"...their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard..." wtf. life sucks.
That $7 trillion number makes more sense now.
Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
91–100 of 255 posts
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#92nice 5d chess move, saltman paobably got this idea from GPT 4.5 high thinking
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#93Guess OpenAI finally found a business model that works: memory futures.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#94Why would one sell something cheaper than the current market value? I wouldnt care if i had stock or not, prices should be what things cost.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#95> On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply.
The market doesn't believe they can pay for the Oracle cloud deal. Why do these vendors believe OpenAI can pay for 40% of the world's DRAM?
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#96Earlier 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…
I don't buy it. It's easier to make this argument for companies that are building their own hardware, since they know it can be immediately used. OpenAI's move is tantamount to hoarding for the sake of strangling competition. There was plenty of supply to allow for their plans without this move (especially since they will probably go bankrupt at this rate).
How exactly could they 'hoard' this? There's no place in the world to store that much undiced wafer. It will all go bad.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
As in producers not over-producing RAM should be illegal? A presumably short-term price spike in RAM of all things is a non-issue. It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about and there is no reason to think this blip is going to last. Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. The world is not sta…
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 an expensive and risky manoeuvre. And we're probably going to have a RAM glut in a few years looking at these prices.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#98> On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply. The market doesn't believe they can pay for the Oracle cloud deal. Why do these vendors believe OpenAI can pay for 40% of the world's DRAM?
They definitely can, as anybody could, for a short enough period of time. The only ones betting they'll be able to sustain it for a long period are the ones paying the currently very inflated price for ram.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#99Why would one sell something cheaper than the current market value? I wouldnt care if i had stock or not, prices should be what things cost.
When someone buys up all the supply, the price will rise because of supply and demand. It's the nature of markets.
TFA mentions that if Samsung and SK Hynix had known what shenanigans were underway, they would have pursued better pricing terms.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the dirty part. This is the dirty part: > OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in ware…
> 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?