Oh wow, reading the wiki you linked, looks like that one exec really learned their lesson \s

On 5 April 2006, Sun Woo Lee, Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain with the US Government for his involvement in the price fixing conspiracy.[5] Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months in prison and fined US$250,000.[6] Lee was subsequently promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal#2002%E2%80%932005

edit/update: Oh, wow so Sun Woo Lee actually really lucked out as Korea focused more on making an example of the Samsung heir apparent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jae-yong

8 months in prison sucks, I totally concede that. Yet literally the deal they made looks like they were asked "Would you take the fall and go to prison for 8 months and then get paid millions per year afterward?"

None of the fines for these things are enough. It should be, like, the company is nationalized. The leadership is sentenced to years of community service and barred from working in the industry for life.

coupled with the fact that the cartels refuse to expand production; this tells me they're realistic about the moment - it's not going to be a decade of future humongous peak RAM consumption, because otherwise they'd be blisteringly stupid (to lose out on those potential increased sales)... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-makers-have-no-plans-to-increase-production-despite-crushing-ram-shortages-modest-2026-increase-predicted-as-dram-makers-hedge-their-ai-bets

Like they did with EVs in the US?

Republicans would probably make sure that can't happen.

It will take maybe two to three years before China could do that. The cheap Chinese RAM manufacturers are only starting their production.

If they have the capacity to do that they would have already been doing it. Chip production is extremely expensive which is why there's only a few companies doing it.

Fingers crossed for the next 5 years.

I'm starting to think more and more that the only way to pop the bubble is the Luigi Style.

Their dilemma is whether to build more RAM factories, which would reduce prices, or not. Knowing when demand slows down would surely help them.

They'll just continue with artificial scarcity until they get sued or fined or something but won't be enough to offset the profits

Yeah, kinda shows there's zero competition in the market.

Let's not forget that almost all memory is made by a cartel of 3 companies known for price fixing. They're all being as slow as possible about increasing production capacity.

Once the US economy craters into the recession it should by all rights currently be working through... Oh I am sure at that point there will be all sorts of companies dumping all sorts of things into every market they can to try to survive.

The AI bubble bursting will fuck the world in ways that will take decades to unfuck. If sanity was even slightly fashionable right now governments around the world, especially the US would be using every power they had to put some limits on this whole mess. Regulation, taxation, environmental controls everything would be on the table.

Instead we seem to be racing at the wall as fast as we can with NVidia and co in the driving seat, and governments around the world in the passenger seat screaming "Go! Go! Go!"

That's OK though, economic turmoil is felt by the individual based on their starting wealth. The rich often manage to become wealthier, it's the poor who get buried. Yay capitalism.

The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC

This is a wild theory if I ever heard one

There is only one American memory company: Micron. Sk Hynix and Samsung are South Korean.

Everyone else who sells memory modules in the west gets the actual memory chips from one of those three companies. Beyond that there is only one company that makes the waifers that the chips are made from and I think its Dutch. Definitely European.

Manufacturing their own sticks would onlympush the problem to the price of RAM chips.

The resources it takes to start manufacturing modern RAM chips is such that THE ENTIRE FUCKING NATION OF CHINA is finally getting around to it.

I know Valve is a big company, but that's a pretty bite to chew and swallow.

I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.

There's a reason why there's only, like, three RAM manufacturers. It's horrifically expensive to start production.

In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.

Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can't just bomb them into submission... Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.

I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.

They'd need to source the components outside of the increasingly monopolistic US-alligned group of hardware manufacturers. The only way you end run the Big Three is to go to... CHINA. And we've layered so many sanctions, tariffs, and putative measures on import of Chinese hardware that it would be a fool's errand to bother.

I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.

Even if there's an AI crash, the long-term outlook for chip demand only goes up. The problem isn't with the economic demand, it's with the provisioning of capital. For the most part, you need to spend tens - if not hundreds - of billions of dollars to start producing even the middle tier of nano-computing components in modern use.

I might suggest there's another way to tackle this problem. And it's one that Valve already is heavily invested in.

Lower resolution games. Lower hardware requirements. More efficient software engines. More games focused on the mechanics and story than the raw, realistic visuals.

You can run Doom on a pregnancy test and people still buy that game. Games like "Undertale" and "Vampire Survivors" do incredibly well in part because they are so accessible to anyone with a 15-year-old rig. Rather than trying to build a PS5-killer machine, you can go the Nintendo route and build a novel interface that runs on more basic components. Then you exploit the hell out of your Disney-esque IP without worrying that Halo: Remastered Delux Ultra looks better than the next iteration of Metroid Prime.

I don't know if there's a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.

My understanding is that it’s the latter. AFAIK it takes something like 3-5 years to get a fab going if you already know what you’re doing, so it would not only be wildly expensive but you’re also gambling that RAM won’t come back down to a reasonable supply/demand in the next 5-10 years to break even on the whole process.

There’s also the fact that it wouldn’t really make sense for Valve unless they wanted to make a huge pivot in their whole business. Entry costs aside, manufacturing RAM is not really something a company can just do as a “side gig”. Valve is only like 400 people, so it wouldn’t be Valve just “starting to produce RAM” but rather Valve turning itself into a RAM manufacturer that also distributes video games.

Chips. Where are they made? Right now its in Taiwan. Wafers for these chips are the most expensive part and that requires special factories and incredibly expensive engineers.

Valve cant just make chipa, they have to make it in quantities to satisfy demand while justifying upstart costs.

No need, others vountries ram are emerging. Hope they start to get to techno. Even better if they copied it from US. I think they are at reliable ddr4, testing ddr5.

Depending on your steam machine you get, it might have empty slots. I think one of the interviews said some will have a single stick of 16 and some two sticks of 8 just because the stock for RAM is so dumb they are taking what they can get.