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2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

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Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#61

Post by londons_explore »

inigyou wrote: post #43
londons_explore wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted... Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist. Lose-lose situation!

But they don't get bankrupted, because it's an ordinary year for them, only with different customers.

Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted because a court would not simply unwind the deal - a court would demand compensation of the market price of the goods not delivered on delivery day - which will probably be very high.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#62

Post by chvid »

vdfs wrote: post #40
chvid wrote: post #22

I saw on Twitter that TSMC has made 1B worth of chips for Apple that they cannot package because of missing memory. (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)

> (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.) Why? High demand and low supply is very good for shareholders and make indexes go up, their goal is not to meet demand, they want exponential qurartly revunes

True - but what is happening now is very destructive to a lot of important companies.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#63

Post by user43928 »

kergonath wrote: post #56
user43928 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if anything, I believe progress has been accelerating. A year ago the SOTA was GPT-5/Opus 4.1/Gemini 2.5 Pro, two years ago Sonnet 3.5. Looking at Opus 5 for SOTA performance and GPT 5.6 Luna for a viable cheap alternative, AI is much more capable now. Honorable mention: GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras, capacity limited to a few customers, is supposedly serving 750 tok/s. Compared to 90 tok/s for non fast mode 5.6 Sol, 5…

> I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments. I don’t think most people are saying it is purely a scam (well, some do but I don’t think they are to be taken seriously). What all these talks about circular financing and VC money are saying is that demand cannot sustain the sector long-term, not that t…

Those are good points, but some arguments are weak:

- Chatbot usage in $20 plans is likely nowhere close to a $200 cost.

Inference cost has come down rapidly, with reports from July claiming OpenAI can now serve all of the logged out ChatGPT traffic on just a few hundred GPUs.

- Measurable benefit: I doubt anything of value is being measured. MS Copilot with GPT 5.5 Instant processing SharePoint files? Developers using AI as a fancy autocomplete under a "I review every line" regime?

I rely on my personal value judgement, based on 30h/week I spend using AI outside of my regular job.

I am developing a mobile app, competing with companies with millions in revenue and entire dev teams. I know it is viable. Others lag in effective adoption, their opinion is likely to change soon with even more capable models.

- data center projects in the US: They look to me to mostly be constructed in the most remote backwater. If even there projects with such moderate environmental impact cannot be realized, that would be an embarrassing policy failure

- the grid: I think that one is true. AFAIK the constraint would be gas turbines, not diesel, and oil supply is not structurally constrained

- the loans: Anthropic is rumored to have become profitable earlier this year because of large growth in enterprise revenue. It does not look so bad to me

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#64

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #61
inigyou wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don't get bankrupted, because it's an ordinary year for them, only with different customers.

Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted because a court would not simply unwind the deal - a court would demand compensation of the market price of the goods not delivered on delivery day - which will probably be very high.

[deleted]

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#65

Post by inigyou »

keybored wrote: post #51
chupasaurus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was legal in USSR for USSR to scalp though, depends on point of view.

Ha ha, the USSR was a silly thing. Anyway, what was the topic about?

I think it was about the failures of centrally planned 5-year plans of RAM sales.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#66

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pu_pe wrote: post #37

This will have general inflationary consequences for consumer products (phones, consoles, laptops, etc.). On top of current uncertainties regarding oil and fertilizers, I think 2% inflation in the US and Europe would be a very optimistic target.

2% was already optimistic once we decided we were buying too much from China.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#67

Post by ethbr1 »

chvid wrote: post #62
vdfs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.) Why? High demand and low supply is very good for shareholders and make indexes go up, their goal is not to meet demand, they want exponential qurartly revunes

True - but what is happening now is very destructive to a lot of important companies.

Indeed. There's a reason the US government has historically stopped air traffic / railroad / longshore strikes: cascading effects.

If memory is now upstream of so many companies, then maybe a higher regulatory involvement would be appropriate (like power companies).

Specifically, and it could fix all of this, capping the max % of their supply they're allowed to sell into the AI space.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#68

Post by amelius »

beloch wrote: post #60

AI companies would do well to realize that civil disobedience is a thing. Take what's currently happening to Flock cameras as an object lesson. People are so fed up with Flock that they're cutting their cameras down en masse, sometimes wiping them clean from entire jurisdictions. Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. La…

Except nobody knows where the AI data centers are actually located.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#69

Post by phire »

gaigalas wrote: post #50
AdamN wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lines that would have made consumer-level stuff are being reduced in favor of the higher profit margin/demand products. That means more supply of those other products (but still not enough) and lower supply of the consumer-level stuff (driving up prices).

Isn't DDR4 like, old and obsolete? From my knowledge, you can't just take a fab that produces DDR4 and make it produce DDR5 or higher. It's kind of a leap that requires replacing a lot of stuff. I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something. To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs t…

There is some overlap. The last DDR4 fabs were typically on a 16nm process, the first DDR5 fabs were also on a 16nm process.

There shouldn't be much issue converting those 16nm DDR4 fabs to DDR5, it's really just an issue of swapping out the masks. That's assuming they haven't all already been converted years ago.

Even when there isn't an overlap, moving to the next process node usually isn't so much about replacing machines, but adding more machines. To oversimplify, you might not be able to convert one older DDR4 fab to DDR5, but sometimes you might be able to convert two older DDR4 fabs to one DDR5 fab.

Such conversions might not be the most cost-effective option in the long run (that unmodified fab could have kept selling DDR4 for years), but conversions might be significantly faster than building new fabs.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#70

Post by AussieWog93 »

user43928 wrote: post #63
kergonath wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments. I don’t think most people are saying it is purely a scam (well, some do but I don’t think they are to be taken seriously). What all these talks about circular financing and VC money are saying is that demand cannot sustain the sector long-term, not that t…

Those are good points, but some arguments are weak: - Chatbot usage in $20 plans is likely nowhere close to a $200 cost. Inference cost has come down rapidly, with reports from July claiming OpenAI can now serve all of the logged out ChatGPT traffic on just a few hundred GPUs. - Measurable benefit: I doubt anything of value is being measured. MS Copilot with GPT 5.5 Instant processing SharePoint files? Developers usi…

>I am developing a mobile app, competing with companies with millions in revenue and entire dev teams. I know it is viable. Others lag in effective adoption, their opinion is likely to change soon with even more capable models.

To add to that, as an ex-software dev that mostly works in a semi-unrelated field now (and can only code as a small part of my job): I think a lot of software devs are underestimating what someone with reasonable technical skills and specialised domain knowledge is able to create with AI.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if, in 5 years' time, the majority of software used by (e.g.) potato farmers was primarily created by other potato farmers. The code might still be less elegant but I think it will be easier for the potato farmer to iterate with an AI than outsourcing to a dev firm.

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