This was easy to predict.
Chinese government is not stupid. They have a strategy (more so than USA does). Years ago that was to dominate global manufacturing and supply chains. They were successful. Now the goal is to reach parity with Western chipmakers and/or get ahead. It’s happening.
The AI boom was like a golden gift to them. Semiconductor prices are through the roof. So if they can produce almost anything at all in quantity it will sell for inflated prices.
While the tech companies of the world jerk each other off with AI, China is building DRAM capacity. CXMT is the first and will not be the last. They will scale quickly. If they have the process perfected they will build a fab in the time it takes USA to conduct the environmental review for the consideration of allowing a permit application to build a fab. They will not build one fab they will build 5 or 10. I’m proud to be American and I love my country but I compare USA to China on the ability to execute large projects like this and China will win every time. We have too much red tape, too many lawsuits and insurance and moving parts. China executes faster and more decisively.
So give it a year or two and China will have a fleet of pretty good fabs. They will sell memory for way less than what the others do. And then just as China made themselves indispensable for manufacturing, they will make themselves indispensable for DRAM.
There’s also the issue of things not necessarily having to be the MOST profitable thing ever. Memory manufacturers decided to go to the highest bider because money. I suspect Chinese company will be quite happy to just flood the market with cheaply priced (relatively speaking) products and just get everyone’s money.
There is so much over investment in memory its going to be dirt cheap again in 2028
This is simply not true. All the major players are not investing in production. They are simply letting the demand stack and prices to rise.
China entering the market will help some, but expect these chips to be banned quite quickly in the western world for fear of communists. They are already blacklisted by many companies.
Yes they are. Samsung and SK hynix are building 4 new fabs I’m Korea 1 in the US. Sandisk and kioxia are building extra capacity in Japan. Micron is building new fan in the US. Its nearly a trillion in investment for additional capacity. These are expected to hit the market in 2027 and 2028 with lag to backfill demand.
Chinese ram will be good but not good enough to block it. Business will keep buying the high preformance stuff and consumers can have the cheap modules but they buy so little it won’t affect anything.
Exactly. Expected to hit the market in 2027 and 2028. This investment in fabs happened years ago. For example, Samsung invested in the Taylor fab (which should start production, a little early, late this year) back in 2021. Samsung KRW6 was announced this year, but thats a new technology, not new capacity. You cant build and turn on a fab in the short term.
Can we just appreciate how you first told him he’s wrong for suggesting memory will be cheap again in 2028.
Only to immediately try to frame it as “memory won’t be cheap until 2028 so that proves my point!”
Which is exactly what he said to begin with. Top notch. 👌
I eagerly await the 64GB mouse driver and the 5000PB home NAS for the discerning hoarder of the output of /dev/rnd
Noice! Now gimme gimme
Nothing a import ban can’t fix.
While making sure to write the ban in ways that doesn’t stop machines being assembled there just not in ways that lowers prices
let’s be honest, these are already banned by the Chinese device ban that banned routers.
but, truthfully, if I can’t even trust Chinese IP cams to not snoop on me, why would I trust RAM?
it’s orders of magnitude harder to do with ram than with a complete, network-connected device. not saying it’s not possible, but I personally wouldn’t be very worried about it.
Yeah that’s probably a sad truth for those in the good ol’ USA.
This is totally going to happen. And there is nothing you can do as far as spying with memory but I guarantee they will come up with some bullshit excuse related to that. I mean the only thing I can think of is some sort of kill switch but that would just kill the machine. Do that enough and nobody buys your RAM so what would be the point. Maybe just plain market manipulation but that’s pretty much happening now.
Is it normal to refer to Taiwanese RAM manufacturers as “Western”?
I’m glad they distinguish it from China obviously, but calling G.Skill and MSI Western feels kinda weird.
They do so because while the manufacturing is taking place in Taiwan, the blueprints are not.
It’s why we call iPhone american phones. Despite them being manufactured in China
Well, they are to the west of the west…so…😁
Yes, they chose to put themselves, economically and politically, within the western sphere of influence. It is not geographic. Weirdness is from your ignorance of geopolitics.
Sort of the joke in the modern US attitude towards Taiwan. They see a break-away province and have no actual respect for their sovereignty. Independent small nations are just colonies-up-for-grabs in the eyes of the US State Department.
Found the Tankie.
don’t look what the government in taiwan calls themselves
Eastern China or westernmost state of the USA? You decide!
The Chinese government being much more fans of a directed market than of a totally unregulated one (neither of which is a Free Market by the way - that thing only exists when barriers to market entry are incredibly low, and it’s not as if any Jack or Joe can set up their very own memory production cottage factory in their backyard, so it’s not possible for there to be a Free Market in RAM under current technology), they’ll probably make sure that RAM only ever leaves China as part of more complex products (i.e. computers, smartphones, tablets and so on) made in China, thus making also Made In China for those product lines be more competitive.
(In other words, want a gaming PC or smartphone with more memory - buy the whole thing from China or pay 10x more)
If properly managed this could boost quite a lot more digital electronics industries in China than merelly RAM.
they’ll probably make sure that RAM only ever leaves China as part of more complex products
Which other components are subject to this limitation in China?
It’s about complex products which contain RAM rather than other component.
Anything made in China which has RAM in it will have its price affected by the price of RAM so if Chinese brands of such products have access to cheaper RAM than non-Chinese brands, they can outcompete the latter on price whilst delivering similar quality products.
Personally I tend to assemble my own desktop PCs, but for example in the past when buying a Mini-PC I would pick a Chinese brand one if cheaper since the quality is the same. Now imagine if the Chinese brand is now 1/2 the price of the non-Chinese one because the former uses RAM from China whose price is nowhere as high as the hyper-inflated South Korean RAM - in this kind of device were the quality is the same, the Chinese product will always be the better option if it’s half the price because of using way cheaper RAM.
Well currently the Chinese manufacturers match current prices
Honestly it’ll probably be more like 3 or 4 times cheaper. I’m excited for the effects of this to start to balloon outwards. Now China just needs a graphics card/GPU manufacturer that can be competitive.
They are working on cracking EUV lithography. From the sweatshop of the west to leading in 58 of 65 advanced technologies already. Neoliberalism has been the ruin of the west.
That’s nice. Affordable RAM when?
Afaik Chinese DDR4 ram production is already keeping prices in that segment sane. They are working to break the ASML monopoly and sanctions on extreme violet light lithography to make the most advances chips and then will ramp up production. They are churning out like 10 times more engineers than the US and EU. They are ramping up but not sure when they will be able to compete at the highest level. I read 2030 earliest.
Whenever the tariffs come down.
Wonder if a consumer can get around the tariff. If the price is too high, it becomes more economical to pay a bit extra for a roundabout way of getting it.
Gray market imports into the US from China have already been big business, especially among counterfeiters and drop-shippers. Idk about getting a full-sized SUV over the border. But designer bags, electronics, and the like have been coming over for at least a decade.
Idk how much retail buyers save, though. Much like with the drug trade and human trafficking, there’s inevitably an enormous mark-up for this kind of smuggling. And because it is functionally unregulated, you get a ton of refurbished, low-grade, and outright fraudulent sales. Smuggling tends to accrue money to the smugglers and the various officials you need to bribe to move the merchandise. You rarely see retail level discounts, unless the market is so glutted with knock-offs.
Canadian here …what’s a tariff?
Might be worth doing a little research. Canada’s never been shy about using them.
RAM has not come from China, and China isn’t exporting much of it yet. Unless Canada and the EU and Japan and everyone else is also handing out tariffs on Taiwan, Korea, etc like the US is, their point was the price of RAM doesn’t have anything to do with tariffs.
The price of RAM is high globally because the AI companies have bought future-RAM with money the RAM producing companies gave them to build data centers that don’t exist yet.
Unfortunately because of the wonderful policies by sequential US governments, US citizens will not be able to buy Chinese chips because obviously the chips will spy on you just like Chinese EV’s, routers, phones, toasters, drones, etc. But all the good things by American tech companies whom totally respect your privacy, like Google scrapping all spirit airlines communication, or Flock camera drones, is just fine.
Yes, nations are generally more lenient when it comes to domestic spying compared to foreign spying.
Kind of like how I’m allowed to say my sister is an annoying asshole but if anyone else talkes shit about her, we’re gonna have a problem.
Good, more for the rest of the world.
But all the good things by American tech companies whom totally respect your privacy, like Google scrapping all spirit airlines communication, or Flock camera drones, is just fine.
A nationstate, whether a autocracy or even a real democracy, does have a genuine national security interest in preventing foreign spying. No matter how much that nationstate itself spies on its own citizens.
So the argument about domestic spying existing, to argue that Chinese spying does not matter, is quite a non sequitur.
Do you know where all the iphones in the US were made?
The chips that goes into the iphones are not made in China.
iPhones are not made in china as much as they are assembled in China. The crucial components comes from the same place as everyone elses. Taiwan.
To make a stick of RAM spyware, would cost $100k/stick or more, and the engineering to do so, could make HBM6 instead. By all means investigate the chips to see if magic chips are inside, but that is the approach we should take. Why aren’t Chinese sneakers spying on you? Far easier to hide and do more cheaply.
The hysteria of foreign spyware is shaped by established monopolies who want to keep their monopolies. There is never a proposed solution of actually verifying/inspecting for spyware.
To make a stick of RAM spyware, would cost $100k/stick or more,
how the fuck did you pull that number out of your ass?
the smallest, simplest embedded CPUs built onto the stick and wired in could do a lot. even if they can’t handle the operating memory frequency, they could access contents through another channel, and also the memory bus.
Make it look like a dram module, make the other 7 dram modules look like ones that are 7/8ths the standard size, and make the set of 8 pins work with 7 actual dram modules while still performing like a cheap standard module. so people buy it. There are no microsopic CPUs or with no pin traces leading to them.
Well, you absolutelly can make digital products that run at least some built-in software and have network connectivity spy on people, but RAM is no such product in either sense - in neither runs software (and given it’s performance constrainst it would be stupidly hard to add it as a feature) nor does it have any network connectivity.
Routers and motherboards, for example, yeah - both have network connectivity and both include and run software so shipping them with spyware is just a question of the factory or distributer putting the right software in them (for motherboards, in the BIOS and running inside as secure code, inside the CPU itself or even in certain peripherals).
(It would be possible to put it in places with more indirect access to networking - such as SSDs - but it’s more complex at they would need to hack OS binaries on the fly)
Of course, even for the stuff were it’s possible, it’s seriously deluded to think only one of the nations with insane civil society surveillance levels that sells those things - China - would be adding spyware to it but not the other one - the US: devices with the capabilities to support spyware made in or designed in any nation which does a lot of surveillance are always suspect.
Motherboards/routers (these are motherboards too) require very careful inspection, specifically if bios chip is unusual, or extra chip connected to bios. There is concern trolling over routers because Huawei is best in world. There is no concern about Motherboards, because only Taiwan is the competitor to China. The point is that inspections instead of baseless hysteria over origin is the right policy.
It’s not a question of concern, it’s a question of what’s technically possible.
It’s technically possible to ship a motherboard with spyware capabilities in the BIOS.
There are experts, even stupid fat american ones, who could confirm the existence of such spyware capabilities.
Yeah, well, when was the last time common people and business paid attention to IT Security experts BEFORE their systems were broken into?!
Also, who would pay the people with the necessary expertise to decompile all BIOS of all motherboard shipments (if at all possible, in this day and age when a lot of shit is encrypted with the keys inside a TPM module)?
I mean, just go at it another way - notice how thousands of pager sent to Lebanon were altered by the Israelis and nobody were aware of it until the Israelis made them explode.
In this day and age it’s pretty straightforward to just alter the software for some shipments and not others or add a weakness (like both Intel and AMD CPUs have) that can be used as a backdoor by software that’s installed remotely (for example, pushed as a Windows update, something which certain American 3 letter agencies can most certainly do since the have the power to demand the signing keys from MS).
There are huge numbers of vectors for spyware to end up in certain computers that start with subtly backdooring the hardware itself.
Whom do you consider to be more evil? Trump or JinPing? National states don’t exist anymore. There are two kings, they only lack the title.
The US is ruled by a junta of oligarchs like the Nerd Reich techofeudalists backing Trump. They believe in nothing, only wealth and power. Trump is no King, but a puppet and the US empire has competing interests.
Xi Jinping is similarly not ruling like a king or dictator. He is accountable to 1.4 billion people and part of what drives his party is ideology. THEY BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. That alone makes them far less evil. They are not benign but they do have a track record of improving the material conditions of billions of people, less predatory economic imperialism and no foreign wars or interventions or coups destroying other nations.
There is no doubt which one is more evil. China now leads in like 58 of 65 advanced technologies. Lets just hope the remaining socialist idealism holds and they stay less evil.
That is not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the US as well as certain other western countries are so obsessed and overreacting to anything made by the Chinese. Like the EV’s for example. Most of the world is now letting go of prejudice and import multiple brands of of Chinese EV’s. They actually pass European safety standards unlike the cyber truck. The only country now that keeps limiting its choice for its citizens, is the US. And using spying as an excuse to enrich the establishment.
Of course all countries spy. But the thought of putting spyware in memory chips is a stretch. Just costwise it’s not feasible.
Sure, but if you’re not a citizen of either i couldnt care less about which of the two evils, one will give me ram though
Pads tears with €
EU taxes the shit out of Chinese electric cars to protect the automotive industry that failed to innovate here. In fact they’ve only been adding more and more taxes and fees on anything that’s imported, usually putting the costs on regular people.
Hopefully since the EU high density desktop/server RAM industry is pretty much nonexistent (as far as I know), they won’t tax it to hell.
China RAM vs US RAM, they are both not EU “allies” now so there should be little reason.
There is more commercial proximity between China and the EU than China and the US.
The current taxation run is to curtail the online markets like AliExpress, Shein and Temu to flood the market with garbage. Shein got hit with their dumping practices very hard.
Taxing the import of vehicles, when an industry already exists just makes sense. European automakers were sleeping on their job, granted, but the other option is to let them fail and surrender another industry to non-EU territories.
China is in fact competing via something usually considered illegal in international trade: Production subsidies meant to enable their companies to sell products for under manufacturing cost so they can kill off all competition. Yes, all auto manufacturers have had help from their national govenrments, but Mercedes doesn’t get paid by Germany to build more cars to sell in China. We do EV subsidies on the purchase side in Europe, so it’s manufacturer-agnostic.
We regularly tariff things that other countries subsidize the production of. China does it as well. And China’s had tariffs for foreign cars for decades.
Chinese companies like BYD have also been trying to kick off manufacturing in Europe, but unfortunately even in Hungary it’s a bit harder to get away with slavery than in China. Hopefully they’ll find a way around watchful eyes so we can get cheaper Chinese EVs in Europe too.
Mercedes doesn’t get paid by Germany to build more cars to sell in China
Maybe Germany should try that a bit, but with the condition that the wonderful AUTOSAR is killed.
Indeed. Its a complex topic, but import taxes aren’t a (likely) complete corrupt cheeto emabrgo lockdown.
Fortune Cookies banned for being part of elaborate mind control operation.
They’re actually an American invention
Pretty interesting history, actually. They were more or less brought over from Japan by Japanese immigrants, but adapted to American tastes and ingredients (sweeter, and wheat rather than rice – the Japanese ones are more like rice crackers). During Japanese Internment, production was taken over by Chinese immigrants and they’ve been associated with Chinese-American food ever since.
They won’t sell it to you, they’re just making sure they aren’t beholden to the same ram shortages the rest of the world is.
They won’t sell it to you
China is a major consumer of RAM. If they can supply it domestically, that has the potential to reduce the volume of global imports and subsequent price pressure.
If their competitors can’t keep up, you will eventually see Chinese RAM get out onto the secondary market in the same way Chinese EVs and Chinese cell phones and Chinese solar panels and Chinese steel have depressed global prices for these commodities.
If their competitors can’t keep up
Their competitors have already sold out their entire 2027 production.
The money they make selling RAM to private consumers is not even 1 promille of their revenue.
There’s nothing Chinese won’t sell to you
I’m take one Beijing, please.
That’ll be 4 trillion (4×10^12) USD, please
What a bargain!
deleted by creator
I just looked at China’s GDP (PPP) in Wikipedia and grabbed 10 percent and truncated
unless they eventually don’t need foreign currency anymore because their own country produces everything they could ever need or want
Nope. China is too big of a country to produce everything they need themselves.
Contrary to popular belief, what china imports the most is actually electronic components. Followed by fossil fuels.
Those two categories alone account for ~40% of all Chineese imports as of 2024.
I’m sure the elites in China won’t take your money because they have gambling, sports cars, and hookers at home /s
RAM is a commodity, so if this stuff is produced in large quantities, it will affect the global market by lowering China’s demand for imported RAM.
Same as oil and gas, even if North America will never import Iranian product, their prices are affected by that stuff not reaching the market in Asia or whatever and driving up the Asian demand for oil elsewhere.
Force countries to pay for it with their currency and this will skyrocket their gdp and currency. Surpassing dollar.
What about all this other Chinese crap I own?
You see, that is in your own words crap, they keep the good stuff for themselves.
they keep the good stuff for themselves.
Do they? If anything, I believe China’s been exporting the high-end luxury items because they have absurd margins in western markets. Meanwhile, the good-enough goods stay at home, because it isn’t worth the time or effort to sail them across the ocean and market them.
I guess Temu and its peers have changed that, to a degree. But so much Temu crap just gets bought up by local American drop-shippers, marked up to American prices, and rebranded as western equivalent merch that it feels like much the same.
There is some decent Chinese stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to know though with the flood of crap. For example Anker seems consistently decent, but anything that sounds like Qihoon or Xiyomao or whatever random brand word they pop into existence on the other hand…
That was back before tariffs and any goodwill whatsoever dissolved.
I wonder how long it will take the US to view RAM like they view oil and invade China?
The US could never bring such a fantasy to reality. Anyone who still believes they could after the debacle with Iran should apply for a cabinet position.
That would officially be WW3, and it wouldn’t go well for the US.
Pretty much the entire world either dislikes or outright hates the US right now, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. There’s far more positive sentiment towards China around the world than towards the US.
I thought they had their eyes on South Korea.
¿Porque no los dos?
the memory of china spans 3k years. think about that. we dwell hard and long about the history of america and that only goes back a few hundred. and that was a time full of witch hunts, slavery and other controversial topics that’d make a great movie but come off as embarrassing in reality.
we came up with the television and the atom bomb–i say big deal. the chinese were there through thousands of years of advancements and follies, enduring and enduring and keeping their national strength through the unbearable weight of millennia. this is when americans can’t go without their smartphone for 60 seconds and believe in nothing other than legal tender.
industrial capitalism is 200 years old, the chinese are as old as mars in comparison. put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I LOL’d. Have a hug.
it cannot have a hug. pull the plug.
Hehe… Go go China !! Crush those scamming mofo’s from the US controlled sphere of influence…
Competition is good. Two spheres of influence.
Chinese sphere of influence is not good. Theirs includes the worst countries in the world, like North Korea, and Russia.
Production of basic necessities and planning an economy is good. China build so many apartments they now have 90% home ownership instead of treating housing as a speculative asset. Now they caught up in high tech and in will be producing highest tech computer chips. And they are building nuclear power plants so you can actually buy AI tokens that do not contribute to the destruction of our world.
Also North Korea is far less dire than depicted these days. I wouldn’t want to live there but life expectancy is something like 74 years so overall it’s probably far from the worst country on earth.
You shouldn’t trust the mainsteam western media or institutions about any of this.
US Sphere of influence includes Israel, not exactly great TBH.
Yeah, pulling the “America are good guys, China are bad guys” card at a time when America are unwavering allies and supporters of the nation who is openly doing in the XXI century the same kind of thing as the Nazis did, with equal levels of inhumanity and ultra-racist violence, doesn’t have quite the same power as it did even a decade ago (though even then the whole Iraq invasion thing had already showed the American “moral high ground” as being mainly a tall pile of mainly middle eastern corpses).
Yep. At the current rate neither the Chinese nor American states will save us. Neither want democracy or liberty for the average person and value control over any other moral principle.
Different performative elements and mechanisms for determing the subset of people who are priviledged elites, same operating principles.
There is zero guarantee China will sell it to consumers given that companies and governments all over the world are willing to pay premium value for current ram prices anyway
We should still benefit from China making good memory chips. Assuming the chips are fungible, China might buy fewer Samsung or Taiwanese chips and that’s more chips for us.
Assuming the chips are fungible, China might buy fewer Samsung or Taiwanese chips and that’s more chips for
usAltman & Amodei
Or they just direct them to their own AI projects before any are exported.
Why not create good will and establish a consumer brand? Undercut everyone.
If this is government backed they can do just about anything they want.
Things are moving ahead ahead of schedule.
