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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing dirty about this deal. When making a large deal with one vendor he didn't disclose to them that he was making a deal with another vendor. That's pretty normal when you're trying to buy a lot of stuff. Otherwise, they can collude to shake you down.

I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity.

EDIT: Though even that may be wrong. TechCrunch reports that it was a joint meeting between the South Korean President, the heads of the two companies, and Sam Altman. I won't claim that TC is the bible but there's lots of stuff being reported that makes no sense, and this is a good deal for both these companies so it's more believable than news from someone that OpenAI is going to buy a bunch of wafers and stick it in a warehouse.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/openai-ropes-in-samsung-sk...

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It's bad for consumers period. A deal that hampers 40% of global supply shouldn't be a thing, it's predatory. I know DRAM is not a necessity, but considering that PCs are going to be affected means this affects real things like schools and hospitals. There's being smart while making a deal and there's knee-capping the market with your leveraged to the tits business

but where do we draw the line? Would 39% be okay? and who's gonna draw the line and enforce it?

I hope this is not a serious argument. This deal is OOM larger than other deals

The line imo is the amount of DRAM OpenAI actually needs/can use. If they end up piling some of it in a warehouse just so nobody else can use it, lock em up.

Do they actually have the cash to buy all of this RAM? If not then it should be very illegal.

There's no need to make it illegal: it doesn't happen because the companies with the RAM to sell are motivated by profit. The problem is that OpenAI has plenty of money to buy RAM. They raised $40 billion in April.

You’re just talking about putting limits on capitalism. Be careful, that’s blasphemy.

> 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 warehouses

That is not "totally normal".

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 while everything downstream in DRAM packaging and DIMM production can't actually consume anything.

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

Not only do they buy 40%, they bought 100% of TSMC's 3nm capacity for a year, locking everyone else out of 3nm chips.

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

They're also reserving capacity on something that doesn't exist yet, and finalize their purchases into finished products. OpenAI is reserving wafers so others can't buy them. They are not the same

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.

If stored in proper conditions, the shelf life of undiced wafers is pretty much limitless. But if moisture or dust get in, it’ll start to have corrosion and other damage. Diced wafers on the other hand are placed on UV tape and I recently learnt that the shelf life of that is like a few months at best.

Nevertheless, unless you’re not storing them in a clean room of appropriate class (or in a vacuum pack), assume 18 months for undiced wafers.

In terms of size, I would think that stored in cassettes or carriers a vacuum sealed, it shouldn’t be too much. A 25 wafer pack is about half meter cube? A 40ft shipping container is about 68m^3. So one container can store about 140 packs of 25 wafers each. That’s 3500 wafers. They’re talking about 900k wafers. That’s about 260 containers. Call it 300 with extra space and stuff. Not exactly hard to provision.

In what time will packaged wafers go bad? What is this based on?

Wonder if they'd rather have it go bad than let their competitors get it?

Granting this premise is true (I have no idea), that makes it even worse. They would deliberately be hoarding 40% of the global supply not to lock in for future growth but simply to make sure no one else gets to have it. It’s figuratively setting chips on fire.

It seems not normal (in the sense that it is obviously quite weird to but like half of the world’s RAM supply). But I wonder if they are also just not ready to announce what they are doing with it?

I mean with that many wafers, I guess it is possible that they’d be doing something pretty custom with the things…

> But I wonder if they are also just not ready to announce what they are doing with it?

Didn't they announce some kind of AI-silicon recently? Wouldn't it be for that?

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