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Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

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Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#191

Post by rootusrootus »

overfeed wrote: post #168
rootusrootus wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so we are never going to see it for 20 grand in the US. Maybe because of tariffs and taxes, as you say, or maybe just because BYD isn't going to set the price at 20K in a market with 10x the average income.

> Right, so we are never going to see it for 20 grand in the US To be fair, @dmix explicitly mentioned the $20k price was for other countries

That is a fair point. But then it just reveals that the comparison was contrived from the outset and there was no point to be made. It has never been the case that products in different markets were priced in coordination. The price is always whatever the market will bear, it has zero relationship to the cost to produce unless the market has a lot of competition.

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#192

Post by overfeed »

ares623 wrote: post #182

Can OpenAI use their stockpile as leverage? e.g. threaten to sell their stockpile to a market that's about to stabilize to crash prices. And are Samsung, etc. happy for this state of affairs to keep their prices elevated but not seem like the bad guy.

I bet RAM is a great carrot to dangle when negotiating first-party GPU allocations with Nvidia and AMD

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#193

Post by windex »

What happens to enterprise apps like SAP and S4 on the cloud that swallow huge amounts of RAM for their in-memory database? AWS, GCP, and Azure must be running around? With their predatory pricing customers were already hesitant about upgrades, it now gets more difficult. Extend EOL for ECC?

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#194

Post by FuckButtons »

embedding-shape wrote: post #39
bee_rider wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err… is there any question that the US is trying to slow down China’s high-tech computer development? I thought that was our open goal. Countries decided the extent to which they’d like to engage in free trade together. It is a knob that we’d hope our leaders would turn strategically. (Regardless of whether or not we think our leaders actually are doing a good job of it…).

> I thought that was our open goal. Is the goal also to hurt South Korean businesses and all businesses in the world, just to "pwn China" basically?

That’s more or less how a trade war works, yes. Obviously, it’s not just Korean dram manufacturers that have been or will be the only collateral damage.

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#195

Post by beeflet »

harimau777 wrote: post #113
arjie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really that different from Apple reserving wafer starts on TSMC's next node and so on. It's just that this kind of capacity requirement has rarely shown up in DRAM before. Vendors prefer this kind of capacity reservation over a more variable finished product requirement. It allows them to know that they can build at the bottleneck rather than having to start up more capacity and then having that lie idle whi…

Did Apple reserve 40% of the supply and cause a massive shortage. If not, then I don't see how its the same.

Apple maintains efficiency and single-core performance dominance with the M-series processors by reserving capacity for cutting edge fabrication processes.

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#196

Post by oasisbob »

pixelpoet wrote: post #101

I like how one of the reference links betrays how the article itself was researched, possibly written; HN hides the end of the url, which is "utm_source=chatgpt.com": > https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/19/cracks-are-app... You have to appreciate the irony :)

Quality of the writing and thought also reveals the construction method.

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#197

Post by NegativeLatency »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #89
LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

I wonder if this kills Valve's Steam Machine and Steam Frame

Yes, I have an older gaming PC from ~2018 that I keep putting off upgrading (first GPU prices skyrocketed, now this...) and was hoping to replace it with a Steam Machine next year. Will be endlessly bummed if that doesn't happen. Will also be interesting if Sony/Microsoft was planning on releasing a next-gen system anytime soon, and I wonder if this will affect Apple's hardware at all.

I’m in a similar place, tried bazzite recently and was pleasantly surprised that it plays all my games well

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#198

Post by roadbuster »

didibus wrote: post #140
roadbuster wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's buying up 40% of all RAM production with the intention to have most of it idle in warehouses They have no incentive to purchase a rapidly-depreciating asset and then immediately shelve it, none They might have to warehouse inventory until they can spin-up module-manufacturing capacity, but that's just getting their ducks in a row

The incentive suggested in the article is to block other competitors from scaling training, which is immensely RAM hungry. Amongst other things. Even Nvidia could feel the pressure, since their GPUs need RAM. It could be a good bargaining chip for them, who knows. I'm not saying it's true, but it is suspicious at the very least. The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab +…

> The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab

The wafers are processed. That means Samsung/Hynix have taken the raw ("blank") wafers, then run them through their DRAM lithography process, etching hundreds of DRAM dies ("chips") onto the wafer.

You could attach test probes to individual chips on the wafer and you'd have a working DRAM chip. In fact, that's how testing is performed: you connect to each die one at a time with a "probe card" which supplies power & ground, plus an electrical interface for functional testing.

If OpenAI takes possession of the processed wafers and wants finished RAM modules, they need to do a few things: test each die (expensive), saw the wafer into individual chips (cheap), package them (moderately expensive), test them again (medium expense), and then assemble the final module (inexpensive). Modern semiconductor test facilities cost billions of dollars and take years to build, so they'd need to immediately outsource that work (typically done in Southeast Asia)

OpenAI likely doesn't want to do any of this. They probably just want to make sure they're in control of their own destiny with regard to DRAM, then decided the best place to accomplish that was by cutting deals directly with the DRAM semiconductor producers. This will allow them to take the wafers to the existing supply chain, then contract them to turn the wafers into finished modules.

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#199

Post by zerosizedweasle »

roadbuster wrote: post #198
didibus wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentive suggested in the article is to block other competitors from scaling training, which is immensely RAM hungry. Amongst other things. Even Nvidia could feel the pressure, since their GPUs need RAM. It could be a good bargaining chip for them, who knows. I'm not saying it's true, but it is suspicious at the very least. The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab +…

> The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab The wafers are processed. That means Samsung/Hynix have taken the raw ("blank") wafers, then run them through their DRAM lithography process, etching hundreds of DRAM dies ("chips") onto the wafer. You could attach test probes to individual chips on the wafer and you'd have a working DRAM chip. In fact, that's how testing is perf…

You need 40% of the world's ram for testing?

Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

#200

Post by zerosizedweasle »

pixelpoet wrote: post #184
potamic wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be as ironic if one wrote an article about Google and used Google search to research their sources?

If the article were about Google ruining everything, yes.

No because google can both ruin things and be a tool that is helpful in certain circumstances
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