Thank god they shut down 3D XPoint.
The RAM shortage could last years
21–30 of 536 posts
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#22It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?
The same thing everyone who's paying attention to the real world (and not the financial fantasy world) does: that OpenAI's purchase commitments are wildly unrealistic and unsustainable.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#23I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of China's new memory companies.
[0] https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#24Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…
I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years.
There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment.
They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they want.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#25I'm personally hoping that one of the AI or data center companies is suddenly unable to pay for their bills and deflate the entire industry. Probably the only hope of things getting better before the 2030s.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think RAM shortages would be the least of our problems… Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU. We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…
I am surprised we consider TSMC like a natural resource: isn't it really a combination of know-how and build-out according to that know-how? If smarts leave the country, perhaps this moves with them. The risk with China taking over Taiwan is that they mostly expedite their own production research by a couple of years.
What you say is absolutely true, and is a serious problem—but the way our system operates does not allow us to correct for it.
Anyone trying to spin up a competitor to TSMC would have to first overcome a significant financial hurdle: the capital investment to build all the industrial equipment needed for fabrication.
Then they'd have to convince institutions to choose them over TSMC when they're unproven, and likely objectively worse than TSMC, given that they would not have its decades of experience and process optimization.
This would be mitigated somewhat if our institutions had common-sense rules in place requiring multiple vendors for every part of their supply chain—note, not just "multiple bids, leading to picking a single vendor" but "multiple vendors actively supplying them at all times". But our system prioritizes efficiency over resiliency.
A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...). But it would require sustained investment at all levels—and not just investment in the simple financial sense; it requires people investing their time in education and research. Dedicating their lives to making the best chips in the world. And the only reason that would work is that it defies our system, and chooses to invest in plants that won't be finished for years, and then pay for chips that they know are inferior in quality, because they're our chips, and paying for them when they're lower quality is the only way to get them to be the best chips in the world.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#27Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…
I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years. There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment. They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they wan…
Maybe if they had no competitors...
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#28I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of Google's TurboQuant[0] introduced 26 days prior. Given that TurboQuant results in a 6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches and up to 8x boost in speed, this optimization is already showing up in llama.cpp, enabling significantly bigger contexts without having to run a smaller model to fit it all in memory. Some people thought it might significantly improve the R…
The net effect won’t be a memory use reduction to achieve the same thing. We’ll do more with the same amount of memory. Companies will increase the context windows of their offerings and people will use it.
That is the sad reality of the future of memory.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#29I'm personally hoping that one of the AI or data center companies is suddenly unable to pay for their bills and deflate the entire industry. Probably the only hope of things getting better before the 2030s.
That’s likely to happen if all the talks about OpenAI pulling out of their wafer deals are true.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#30Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…
To add a more local hurdle as well, the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection.
That is, memory capacity is reserved for datacenters yet to be built, but this will do weird things if said datacenter construction is postponed or cancelled altogether.