung and SK hynix are building 4 new fabs I'm Korea 1 in the US. Sandisk and kioxia are building extra capacity in Japan. Micron is building new fan in the US. Its nearly a trillion in investment for additional capacity. These are expected to hit the market in 2027 and 2028 with lag to backfill demand.
Chinese ram will be good but not good enough to block it. Business will keep buying the high preformance stuff and consumers can have the cheap modules but they buy so little it won't affect anything.
Sounds like it'd be a good idea to get an xl motherboard
I eagerly await the 64GB mouse driver and the 5000PB home NAS for the discerning hoarder of the output of /dev/rnd
Is it normal to refer to Taiwanese RAM manufacturers as "Western"?
I'm glad they distinguish it from China obviously, but calling G.Skill and MSI Western feels kinda weird.
They do so because while the manufacturing is taking place in Taiwan, the blueprints are not.
It's why we call iPhone american phones. Despite them being manufactured in China
They won't sell it to you, they're just making sure they aren't beholden to the same ram shortages the rest of the world is.
There is zero guarantee China will sell it to consumers given that companies and governments all over the world are willing to pay premium value for current ram prices anyway
The Chinese government being much more fans of a directed market than of a totally unregulated one (neither of which is a Free Market by the way - that thing only exists when barriers to market entry are incredibly low, and it's not as if any Jack or Joe can set up their very own memory production cottage factory in their backyard, so it's not possible for there to be a Free Market in RAM under current technology), they'll probably make sure that RAM only ever leaves China as part of more complex products (i.e. computers, smartphones, tablets and so on) made in China, thus making also Made In China for those product lines be more competitive.
(In other words, want a gaming PC or smartphone with more memory - buy the whole thing from China or pay 10x more)
If properly managed this could boost quite a lot more digital electronics industries in China than merelly RAM.
