Keep in mind, many of these same DRAM makers were once caught up in one of the largest illegal business cartels ever discovered by the U.S. government over 25 years ago. Just a fun fact to store in your brain.
😡
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
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?”
Going to jail as a poor person means you lose your job
Going to jail as a rich person apparently gets you a promotion
Interesting
Doesn’t the mob and other syndicates do something like that as well? Gotta do some time and not snitch to move up in the ranks.
That means that he managed to keep the fine small enough that Samsung made significantly more money off the price fixing than they ever lost from the fine. Hasn’t changed
https://www.axios.com/google-facebook-fines-profits--134d3567-1052-4d9d-aa70-dc7c25ed4ebf.html
Cost of doing business really
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
They see the AI bubble for what it is, just like the rest of us, and they don’t want to be holding warehouses full of shovels when the gold stops coming.
entirely agree. if there were overproduction it would cause the prices to crash, can’t have that.
Micron has been building a new fab in Boise which is set to output RAM starting 2027, no?
Apparently another fab is planned already.
Infineon is also looking to expand production, if I understand correctly, though RAM may not be their main thing.
yeah this is kind of the pattern with ram price fluctuations.
Ram demand goes up.
Ram prices go up.
Ram makers say they’ll increase capacity.
Nothing happens, they may open new factories but close older lines, or they may start to open another fab but then for whatever reason it doesn’t work.
Ram prices go up.
The decision to build the new Boise fab in question (to start production in 2027) was made in September 2022. ChatGPT was made available to the public in November 2022. The new fab is likely not a response to significantly increased demand at the time but an investment made in expectation of increased demand (GPT-4 could already be tested in 2020, maybe they foresaw the LLM hype). They make DRAM. Isn’t it likely that prices are going to drop once production starts at the new fab?
Isn’t it likely that prices are going to drop once production starts at the new fab?
depends on the market; one of the things I’ve seen repeatedly is new fabs opening to produce newer processes - replacing older fabs with larger nodes that then are shut down.
sometimes it’s advantageous to keep the old lines going and eek every bit of market share out of them, sometimes it’s prohibitive to keep older processes open.
but to respond to your query: in this market? in these crazy times? I’d be striking while the iron is hot and getting the maximum I could from every dram chip because the valuations of the hyperscalers and the surrounding ecosystem - open AI, anthropic, meta, google, nvidia etc., will continue to gobble it up until the bubble blows up in their faces.
Micron Locks In Historically High Memory Prices For Five Years
https://m.slashdot.org/story/455824
ho lee fuggin sheeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiit
Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren’t much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories – and when they come online there still won’t be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM.
Well, shit. So much for that. Is that even legal?
Another source with same info…
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Micron-sets-high-memory-prices-for-5-years-11344834.html
Well, shit. So much for that. Is that even legal?
AI should be illegal if this is the consequence. fuuuuUUUUuu
It’s related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they’re cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they’re buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.
As soon as the first one fails, it’s all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.
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
I mean, it seems pretty obvious at this point. The data centers aren’t getting built in time for all the hardware they’re buying up to get used, so it’s just sitting in warehouses and will be obsolete by the time any of these new data centers are built (if they ever actually are). And Jensen Huang has been waxing poetic about a future in which people don’t own computers anymore, they rent them to run AI agents on.
I’m not saying this is a sane and rational thing they’re pursuing, and it’s certainly doomed to failure because no one wants to rent computer time to run AI agents. But trying to prop up the AI bubble certainly seems to be the primary goal of all this ridiculous hardware purchasing.
Yep. Just like how nobody uses Windows since Linux is easily accessible.
Wait
What are you talking about?
The general public adopting open tech themselves instead of using corporate options
Was that not clear?
It’s not the average consumer spending thousands on tokens. Even my work just had a meeting about how “the free lunch is over” now that AI costs are expanding, and they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.
Linux is widely used in the enterprise world. It’s the home consumer world that doesn’t use it as much and even that is rapidly changing as things enshitify.
they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.
That’s going to be incredibly hard to make economical I bet, unless you have the ability to basically max out the utilization of the hardware around the clock.
general public
I hope China floods the market with cheap RAM and absolutely destroys these scumbag memory companies.
It will take maybe two to three years before China could do that. The cheap Chinese RAM manufacturers are only starting their production.
That’s true, but after that point the capacity is there and it will be harder to constrain supply in this way after that. After China establishes a major memory player, I assume they wouldn’t want to fall behind after that point either.
Fingers crossed for the next 5 years.
So maybe try to remember that after the AI bubble burst, and there is more RAM than customers, and it’s the customer that sets the price.
I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They’ve certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
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.
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.
AsmL is a dutch company…
Also ,i’m not sure if HBM requires the smallest nodes
And China also can’t really invade because all the facilities that make the silicon are rigged to self destruct if China puts boots on their soil, at least last I heard.
Would be brilliant
I mean, it would bring global tech to a standstill. It would be a significant problem. Once existing stuff broke, there would be no replacement. I know very little about chip manufacture, except that the lithography machines are fantastically complex and costly. It would probably take years to spin up new production.
This seems like a pretty solid mutually assured destruction deterrent and doesn’t even involve nukes.
You have clearly and concisely explained the exact reason the US wouldn’t and couldn’t allow China to invade Taiwan (well, wouldn’t under a rational administration).
It’s a lot of things. But complex tech can involve literally thousands of hardware engineers. Each with very specific skills.
The proximity of these highly skilled workers to cheap chinese labour is another reason why this is difficult to replicate elsewhere.
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 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.
Currently the spot price for dram is massively high. Theres so so much profit right now.
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.
You know i always forget how small valve actually is.
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.
RE: Memory Procurement Quote
Did I stutter?
RAM Don (he/him)
Memory Racket LLCI think legacy american market ram companies need to be blacklisted.
Once China floods the market, we need to put these fuckers out of business.
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.
I think the wafer is dominated by the Japanese. The Dutch company you are thinking of is ASML and they manufacture 90% of the precision machines that manufacture chips in the world.
Is that what I said?
They should also sell it with empty ram slots…
I’m sure a lot of people have a desktop with more ram than it needs that wouldn’t mind sacrificing a stick or two for a steam machine in thier lounge, especially of they’ve switched over from windows 10 to Linux on their desktop…
What’s to stop them from just going a generation back and using DDR4 instead of DDR5.
There is no one who can convince me that it makes any noticeable difference anyway. When I was putting together a new/used desktop I specifically looked for DDR4 for precisely that reason and I would take any bet that a performance hit would be measured in numbers too small for any user to even notice.
Constantly needing newer hardware with only fractional improvements is the biggest scam in tech. They took their lesson from Apple and Samsung.
I don’t think DDR4 is significantly cheaper. Plus, they would have had to go a CPU generation back too then and I think the AMD CPUs of that generation had way worse integrated graphics, so now you’d need a dedicated GPU as well.
I haven’t been following the Steam Machine, but are they using integrated graphics for it?
Nah, it’s some kind of a mobile GPU.
Looks like a custom GPU configuration based on AMD hardware to me. So not an iGPU, but also not a mainline card.
DDR4 prices have come up too. In fact, DDR3 and even DDR2 prices have spiked.
That article is confusing, are they talking about the RAM chips themselves? Or the packaging(sticks)? Or both? Also without an ad blocker on a phone, that article is herpes. Why would anyone voluntarily read an article from that site.
I feel like Valve would have been better off designing a new motherboard and discrete GPU design to facilitate cooling and smaller cases.
Make a new standard and allow any third party to use it.
They just wanted to make a new GameCube instead.
Yeah, because everyone agrees the price is too low and more engineering and manufacturing costs are needed to beef it up.
I’m talking about something that is closer to a true PC ecosystem than the locked-in underpowered overpriced DOA system.
If the price is going to be exorbitant the system might as well be customizable and not limited to AMD’s trash bin.
There should be a “no RAM, no storage” option.
Valve managed to make a system that can possibly outperform a PS4 for $1050 plus tax plus whatever a controller costs.
The PS4 can also play DVDs, Blu-ray’s and comes with a controller.
Who the fuck has physical media in 2026? I have vinyl records, but no CDs, DVDs or BluRay… Fundimentally its a little linux system, so a USB bluray drive off amazon should just work.
But yes, a ram and diskless version would be nice.
You don’t have to know the people that have physical media to know that it is valuable.
It just gives the old console even more value. It’s a 1080p system with a massive library of great games at dirt cheap prices.
I don’t know how Valve could have dropped the ball any worse.
If it had an optical drive I wouldn’t be buying it.
Straight up a waste of space and plastic and componentry.
Its not 2010 any more, DVDs are gone bro.
I don’t think you’re gonna buy the Steam Machine even without an optical drive.
PS4 Pro is $210 on Amazon. With an optical drive that lets you borrow games. Rent games from a public library. Buy used games. In addition to movies and Blu-ray’s that are much higher quality than any streaming service unless you have worthless eyes and are some kind of child that thinks that time passing makes things inferior.
It might be $210 bucks but I already have like 8k worth of games on Steam. Also, I wouldn’t buy a PS4 I’d just look in a landfill for a free one.
There are no games on playstation, by comparison.
I don’t buy optical media because I just steal 4k footage and watch it on a 4k panel that a PS4 can’t drive.
I don’t know why you’re bothering to argue with me, unless you’re some sort of timetraveller from 2016. In which case, theres a terrible pandemic coming in about 4 years time. You should invest in face masks.
You’re the one butthurt that people still use physical media and that an old console is a much better deal than Valve’s e-waste.
You seem like the type of person that has many friends so I’m gonna let you go back to them. Go ahead and add another downvote to this message. You’re a true redditor.
No, I’m just annoyed that you’re spouting bollocks at me and haven’t stopped.
If you disagree on valve share in publishing a game on steam it would pretty much be the same story. Valve is a for profit corporation whos ceo own an entire fleet of mega yachts, they are just as shit as any other corporation.
It’s hard to believe that it’s just a RAM issue.
Valve is going full Apple with the SSD upgrade. They’re making a healthy profit from each system they sell.
Why shouldn’t they? Margins are going to be tight btw, so they’re really not. What they’re really selling is a vehicle for Steam.
BTW, try putting together a same or better spec build yourself and get back to us with the cost.
Why shouldn’t they?
Because they are a for profit company with a billionaire ceo. Making profits it’s their job.
BTW, try putting together a same or better spec build yourself and get back to us with the cost.
The price you pay for something in a store is not the same price valve pays for a stock of parts. They buy the same stuff for a lot cheaper and resell it at an higher price to make profits.
