The memory makers will not expand demand drastically. It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied, otherwise the following oversupply will kill them. Instead, supply is just rerouted from less profitable segments such as mobile and personal computing.
China doesn't have EUV fabs... They've pushed DUV impressively far... but until they get EUV working industrially (and reasonable timelines are at least 2-4 years for that) it shouldn't be possible for them to compete for that market.
The future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed. China will mass produce something to the point that it is widely distributed. That is how China acts as a great equalizer on a global scale.
Another way China is a great equalizer is their willingness to do business with anyone that can pay.
China is willing to do business while giving zero fucks about the environment they are destroying and the global warming they are causing. It really blows my mind people support the china thing so much around here.
...why wouldn't it be? Who cares if e.g. Greenland has near-zero total emissions if nearly nobody lives there? Emissions are a cost of human existence, of course absolute emissions should scale with population.
No, most of the rest of the large developed economies have some standards (e.g. against buying conflict minerals) and sanctions against certain regimes. China is quite happy to ignore that if they can get away with it.
> but until they get EUV working industrially (and reasonable timelines are at least 2-4 years for that)
Does this not count as soon? How often do you buy new computers? That seems pretty soon. I remember a year or few ago being told it'd never happen so they're already infinity years ahead of schedule if we accept that as reasonable. The rate they're pulling ahead of expectations appears to be so sharp there is a risk they leapfrog EUV to go on to the next big thing.
How much does the node size matter for dram? My understanding was that it’s been marginal gains on sram since about 7nm TSMC. I would naively expect the capacitor size requirements not to shrink as well as logic, does the smaller transistor make up for the lower capacitance, or do they have to run at higher frequencies and refresh more frequently?
Not an egalitarian society, but their companies have a honey-badger like mentality from what I have read, where they ruthlessly reduce costs and margin down past where non-Chinese companies cannot compete.
But they do build infrastructure, usable, infrastructure, ever already built that railway all the way to Tehran, and once the war is over between Ukraine and Russia, they almost certainly will build high speed rail all the way to Europe.
Would’ve been nice if the United States had built a rail system to north to Alaska or even a rail system to Chile to the south?
I guess doing things like that are hard to do when you’re busy fighting multiple wars since the early 1950s.
There are no egalitarian societies. Societies in the west favour the super rich and believing anything else is simply delusional. Sorry to burst the bubble.
If you think that South Africa is absolutely egalitarian, you're wrong.
If you think that Norway is absolutely egalitarian, you're also wrong.
But if you think that "South Africa is egalitarian" is as wrong as "Norway is egalitarian", then your views are more wrong than both of them combined.
To state that no country is absolutely egalitarian does not mean that "China is hardly egalitarian" has to be wrong. And even if some other country (say Norway) were to be as hierarchical as China, that would not disprove the claim that China is hardly egalitarian. It would just mean there exist other inegalitarian countries too.
The thing about China is that they will iterate and iterate some more until they get there and then once there, well like BYD they will disrupt the entire market the cozy days of resting on your laurels for the American/Korean memory companies is over.
The big three memory makers will probably face their last big payday. I hope they enjoy it, as China will dominate the global memory market in three-five years due to their short term greed.
Apple will likely bring memory in-house, like they did with CPUs and GPUs. Anyone questioning the time it took to replace Intel and Qualcomm should consider the Chinese expansion in the memory market, which makes it a long-term necessity.
Apple has the money, and while its competitors have spent/squandered $1 trillion on the AI data center fiasco. Apple made a decision to stay away from the blast crater.
Meanwhile Apple which also has the expertise in engineering and chip design can do what is necessary and bring memory in house. Note: Nvidia and Broadcom have also been replaced along the way by Apple also.
Who knows maybe Intel will condescend to do memory too?
There is a certain amount of capacity to produce memory. They are building new facilities but it takes a long time. They have been burned going down this route many times in the past (e.g., losing money, firms that are no longer in business).
The Korean memory makers are playing the same game as Micron and simply moving existing capacity up-market.
GP was referring to upstart Chinese memory manufacturers like ChangXin, who - if their yields manage to catch the wave - could not have asked for a more favorable market after the big 3 have abandoned the consumer segment. Consumers who would have otherwise turned up their noses at CXMT will not have the luxury.
Chinese manufacturers will probably takeover consumer ram that most of us use as current manufacturing contracts expire and Samsung SK and micron move all their production to HBM for data centers. Corsair recently released chinese chips based DDR5 sticks.
I've so far been anti-chinese memory in my recommendations, not because it's Chinese (I don't really trust any big organisation/govt other than the EU?) but because they've been very new, and it's not worth PC stability for saving $50.
However with corsair giving it their blessing, and their technology having matured a bit (a lot?), and more reviews showing good stability (longevity I suppose, is TBD) they're definitely worth recommending these days.
Right, so exactly two countries in the world control most of the memory market (US and Korra). As the person above said, more global competition would be great.
They’ll also go out of business if they make a massive investment to increase supply, and then the “AI” bubble pops, cratering demand. It’s a tough spot.
There is not much information about conditions in the the mining industry in most countries, because the situation is unremarkable and comfortable. I put it to you that you have no idea what mining conditions are like in China and the situation is overall good.
It seems that you believe 'no news is good news' in this situation. But I just say it's not. A tragedy just happened this week. You will never know. And you might know much less about the other side of China unless you aware that one day by reflection. God bless you.
The Chinese healthcare system is not so different from that in the US. It is primarily employer-sponsored insurance, with subsidized insurance programs for poor and rural folk.
Up until 2005, roughly 10% of the population couldn't even access healthcare, at which point the PRC built out more care centers and invested in training more doctors, but there's still a significant shortage, such that scalpers sell outpatient appointment tickets for 10-15x markup over the actual appointment cost.
There's plenty of ways the two countries are different, but healthcare seems like an odd choice to try to "one-up" the US on, even if its programs like medicare, medicaid, social security disability and others still leave gaps.
First of, even per capita, the USA is at 8th place while China is 74.
For sure China has a problem due to its gigantic size and amount of people to even be able to reach its people, but the health care costs are nowere as high as USA has. USA is actually the country with the highgest % of GDP spend for health care alone.
Just checkout a YT video from an US American going to a normal chinese hospital and then compare the bill.
And in parallel the USA is dismantling medicare, medicad and co.
This is also directly reflected in the life expetency: US Americans are getting less old than Chinese people.
Rural China has a per capita GDP 1/10th of the US adjusting for purchasing power; if their health care wasn't cheaper only the very richest could afford anything at all. Even the wealthy coastal areas are 1/3 of the US.
China and the US have the same life expectancy of 79 years, which is a very recent phenomenon due to the 2005-2018 changes I mentioned earlier. Obesity, lack of exercise and other cultural factors weigh down the US life expectancy compared to all other Western nations. China's use of abortion during the one child policy era also prevented a lot of people who would have had chronic medical conditions and disabilities from being born.
It is not yet true, however, that Americans are getting "less old", though it may soon depending on how China manages it's own growing obesity problem and tobacco use.
In a thread about China, I replied to a post about how American healthcare is bad.
My main argument, which is in my first comment, is that healthcare is a bad way to show the difference between China and the US, since they are actually have a lot of similarities, especially with access at the lower end of the income spectrum.
There's literally no reason to bring other countries into the conversation other than to say "US is bad", which does nothing to change the reality of healthcare access in China.
Why would I, as an American engineer and user of tech hardware from China for quite some time now, need to immerse myself in the Chinese factories as if they are somehow worse than other ones throughout the world?
It's not that I cannot see them; it's that I don't care. And I certainly don't entertain sanctimonious "le China bad" nonsense like that. You live in a country where every 5 years has been substantially better than the previous 5 for a while now. You don't understand your own "privileges" if you can't understand what it's like to live in a country on a free fall that has foreclosed on the possibility of ever building anything again unless it's the latest investor ponzi scheme.
I don’t object what you said. But I think it’s just naive to think the country which seems to keep on being better is a life saver. Surely I have my privilege, compared to my fellow citizens. But that’s just what makes me more disappointed if someone simply praise this country “oh your country is great. You gonna be the first place” or so. Because I know that does none business to me or most of the people like me on this land.
And I know you don’t care about it. It’s understandable because you have your own concerns to devote to. Never mind. But just don’t put all these stuff in a simple way. Please remember the problems beneath those achievements are much more and make a larger numbers of people suffered than those who are benefited through those achievements.
I guess we might have more similarities than disagreements if those issues are abstracted out the country level.
China can afford and has the political will and power to centrally plan parts of the economy it feels like planning. Cars are obvious examples and if dram is next, western manufacturers should brace for impact.
man i keep thinking. why cant india get into stuff like this. Do their own manhattan project to build factories and tech for this and immigrate experts with high salaries.
As an Indian, my quality of life would be improved more by the Indian state first figuring out how to make functional roads and garbage collection systems
India needs to first figure out the absolute basics
During Mao/cultural revolution for all the bad, two good things were great focus on K-12 education and reducing religious fundamentalism (curbing religious powerhouses). Both of them are now biting India, alongwith standard problems of corruption that plague most poor democracies.
I am typing this on my return flight home from a business trip in Delhi. There are many other areas the Indian government needs to be focussing on first.
I had a similar view to you ~2 weeks ago. Spending some time there very quickly made me realize that there’s a lot of other things that are much more pressing.
Thanks to Indian constitution and other laws, incompetence is heavily praised and promoted. Go to any public high/elementary schools, go to any private colleges, it is rampant. It has taken three generations to produce these bad results. Of course, I am not saying that students are dumb. It is just that many smart kids in villages if given an opportunity, will leave India in a heart beat because they don't see a bright future for their future kids.
Indian bureaucracy thinks extremely short term. The state prioritizes extracting revenue over all else. So many baffling short-term decisions over everything from corporate tax breaks to a incentives for global events like Formula 1.l
You really can’t expect the same bureaucratic setup to think in terms of the decade+ it would take to be competent at something like chips
Indian bureaucracy exists to enrich themselves for their next ten generations. The bureaucracy itself promotes, recruits incompetents. There is no way to reform such a bureaucracy.
The whole system needs to be dismantled while an alternative system gets built; given the nature of Indian politics (freebies/jobs/reservations to certain groups; monthly stipends to certain groups by borrowing money while at the same time looting public funds), it is impossible.
I suspect Chinese factories will get built first, but quality may take a few years to really nail down.
Basically:
China floods the market with cheaper but less QA'd parts, makes a gazillion dollars, is able to spend said money to fix yields / QA issues and streamline operations, by the time that happens Micron and maybe a few other existing players will have new memory production, and then we'll have a flood of cheap, reliable memory. 4yr, maybe?
How long would it take an aggressive company to expand production capacity? I always thought it takes a few years, at minimum, for even established players to stand up new fabs
As far as I can tell, Micron and SK Hynix are using EUV lithography and may be constrained by availability of the equipment, whereas CXMT does not have EUV machines. There were reports that EUV lithography is needed for high yields, but CXMT appears to be proving that wrong.
It is not a law of nature that Chinese products are lower quality (cf. electric cars) and I don't see why they would go for that. They can just bin what they produce like everyone else and sell their products for what they have been tested to deliver.
But it is a near law that the first to market attempts will fully embraces the deeply engrained culture of 差不多, until market forces beat it out of the product line.
The west absolutely loves enshitified products. So why not sell them what they want? If they wanted quality they would pay slightly more and do something about it.
Because we buy that stuff even without it. And if you make both good and crappy products, why sell the good stuff internationally?
The US did it when it was a bigger steel supplier, good steel was sold domestically, crappy steel was sold elsewhere. If you got crappy steel in Africa at the time you might have thought US steel was garbage with poor QA, but in reality US steel was great and they just shipped the crappy stuff because people still kept buying it.
China is a gigantic country where one in 6 humans live that either produce directly or indirectly, 70%+ of the world's goods.
It's quite difficult to make general statements at such a gargantuan scale encompassing every single sector.
China has an abundance of terrific QA in electronics and advanced technologies as much as it has an abundance of the opposite, just simply due to its sheer size.
Don't think they'll flood the market. Instead gov will subsidize entire vertical (gpu, memory and power) - you'll just buy deepseek tokens on the cheap, just like EVs, solar and batteries. In return you'll give away your data.
This is wrong. It is NOT in their nature to keep the market under-supplied -- eg, Samsung, the industry's largest company, was notorious for expanding their capacity during the industry downturn to gain market share while everyone else was cutting back to minimize loss.
I'm guessing you are also probably unfamiliar with the terms like "chicken game" which refers to the cutthroat, high-stakes price wars where dominant semiconductor manufacturers intentionally overproduce and slash prices. This is literally how the industry went from dozens to just three majors today since the 80's.
You're making the point for him. Undersupply in a boom, store cash to ramp up capacity in a downturn. Presevres capital and avoids overcapacity during the turning
This sounds like a plan to sell less when prices are high and more when prices are low. That is one of the stupidest strategies a company could adopt. I assure you, the RAM makers are pumping out as much as they can and increasing capacity as fast as they think the market can handle.
I'm not sure what world we live in when the scheming capitalists are all hunched around their table working out how to dodge selling their products into an enormous price boom. Do they not like money all of a sudden?
Building new capacity takes years. The idea is that the market is reliably cyclical, so you should expand when there is a downturn, when costs are low and you can afford the short-term capacity hits that expansion causes (fe. when you divide productive teams in two and fill both halves to full strength with new hires).
If you prefer. But we seem to have gone from "undersupply in a boom" to a strategy of oversupplying so aggressively that manufacturers would finish ramping up supply well before the boom before it even happens. And that would be a better strategy.
The industry is so naturally prone to oversupply that the only stable equilibrium is undersupply. Aggressive expansion kicks off a price war, which immediately undercuts the logic of the expansion.
This only changes with new entrants, which will come, especially from China. But it takes time to build fab capacity, so the medium-term modal outcome is consistent undersupply.
If the existing memory makers retains control of the market and don't defect from the optimal-long-term equilibrium for themselves, that's true. It just takes one player to defect for short term gains as we've seen with some past boom-and-bust cycles. Alternatively, it takes a sufficiently-resourced player with enough incentive to enter the market themselves (NVidia, Google, Amazon, the PRC government through one of many companies...)
CXMT is scaling up incredibly fast, they are on a clock (south koreans) their monopoly will end relatively soon, although I'm guessing that the AI companies will crash before that anyways.
I struggle to think of a line of business as cyclical as DRAM, maybe like certain kinds of mining would be my only thought.
The DRAM fabs have been on a roundabout for 40 years going from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior, to struggling to keep the lights on.
And imo it's not really their fault, it's all the lead time of advanced semiconductors, combined with the commodity dynamics of oil.
And the goal is to match that supply to the demand of everything from consumer electronics to more datacenters than you can shake a stick at.
It's maddening to try and solve that, so at this point I really don't fault them for prioritizing survival.
> from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior
"Accused" makes it sound like these things may still be up in the air, when they very much are not. I would choose instead the much clearer "A number of those involved in DRAM production have a proven history of cartel behavior and price fixing."
For those who may not be familiar with some of the history in this area:
I said accused mainly because the big 3 won their last antitrust suit in the US, sort of "what have you caught me for, lately?" approach.
For all I know, maybe they are dumb enough to try and actually coordinate again, my hunch would be no, or they've tried something new and inventive.
Like Matt Levine talked about how so many landlords were using the same software to set prices, that one was pretty shady.
But it is interesting where it is popping up at the moment, like power transformers is another area. These companies have lived through these cycles before, and know there is no one to save them if they overleverage and get it wrong.
What you described only works if the manufacturers agree to price fix. Otherwise, in a free market, they'll race to increase their earnings by meeting the demand.
Supply and demand always balance out. There is no way manufacturers aren’t going to compete away these inflated margins, as long as they feel like this demand is sustainable.
Increasing the availability doesn't mean decreasing the price ... people think those are intrinsically related - not so much.
You can get a prada shirt for $2,000 ... as many as you'd like, for $2,000 a piece. No problem. They'll make the factories go burr all night long. Still $2,000.sweeping
There's a bunch of things like this. $100 bills for instance ...
a new entrant might yield a price drop, or, it might not.
> why not? i'm sure they can jump into the hustle.
Not so quick. Critical difference is the relationship between enterprises and the state. In China, the state owns the enterprise, in one way or another. High costs of memory is a threat to the established Chinese electronics manufacturers. The Chinese state can optimize returns at a higher level than the one some petty chip manufacturer operates at, especially if doing so means it could gain coercive geopolitical strength, aka blackmailing.
I mean kind of? Industry and politics are always cohorts. China has structural differences but new entrance to commodities and defensives are almost exclusively price sensitive offers. If say, Singapore or even a firm in Ohio tried to enter the market for global play, they'd undercut as a strategy
Except... Maybe they don't need to. Demand is outstripping supply right now. Competing on availability may be sufficient
You can easily see this on a mini-macro scale with popular restaurants. Often a restaurant with an equivalent menu and prices will open nearly adjacent to a very popular place and can sustain itself simply because you don't have to wait an unacceptable length of time to be seated
There's very few manufacturers, I believe 3 globally? And there's a large moat. Nobody can compete with them in the next 10 years. It's really not hard to coordinate action between 3 companies.
There really aren't though. The reason there's only three is because memory is a commodity and margins are historically very low. It's not a very good business to be in, generally.
In the past when memory supply was short and then rebounded, many companies went out of business because making memory was no longer profitable.
And margins will continue to be low, otherwise they'll discover they don't have a moat. Commodity markets being competitive is a self fulfilling prophecy.
The companies have two choices. They either produce RAM cheaply and in large quantities, or they get replaced by someone who will produce RAM cheaply and in large quantities. Current incumbents are free to pick which of those two scenarios they prefer.
There used to be over 50 memory manufactures in the US alone. Everytime there was a bust (following a boom) there'd be bankruptcies. The lucky ones got bought out and consolidated. Empirically, attempting to capitalize on memory booms is a losing strategy.
If it costs you $1B and five years to build out new supply and you think demand will not sustain for more than three years, it does not make sense to expand supply.
Instead you will maintain your margins currently and await demand to decrease back to your current supply.
This is pretty common and as others have pointed out is even more common in markets where competition is slow and lead times are long.
Ammunition is a great example over the last decade or so as political turnover caused relatively short lived demand spikes and manufacturers didn't expand supply because they knew once political winds shift, demand would decrease.
> It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied
What?! If they did an anti competitive agreement sure. Otherwise no as each supplier is incentivized to produce more than its competitor and less than the demand, while divesting just enough to survive the oversupply risk.
That’s not the Apple way, but they might fund a supplier to build out capacity in return for priority access.
The thing is they tend to only do that when they can get a technological competitive advantage. The priority access gives them a locked in competitive edge, for a while. It’s not clear there is an opportunity like that in memory.
