[MichaelZuo]

Isn’t that the point?

Everyone knows the commodity market (outside HBM) is going to be margin crushed within a few years… by CXMT, demand swings, and so on.

So nobody cares to fully meet the demand today. They are perfectly happy telling customers (those not willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front at least) to go pound sand.

They don’t even need an OPEC like arrangement. They are effectively perfectly coordinated already in dismissing customers.

[Analemma_]

Yes, there are a bunch of bizarre comments in here. "Why aren't they rushing to make more fabs? Don't they know China is using this moment to the enter the market in a big way?" Yes, they do! And building more fabs would make that worse. The last thing you want to do before a state-backed player enters the market in a boom cycle is load up on debt to produce more capacity just before the bust.

[state_less]

It's a bit surprising many here are referencing the memory supply cycles without mentioning this revolutionary new application for memory people call AI. It'd be like talking about weather cycles and climate without mentioning global warming. Just like the planet is not going to get colder on average than it was for the foreseeable future, we're not going to need less memory for the foreseeable future.

China is trying to be vertically integrated, completely independent of outside influences and own the future supply/means of production. Memory and chips are piece of their larger plan. In any event, whatever China brings online will be absorbed - imagine a future where people's home computer has 100 to 1000GB of RAM in one variety or another. Folks are going to want better chips and more memory for years to come, supply will be absorbed.

[mrandish]

> this revolutionary new application for memory people call AI.

Most analysts think LLMs will elevate the long-term base RAM demand level. I mentioned 15-25% above prior projections without AI, which I think everyone agrees is highly likely. That's actually a lot because it's an overall market number and RAM goes lots of places other than PCs, servers and high-end mobile (depending on how you segment, 25% overall could be in the neighborhood of doubling PC, server, high-end mobile demand).

Above that range analyst estimates diverge. Some are more bullish, and a few are much more bullish. But everyone's error bars get much wider when the numbers go over 30% overall. It's hard to tease out exactly how much of the current demand bubble will persist in the long-run. Clearly, the current market is distorted by short-term dynamics but which part is base demand and which distortion?

How much consumer AI compute will be on-device vs aggregated in load-balanced clouds? How much RAM will that kind of compute require? Will the market find it's more efficient to consolidate around two or three mega-datacenters or will each frontier lab (and geopolitical block) continue drag racing each other to tie-up future RAM (as much to keep it away from competitors as for their own needs). I don't know. I've been watching this game as an interested bystander for several decades and I wouldn't bet too much of my own money on the most bullish estimates.

[state_less]

I think there will continue to be latent demand from PC, server and laptop users who have put off purchases as hyperscalers skip to the front of the wafer line with large outlays of spending for chips and RAM. This would likely extend out beyond the datacenter demand which analyst are pretty confident will be in place for the next 2 to 3 years, looking at Nvidia estimates alone.

I'm concerned that the regular Joe/Jane won't be getting a GPU or a system upgrade for some time. And then you have people in Africa and elsewhere who can't afford new phones.

There probably is some distortion in that the top spenders aren't terribly against cornering the RAM market and forcing everyone to pay more for local AI due to higher RAM, GPU and CPU costs while squeezing people through their APIs to access AI services, but that's an expensive gambit that depends on local models not getting good enough and frontier models to continue to get better while requiring large swaths of memory and compute, keeping consumers demanding the latest models from the APIs. But if the supply increases and people have more access to RAM, GPUs and CPUs, we'll likely see more local model usage and people doing all sorts of creative work, even training their own models.

I'm bullish, not so much of an overzealousness as having witnessed so many of these computing explosions to not doubt it much anymore. We'll collectively find all sorts of creative uses for these wafers and tech. If I were to bet on it, I'd simply buy a basket of stocks and hold, riding out the noise - nothing too surprising there.

[MichaelZuo]

If this future is so certain… where are the customers (non HBM) willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front?

Even taking bank loans at a 10% rate to pay (maybe even 15%) upfront would still make sense.