I'm not a business guy, but I think I would be very worried if I created any opening (even on the very long term) for competition to justify itself being built up to meet demand (or national security requirements of other countries) on an industry I mostly control, because I prioritized extremely high prices for a few years that might have the effect of changing the arithmetic for potential competitors that wouldn't have done it before.
It makes me consider whether there would be retaliation in later years against the US intellectual property system in countries other than China. While RAM is a tangible product, the areas it serves aren't really.
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jmward01
This is abdicating an entire market in the hopes that your ability to manipulate it later, which has worked so far unfortunately, will hold. It is so obviously market manipulation here. Sure, prices would go up when this much server demand comes in but it is so profitable to make DDR5 that completely abandoning that market is stupid and only works if all players move in unison. It would just take one of the big three deciding to be the consumer maker to dominate the market and reap massive profits now and later when the server market cools and the other two try to come back. The fact that they are all shying away from such a ridiculously profitable sector is clear evidence of the collusion. They need jail time, again, but this time not allow those going to jail to become the CEO when they get out. They should also have fines that actually stop this behavior in the future. Fines so punitive that it actually brings into question their ability to continue as a company.
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water-drummer
Shovel seller says shovels will be expensive in winter so make sure to buy as many as you can today.
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proxysna
I have huge hopes fox CXMT entering the market and at least offsetting this nightmare. Just this week i've paid ~$1k USD for 2x32G DDR5 ECC, insane.
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twelvedogs
doesn't seem unlikely, i'd probably ask someone who won't massively benefit from people believing that it will be tighter though
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BatchJob
The war on general purpose computing is ramping up. They are coming for your computer....get ready.
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damowangcy
remind me in a few years when the same CEO is writing long post on Linkedin explaining why they need to let go half of the company.
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pjmlp
I guess it is back to the old days, when home computers had the memory they had and that was about it.
When are we getting the wave from REIN (Rewrite Electron In Native)?
HPsquared
I look forward to memory optimizations in software design.
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PowerElectronix
It'd be a shame if their two main sources of income (openai and anthropic) were to go bust...
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pbkompasz
> Acer CEO says memory makers are hyping 2030 shortage fears to protect margins — PC prices set to decline by late 2027, cheaper Chinese capacity coming online delivers lower memory prices
spiclk
If only we'd all made do with 640k!
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Nerdrotic
Micron profited immensely by exiting the retail RAM / SSD markets. All the big manufacturers used Crucial RAM. Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. They are the number one reason RAM is so expensive. They decided it was more important to make trillions selling to the A.I. hyped data center buildouts. They weren't wrong, they made serious money. I'm still rather pissed off about it.
cosmic_cheese
As an end user it’s difficult to not be bitter about the situation, particularly when you have execs coming out and saying, “yep these prices sure are terrible, better buy now before they get even worse!”
I’ve seen people say, “well that’s just the free market, there’s a customer that’s willing to pay more than you,” but that argument doesn’t hold water when industry incumbents are actively obstructing entrance of new competitors into their primary markets. Micron, etc can’t both refuse to carve off more of their capacity for consumer-destined NAND and also refuse to allow others to fill the vacuum they’ve so conveniently created. Either you’re serving the market or you’re not; you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too under properly functioning, healthy capitalism.
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baalimago
I thought that the bulk of memory is already "technically bought" by the AI hyperscalers in the form of the big (not so) "hidden" debt? As in: the supply should already be known.
Why the need for speculation?
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TJSomething
Sounds like I'm not buying a computer or a phone for 2 years. I hope my Pixel 6 lasts that long.
mring33621
per yahoo finance:
MICRON INSIDER TRANSACTIONS (LAST 6 MOS)
Purchases 887
Sales 337,619
Seems like the Execs aren't seeing this as a good thing for their company
xnx
Micron stock has gone up 10x in the past 2 years in a sector where the barrier to entry is lower than GPU/TPUs. CEO will do everything he can to keep stock price from returning to the mean.
perarneng
The ripple effects are going to be big. Its going to be rough for any company building products with RAM in it. People will hold on to what they got.
probablypower
If I made a similar statement in my industry, I would be jailed or at least heavily fined for market manipulation.
dhbradshaw
I think as a manufacturer I'd be less worried about competition than about vertical integration by large players.
It makes sense to de-risk your supply chain and at this point memory is a key supply risk.
exabrial
The cartel has spoken.
jmyeet
One factor constraining supply for RAM in the short-to-medium term is that memory manufacturers is that DDR5 (and assumedly DDR6) capacity is being moved to the much more profitable HBM.
I think supply will be tight until at least the AI market crashes, which could take years or happen within months. Nobody can really predict when this will happen but it's fairly clear (IMHO) that the revenue projections needed to justify the investments by OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX simply don't exist.
Without the AI boom, the economy is in recession and has been for awhile. We're in an affordability crisis and the energy crunch is coming.
rickdeckard
Kudos to the memory supply-industry on converting their market in a way that a handful of large-scale customers moved from mere supply-forecasting to outbidding themselves to BUY future production of chips for years to come.
I would now like to open the floor to investigations in this industry to determine whether this is hindering free-market forces and is ripe for regulation, as no-one is able to actually compete with these handful of companies anymore.
...anyone?
...ah yeah, right, I forgot. They also found a circular financing scheme which enslaved the entire global economy and organically prevents governments from properly governing their industry.
formvoltron
Folks... If token demand goes up 3x and vera Rubin boosts tokens per second by 7, then wouldn't you need less memory?
Or did I mess that up?
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api
CXMT is coming for this market, and this creates a huge opening for it.
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wewewedxfgdf
Obviously, because they are making a killing.
muddi900
I just got some windfall. Maybe I will pickup the Macbook Pro I so desperately need!
cmiles8
If you follow the money though much of this future “demand” is on fulling orders from the AI labs and at the moment the AI labs don’t have the cash to pay that bill. A rather important detail in this whole mix.
So either the labs need to start printing money, now, or there’s going to be a whole bunch of excess chips hitting the market in 2027-28.
Someone in the middle is going to get left taking delivery of all these chips but unable to collect payment for them. And someone else is going to get left holding the bag on data center loans to house those chips. That’s the storm ahead.
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fragmede
Ah, so the world is going to end in RAM chip maximizers, not paperclips.
sidewndr46
So instead of consumer's not being able to buy memory, consumers won't be able to buy memory?
nunez
makes sense. large backlog + sustained demand + constant manufacture time = larger, faster-filling backlog. i'm sure this has a fancy economics term
kylehotchkiss
Glad I got received my M5 ultra studio already, I smell a price increase coming.
maxnevermind
I guess those estimations based on projection for data Center build out, which include 30GW+ in 2027 alone, more then 3 previous years combined. Surely every human on earth will start token-maxing tomorrow and bring all of their money to their AI labs overlords to justify that explosion in spending, right?
yipinwong
In the short term, what `Neil44` mentioned "Yeah he doesn't want people delaying purchasing decisions" makes sense.
In the long term, the big comapnies are pushign to have consumers to adopt "terminals" back in old days.
- we use crappy devices, while cloud got beefy machines.
loopydosuette
and here I hoped to suspect that my DRAM prices were all fake news run by my MITM ... goood, damn it
this would be the time to revive and evolve some of that Made In Germany Engineering ...
alpha_trion
Not good. Prices are never going down
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pelasaco
And People believing that everyone will have a robot at home.. until they realize that a human is much cheaper to maintain, a bread and a liter of water is enough...
zsoltkacsandi
No one will use AI products if there won't be consumer products because of RAM shortage.
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vivzkestrel
- i have the exact opposite to say
- one of those "frontier" model IPOs s gonna tank badly and take out the entire AI hype with it
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theodric
Man whose compensation package is strongly tied to the economic performance of his company says company's economic performance will be great in 2027 and 2028 (so people should invest now to benefit from that bump)
brnaftr361
Gonna be crazy to watch this bubble pop.
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sharts
Sounds like the gov needs to spin up another “Project Warp Speed” like they did during covid.
hacker_88
Can we get the South American Cartels on it ..
shevy-java
They are milking the market now.
Make no mistake here: they also plan to retain these high prices. It's like the mafia now. There should be instant-jail time to cure these CEOs of their greed. Like, go to prison for a week, to help refresh your mind and stop thinking in terms of milking the customers dry.
I'm not a business guy, but I think I would be very worried if I created any opening (even on the very long term) for competition to justify itself being built up to meet demand (or national security requirements of other countries) on an industry I mostly control, because I prioritized extremely high prices for a few years that might have the effect of changing the arithmetic for potential competitors that wouldn't have done it before.
It makes me consider whether there would be retaliation in later years against the US intellectual property system in countries other than China. While RAM is a tangible product, the areas it serves aren't really.
This is abdicating an entire market in the hopes that your ability to manipulate it later, which has worked so far unfortunately, will hold. It is so obviously market manipulation here. Sure, prices would go up when this much server demand comes in but it is so profitable to make DDR5 that completely abandoning that market is stupid and only works if all players move in unison. It would just take one of the big three deciding to be the consumer maker to dominate the market and reap massive profits now and later when the server market cools and the other two try to come back. The fact that they are all shying away from such a ridiculously profitable sector is clear evidence of the collusion. They need jail time, again, but this time not allow those going to jail to become the CEO when they get out. They should also have fines that actually stop this behavior in the future. Fines so punitive that it actually brings into question their ability to continue as a company.
Shovel seller says shovels will be expensive in winter so make sure to buy as many as you can today.
I have huge hopes fox CXMT entering the market and at least offsetting this nightmare. Just this week i've paid ~$1k USD for 2x32G DDR5 ECC, insane.
doesn't seem unlikely, i'd probably ask someone who won't massively benefit from people believing that it will be tighter though
The war on general purpose computing is ramping up. They are coming for your computer....get ready.
remind me in a few years when the same CEO is writing long post on Linkedin explaining why they need to let go half of the company.
I guess it is back to the old days, when home computers had the memory they had and that was about it.
When are we getting the wave from REIN (Rewrite Electron In Native)?
I look forward to memory optimizations in software design.
It'd be a shame if their two main sources of income (openai and anthropic) were to go bust...
> Acer CEO says memory makers are hyping 2030 shortage fears to protect margins — PC prices set to decline by late 2027, cheaper Chinese capacity coming online delivers lower memory prices
If only we'd all made do with 640k!
Micron profited immensely by exiting the retail RAM / SSD markets. All the big manufacturers used Crucial RAM. Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. They are the number one reason RAM is so expensive. They decided it was more important to make trillions selling to the A.I. hyped data center buildouts. They weren't wrong, they made serious money. I'm still rather pissed off about it.
As an end user it’s difficult to not be bitter about the situation, particularly when you have execs coming out and saying, “yep these prices sure are terrible, better buy now before they get even worse!”
I’ve seen people say, “well that’s just the free market, there’s a customer that’s willing to pay more than you,” but that argument doesn’t hold water when industry incumbents are actively obstructing entrance of new competitors into their primary markets. Micron, etc can’t both refuse to carve off more of their capacity for consumer-destined NAND and also refuse to allow others to fill the vacuum they’ve so conveniently created. Either you’re serving the market or you’re not; you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too under properly functioning, healthy capitalism.
I thought that the bulk of memory is already "technically bought" by the AI hyperscalers in the form of the big (not so) "hidden" debt? As in: the supply should already be known.
Why the need for speculation?
Sounds like I'm not buying a computer or a phone for 2 years. I hope my Pixel 6 lasts that long.
per yahoo finance:
MICRON INSIDER TRANSACTIONS (LAST 6 MOS)
Purchases 887
Sales 337,619
Seems like the Execs aren't seeing this as a good thing for their company
Micron stock has gone up 10x in the past 2 years in a sector where the barrier to entry is lower than GPU/TPUs. CEO will do everything he can to keep stock price from returning to the mean.
The ripple effects are going to be big. Its going to be rough for any company building products with RAM in it. People will hold on to what they got.
If I made a similar statement in my industry, I would be jailed or at least heavily fined for market manipulation.
I think as a manufacturer I'd be less worried about competition than about vertical integration by large players.
It makes sense to de-risk your supply chain and at this point memory is a key supply risk.
The cartel has spoken.
One factor constraining supply for RAM in the short-to-medium term is that memory manufacturers is that DDR5 (and assumedly DDR6) capacity is being moved to the much more profitable HBM.
I think supply will be tight until at least the AI market crashes, which could take years or happen within months. Nobody can really predict when this will happen but it's fairly clear (IMHO) that the revenue projections needed to justify the investments by OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX simply don't exist.
Without the AI boom, the economy is in recession and has been for awhile. We're in an affordability crisis and the energy crunch is coming.
Kudos to the memory supply-industry on converting their market in a way that a handful of large-scale customers moved from mere supply-forecasting to outbidding themselves to BUY future production of chips for years to come.
I would now like to open the floor to investigations in this industry to determine whether this is hindering free-market forces and is ripe for regulation, as no-one is able to actually compete with these handful of companies anymore.
...anyone?
...ah yeah, right, I forgot. They also found a circular financing scheme which enslaved the entire global economy and organically prevents governments from properly governing their industry.
Folks... If token demand goes up 3x and vera Rubin boosts tokens per second by 7, then wouldn't you need less memory?
Or did I mess that up?
CXMT is coming for this market, and this creates a huge opening for it.
Obviously, because they are making a killing.
I just got some windfall. Maybe I will pickup the Macbook Pro I so desperately need!
If you follow the money though much of this future “demand” is on fulling orders from the AI labs and at the moment the AI labs don’t have the cash to pay that bill. A rather important detail in this whole mix.
So either the labs need to start printing money, now, or there’s going to be a whole bunch of excess chips hitting the market in 2027-28.
Someone in the middle is going to get left taking delivery of all these chips but unable to collect payment for them. And someone else is going to get left holding the bag on data center loans to house those chips. That’s the storm ahead.
Ah, so the world is going to end in RAM chip maximizers, not paperclips.
So instead of consumer's not being able to buy memory, consumers won't be able to buy memory?
makes sense. large backlog + sustained demand + constant manufacture time = larger, faster-filling backlog. i'm sure this has a fancy economics term
Glad I got received my M5 ultra studio already, I smell a price increase coming.
I guess those estimations based on projection for data Center build out, which include 30GW+ in 2027 alone, more then 3 previous years combined. Surely every human on earth will start token-maxing tomorrow and bring all of their money to their AI labs overlords to justify that explosion in spending, right?
In the short term, what `Neil44` mentioned "Yeah he doesn't want people delaying purchasing decisions" makes sense.
In the long term, the big comapnies are pushign to have consumers to adopt "terminals" back in old days.
- we use crappy devices, while cloud got beefy machines.
and here I hoped to suspect that my DRAM prices were all fake news run by my MITM ... goood, damn it
this would be the time to revive and evolve some of that Made In Germany Engineering ...
Not good. Prices are never going down
And People believing that everyone will have a robot at home.. until they realize that a human is much cheaper to maintain, a bread and a liter of water is enough...
No one will use AI products if there won't be consumer products because of RAM shortage.
- i have the exact opposite to say
- one of those "frontier" model IPOs s gonna tank badly and take out the entire AI hype with it
Man whose compensation package is strongly tied to the economic performance of his company says company's economic performance will be great in 2027 and 2028 (so people should invest now to benefit from that bump)
Gonna be crazy to watch this bubble pop.
Sounds like the gov needs to spin up another “Project Warp Speed” like they did during covid.
Can we get the South American Cartels on it ..
They are milking the market now.
Make no mistake here: they also plan to retain these high prices. It's like the mafia now. There should be instant-jail time to cure these CEOs of their greed. Like, go to prison for a week, to help refresh your mind and stop thinking in terms of milking the customers dry.
Micron may be out of business by then.