Wonder if a consumer can get around the tariff. If the price is too high, it becomes more economical to pay a bit extra for a roundabout way of getting it.

Canadian here ...what's a tariff?

¿Porque no los dos?

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.

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.

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.

Assuming the chips are fungible, China might buy fewer Samsung or Taiwanese chips and that’s more chips for us Altman & Amodei

it's orders of magnitude harder to do with ram than with a complete, network-connected device. not saying it's not possible, but I personally wouldn't be very worried about it.

What's your alternative?

No shit. What I want though is memory prices to go back down here.

It's about complex products which contain RAM rather than other component.

Anything made in China which has RAM in it will have its price affected by the price of RAM so if Chinese brands of such products have access to cheaper RAM than non-Chinese brands, they can outcompete the latter on price whilst delivering similar quality products.

Personally I tend to assemble my own desktop PCs, but for example in the past when buying a Mini-PC I would pick a Chinese brand one if cheaper since the quality is the same. Now imagine if the Chinese brand is now 1/2 the price of the non-Chinese one because the former uses RAM from China whose price is nowhere as high as the hyper-inflated South Korean RAM - in this kind of device were the quality is the same, the Chinese product will always be the better option if it's half the price because of using way cheaper RAM.

I'm take one Beijing, please.

unless they eventually don't need foreign currency anymore because their own country produces everything they could ever need or want

If their competitors can’t keep up

Their competitors have already sold out their entire 2027 production.

The money they make selling RAM to private consumers is not even 1 promille of their revenue.

That was back before tariffs and any goodwill whatsoever dissolved.

You see, that is in your own words crap, they keep the good stuff for themselves.

US Sphere of influence includes Israel, not exactly great TBH.

spheres of influence

Let's aim for a world without spheres of influence, shall we?

Production of basic necessities and planning an economy is good. China build so many apartments they now have 90% home ownership instead of treating housing as a speculative asset. Now they caught up in high tech and in will be producing highest tech computer chips. And they are building nuclear power plants so you can actually buy AI tokens that do not contribute to the destruction of our world.

Also North Korea is far less dire than depicted these days. I wouldn't want to live there but life expectancy is something like 74 years so overall it's probably far from the worst country on earth.

You shouldn't trust the mainsteam western media or institutions about any of this.