[locknitpicker]

> 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?

For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.

[Hamuko]

The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a year ago.

[locknitpicker]

> The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up.

I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected.

It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND they will be sitting on a huge bag of cash.

I think you are confusing "I don't want to pay this much" with "this isn't sustainable". The sellers are cleaning up stock at a huge markup and buyers are still buying like crazy.

[Hamuko]

It's not sustainable because it'll basically ruin all of the industries connected to memory. OpenAI, Anthropic etc. all need a massive amount of compute to train and serve models, and increases in memory price will all drive up their already massive costs. And then on the other end, the people they need to use their AI services cannot either afford the devices they need to access the devices, or the device costs go up so much that they cannot afford to buy the services. If for example budget phones disappear completely because of memory prices, those consumers disappear from the customer pool and then the budget phone manufacturers disappear and stop buying memory, AI companies spend even more to build models for fewer people, etc.

Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?

And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.

[hurtigioll]

OpenAI/Anthropic are in the business of "replacing workers with AIs", not in the business of "selling AIs to workers"

that is a 20T market

they dont need you to afford a subscription, they need your boss to replace you with their service

[Hamuko]

I wonder about that. At the moment, it feels like OpenAI and Anthropic are in the “racing to IPO” business. I’m also not sure who is going to be buying all of this AI output when nobody’s employed.

[dopa42365]

Meet the new memory cartel, it's just like the old memory cartel but with CXMT being priced a tiny tad below.

Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism.