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Comment by hnuser123456 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but if the price is being inflated by inflated demand, then the suppliers will just build more factories until they hit a new, higher optimal production level, and prices will come back down, and eventually process improvements will lead to price-per-GB resuming its overall downtrend.

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Memory fabs take billions of dollars and years to build, also the memory business is a tough one where losses are common, so no such relief in sight.

With a bit of luck OpenAI collapses under its own weight sooner than later, otherwise we're screwed for several years.

Micron has said they're not scaling up production. Presumably they're afraid of being left holding the bag when the bubble does pop

Not just Micron, SK Hynix has made similar statements (unfortunately I can only find sources in Korean).

DRAM manufacturers got burned multiple times in the past scaling up production during a price bubble, and it appears they've learned their lesson (to the detriment of the rest of us).

Why are they building a foundry in Idaho?

https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id

Future demand aka DDR6.

The 2027 timeline for the fab is when DDR6 is due to hit market.

I mean it says on the page

>help ensure U.S. leadership in memory development and manufacturing, underpinning a national supply chain and R&D ecosystem.

It's more political than supply based

Hedging is understandable. But what I don't understand is why they didn't hedge by keeping Crucial around but more dormant (higher prices, less SKUs, etc)

The theory I've heard is built on the fact that China (CXMT) is starting to properly get into DRAM manufacturing - Micron might expect that to swamp the low end of the market, leaving Crucial unprofitable regardless, so they might as well throw in the towel now and make as much money as possible from AI/datacenter (which has bigger margins) while they can.

But yeah even if that's true I don't know why they wouldn't hedge their bets a bit.

So position Crucial as a premium brand, raise prices 4x instead of 3x, and drastically cut down on the SKUs to reduce overhead. If they tried that and kept spiraling into fewer and fewer SKUs and sales, I could understand it. But the discontinuation felt pretty abrupt.

Chip factories need years of lead time, and manufacturers might be hesitant to take on new debt in a massive bubble that might pop before they ever see any returns.

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