101–110 of 255 posts
> https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/19/cracks-are-app...
You have to appreciate the irony :)
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Market manipulation is a crime under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. You can't buy things to influence the price or the market, only to use or resell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation
The law you refer to applies only to markets for securities. RAM is very clearly not a security, it fails the Howey test. There are similar laws prohibiting the manipulation of commodity markets but I do not believe a US court would find RAM to be a commodity.
I'm curious how OpenAI has the funds to pay for 40% of the worlds ram production? Sure they are big and have a few billions but I kind of assumed that 40% for a year or whatever they are buying is easily double digit billions? That has to hurt even them, especially because they cant buy anything else? Also what are these contracts? Surely Samsung could decide to cancel the contract by paying a large fee but is that f…
I assume this includes more than just the raw price of modules but Openai only has 60 billion in funding altogether and was aiming for 20 billion ARR this year. This sounds like they are spending maybe half their money on RAM they never use? That just doesn't add up.
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> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules And? Why should they be obligated to pay for all the middleman steps from fab down to module? That includes: wafer-level test, module-level test (DC, AC, parametric), packaging, post-packaging test, and module fabrication. There's nothing illegal or sketchy about saying, "give me the wafers, I'll take care of everything else myself." > not even allocated to…
The implication here is that the primary goal is to corner the market, not to use the supply. If you aren't going to use them anyways then of course it is silly to pay for them to be finished. Do you think that's fine, or do you think that implication is wrong and OpenAI does actually plan to deploy 40% of the world's DRAM supply?
If what we've heard about no acceptable pre-training runs from them in the last two years trying to increase the memory for training by two orders of magnitude is just a rehash of what got them from gpt2 to gpt3.
If OpenAI were actually using the RAM that’s one thing - but stockpiling raw wafers in warehouses is egregious.
Also consider:
Warehouses of small, high-value items that are fungible and untraceable.
That will create multiple huge targets for a big heist. And they'd best have good eyes on their security people too.
Sounds like something big enough for organized crime to target.
There's nothing dirty about this deal. When making a large deal with one vendor he didn't disclose to them that he was making a deal with another vendor. That's pretty normal when you're trying to buy a lot of stuff. Otherwise, they can collude to shake you down. I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity. EDIT: Though even that may be wron…
It's bad for consumers period. A deal that hampers 40% of global supply shouldn't be a thing, it's predatory. I know DRAM is not a necessity, but considering that PCs are going to be affected means this affects real things like schools and hospitals. There's being smart while making a deal and there's knee-capping the market with your leveraged to the tits business
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Seems like it is, but the question is whether the current Justice Department will do anything about it.
I read "US Justice Department" the same way I read "Britain's Ministry of Truth".
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Who in developed countries doesn't buy computers and by extension ram
Who in the developed world doesn't have a few luxuries? Pretty much all of history people have had to make do with RAM being a lot less accessible than it is now. It isn't essential and people can still buy RAM in the rare situations where they actually need it. There is nothing here worth invoking the legal system over. OpenAI can buy huge amounts of RAM if they want. Good luck to them, hope it works out, looks like…
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> Moves like this should be illegal. Should be, as in, new legislation should criminalize it? What's the generalized principle? Or should be, as in existing law should cover it? And if so, what law / how?
It wouldn't shock me if this is actually just market manipulation. OpenAI in the past year seems to be operating more and more like a pump and dump machine. Their recent AMD deal seems to have been AMD giving them a bunch of stock for free in exchange for them announcing that they would use AMD GPUs for training, and OpenAI doesn't have any fab equipment so the only thing they can do with 40% of the global dram suppl…
The way it works is that OpenAI will have the DRAM delivered to Nvidia/AMD/Broadcom to be assembled into the racks that OpenAI buys.