Wait, what? #OutOfTheLoop

You cant just "fund a startup trying to make ram". Chip fabrication is probably the most difficult and capital intensive production process there is. What manufacturing more ram looks like is investing tens of billions of real money (not the you give us stock we let you use our GPU deals the AI companies have been doing) and then waiting 5-10 years before the fab you funded starts to make chips, and hope prices are still high by then.

That's why the existing manufactures are slow to scale up, they arent sure that the current spike in demand will still be there by the time their scaling up increases production.

Honestly, no. There is no fast way to spin up fabs for this stuff. A lot of lithography equipment for the top tier stuff is made by 1 supplier, stocking a shitload of fabs with the right gear just isn’t something they can do.

IMHO, the fastest way out of this mess would be for governments to regulate how supply is spilt between consumer and enterprise products.

That still might take 10y because lithography printers aren’t cheap, their location isn’t cheap, and so much more. Once you watch an Intel, TSMC, or Texas Instru… chip factory tour.

Wait, why doesn’t Texas Instrument cash in or did they offshore their production too?

They're going to start up an entire RAM company to fill a temporary shortage?

Honestly, we should probably just have a state owned and ran chip fab company. If the US is serious about security and/or innovation, that's what needs to happen. There's no way it's going to happen though sadly, but that's what should be done. >

The problem is it doesn't solve the core issue. What's to stop an AI data center buying up all the startup's stock and future stock also.

The “demand” is in the future. It may never be realized. There’s no money in starting a chip fab when there’s only a manufactured shortage. The chip companies aren’t adding capacity because they don’t need it.

It is an extremely long and complicated process to do so. China has been trying to enter chips manufacturing for decades and are now almost there (they don't have the capacity to produce the most advanced chips yet, but are still working on it).

However the moment they got a decent DDR4 production going they announced they are going to "phase them out" in favour of DDR5 chips (of which they have not really perfected the process yet) so they can be used for Chinese AI-datacenters.

I went to my thoughts store and they were all out of thoughts. The prayer store? Out of business.

They aren’t artificially creating this problem, they are inadvertently creating this problem.

AI companies need RAM and other compute components to feed the AI beast which drives up demand, and cost but reduces supply for everyone, including their Xbox and Surface divisions.

Given their enterprise divisions make vastly more money than their consumer divisions, nothing will change.

I haven’t bought an XBox since the 360 because it was such a vapid upgrade path.

Asha was absolutely put in place to be glass cliffed.

Not sure Xbox will be gone any time soon, but once Asha has taken all the blame they'll get back to the same old BS.

Oh I hope not. The one part of Microsoft I actually like is World's Edge, and that sits under Xbox.

"We're going to crash in to that orphanage! AHHH!"

"Then brake..."

"OH THE HUMANITY!?!"

You can stop pulling the lever at any time. All that happens is modern society unravels as we enter the financial equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb going off. The same will happen but slightly worse if you keep holding the lever.

Soley? No. Huge part of it? Absolutely.

let’s not pretend they’re solely responsible for the memory pricing crisis.

Nobody is claiming that. Did you even read the literal first sentence of the article?

the memory pricing crisis that its own AI ambitions are helping cause

Kinda direcly are, as they funded a lot of OpenAI during the early years. And later years.

You think RAM prices are ever going to drop?

Sweet, summer child..