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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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