The fact that a dozen companies are allowed to buy up the entire global supply of core components, and increase the cost of living for every human on Earth, is full blown dystopian.
> That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
Yes, it's better to not do anything right? After all 'the market' is working for some.
No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.
> But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc.
You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.
The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.
The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.
There's solutions to everything you mention and as I said, usually when sanctions are applied to countries, companies and individuals are meant to deal exactly with this.
This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'
If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.
> If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to,
There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.
If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.
I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.
> but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
That might actually be the goal. A more fragmented market would mean each participant has less money, so they would try to watch their costs a bit more closely. The innovation rate (in non-cost-cutting areas) would probably decrease, maybe even substantially... which some people happen to consistently advocate for. A lot of lost efficiency would be reclaimed in a few years, but the whole system would be more stable, cheaper, and less centralized as a side effect.
Yeah, it would be suicidal to do that when it's your budget that gets the taxes from those giant corporations; who would want to willingly reduce their income for years? The rest of the world would benefit tremendously, but it could be a net plus (socially, politically, if not purely economically) in 5-7 years down the road - even in the country currently benefiting from the corporations the most. But that would be one to two lost elections too late, even if it turned true. So, while it won't happen, if it did, I don't believe we'd be worse for it.
Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.
> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them
One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
Then, let's see how quickly I can reinterpret whatever power you've grabbed in the name of "doing something" and pervert it for some other nefarious purpose, or just generally bypass the intent entirely as a motivated actor with limitless funds.
Many regulations, once passed, impact only those incapable of navigating around them - typically, the less-fortunate. Invariably, power taken in the name of some transient issue is never later relinquished.
> > That's why some regulation is not the enemy of the people that some want to make it out to be.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
> Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
The fact that you ask the important question and then continue to kneejerk at the mention of "regulations" shows the REAL problem. People have problems DISCUSSING the idea. Everyone in the world knows that regulations can be stupid, but that's not the sole property of government, businesses can be colossally stupid too.
My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.
What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.
When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
> Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
They have those powers when they're allowed to become monopolies. Unregulated capitalism leads to monopolies and slavery as they're the best way to capture all capital. Company towns, company stores, company scrip, etc.
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices.
How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
> What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work.
The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.
It’s a global phenomenon. The latency concerns for data centers are minimal, so they could be built anywhere.
If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.
This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.
If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
Yeah, imagine doing that for oil. American and EU companies that “hoard” oil get punished. The net effect would be everyone else gets to buy more and prices remain exactly the same.
Good news, you get the DDR2 that has been languishing in a salt cave for the last 20 years.
Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.
I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
A strategic reserve of a commodity that (historically) depreciates at ~50% per year is a terrible trade for occasionally avoiding demand-driven price spikes.
So, in practice, if, say, the agriculture industry buys up the supply of seeds (they already effectively do) and we see it start driving significant inflation for food (a common concern), the agriculture industry would be restricted from buying seeds?
Yes, because we can't apply specific regulation for specific industries where it makes sense, we have to write them as if we were LLMs so they can be proven to 'not work'.
Barring any single company from negotiating to buy more than a certain percentage of a given existing market of goods would be a start. Companies would still be free to build their own factories/fabs if they didn't like it.
That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
One or two companies will come out of this, designing and engineering memory and partnering with someone else to do the fab of that memory no different than making processor chips in Arizona.
The market will take care of itself. The Chinese are going use this to ramp up and build more memory, and some companies out there will take it in-house, In short, they won’t be caught with their pants down again.
Because extreme corporate use, that is, what is happening now where a majority of supply is locked up ahead of time via B2B back-room deals, is anti-consumer. Unregulated, it is easy to see how this could lead to a perpetual "rent everything" dystopian environment for consumers.
Every use of DRAM is a corporate use, with the best consumer-friendly examples like Apple’s efforts to hold down prices (until today) being thanks to “back room deals”. Nobody’s buying some DRAM to build a memory stick in their garage.
Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.
The cure for high prices is high prices. This increase in demand is encouraging economization. Factories which make components are trying to operate for more hours. Producers who haven’t gotten into RAM may try it out. Large companies like Apple may test alternative suppliers. Consumers who don’t really need an upgrade will wait, allowing others who need it to buy one.
Unfortunately, RAM is more like a taxi than an umbrella.
> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.
No? It’s an interchangeable component which is manufactured at scale by many suppliers.
Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.
Building a RAM factory is a major investment and takes a lot of time. There is a big risk that by the time you enter production the rain will have stopped in the form of reduced demand and/or algorithmic improvements that reduce the memory required to produce good results. All of the attention is on the well funded frontier labs who may be buying up RAM as much to starve out competitors as anything else while in the background there is an army of researchers all over the world who only have a handful of consumer GPU to work with.
The only one you mentioned was existing factories extending production hours. AFAIK they already operate 24/7! Apple can't switch suppliers because everyone is selling out. Semiconductor factories are specialized and can't be easily switched to other types. It takes time and money and it stops making money for the duration, leading to a similar risk analysis as building a new one.
Yeah but if you think about it... you don't really _NEED_ any of this stuff. It's all "want" and not "need" deep down. We don't really need smartphones, we're just led to believe we can't live without them.
This is true in the same sense you don't need to own a pair of shoes.
Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.
So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.
We were talking here about whether it is necessary for the government to intervene because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products.
In that context, it is not only technically true that you do not need to buy those products. This simply does not strike me as an issue where the government would need to step in and regulate the market.
> because of rising prices for consumer electronics, particularly high-end Apple products
Here's your problem. This is not a consumer or Apple-specific issue whatsoever. Computing hardware is critical infrastructure in the digital age. The AI boom is inflating the cost of almost all compute for every business, including the cost of all cloud computing.
It's alot like housing, in that the average cost of housing directly inflates the average cost of living, impacting the poorer many orders of magnitude more than the richer. When all governments, companies, and individuals depend on computers to amplify productivity or deliver services, a significant increase in price will impact every government, company, and indiviudal.
An extremely small number of individuals or orgs being able to dramatically impact critical infra, and the cost of living – regardless of why – is a major national security and supply chain failure. This is the entire reason why monopolies and too-big-to-fail entities are bad for everyone, and anti-trust laws were created to being with; to prevent an extreme minority from influencing markets in such a way that it is detrimental to consumers and other market players or sectors.
The Chinese won’t be sitting around? They will consider it a vital area. And they will keep the engines going sitting back and daydreaming will only leave you further behind…
I don’t think government needs to get involved in the West, but some of those companies affected that have the resources are gonna have to reconfigure themselves and design around the three memory companies. The Chinese certainly will.
"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."
--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith)
_Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_
I want to believe this is true, but I am increasingly encountering situations IRL where saying "I don't have a smartphone" would be a serious hindrance to doing whatever it is I'm doing.
What helped me come to my conclusion is trying to come up with concrete examples, so like "I need a smartphone cause I need maps going to a place I've never been before" instead of "I need a smartphone for whatever it is I'm doing."
Then I can be like: well, the trip sends me to the boonies, so maybe I'll have a printed/offline map as a backup, just in case.
My banks in the US and abroad all require 2fa and some of them are app-based 2fa not just SMS. All traditional banks- no neobanks.
Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.
Do we need the newest/fastest/best? Probably not, but I don’t see any major mobile OS making software more efficient for older/ lesser hardware and if you try to hold onto your old phone eventually it will be vulnerable to attacks after support for it ends.
It's 2026, the _WANTS_ are reserved for the ultra wealthy. The rest of us plebs should be happy we're getting 1500 calories everyday with a room to go back to in the evening, after increasing shareholder value everyday. Oh and don't forget to reduce your plastic usage to save the planet.
They are reserving future HW productions to meet their hypothetical usage as well. Which is why others (like Apple) can’t reserve it for their future products.
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
Sorry, I should have said "profit path", good catch!
They have revenue, but their cost scales with revenue and they're losing more than they are making.
Their costs do not scale linearly with revenue. Inference is expensive, but it's a variable cost. Anthropic's overall costs include massive fixed costs in training, which are the same regardless of usage.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
That's convenient accounting. The reality is that they can't stop training since they risk losing customers if they do so. So they shouldn't factor it out of profitability analysis.
This is not sustainable forever unless their hypothetical usage is realized, and eventually the bill will come due.
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
except if as cost here only the inference cost is considered, and not the capital investment, and maintenance costs (not to mention r&d, marketing, and others).
to put it another way, if they just had the corporate API subs today, would they be profitable?
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.