Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see them succeed and take on the pc builder market, aka hobbyist market. Honestly, the recent rise in RAM left me behind with a huge amount of disbelief and anger. Anger primarily, because big corporations are responsible for draining the market, while on the other hand a Satya Nadella states that they are sitting on a pile of GPUs they cannot use because of limited power.[1]

I simply cannot understand how that will ever be profitable. To me, it just looks like a huge waste of resources.

[1]: https://redmondmag.com/blogs/generationai/2025/12/microsoft-...

View on HN

Same with Chinese GPUs: https://videocardz.com/newz/chinas-lisuan-begins-shipping-6n...

Sure those particular ones are still using TSMC but at least people are doing something to prevent everything from being such oligopolies: which is also why I own an Intel Arc A580 and B580.

Any step towards market competition is nice to hear about.

I'd love to see it, but they'll be given the BYU/Huawei/etc treatment to keep the silicon cartel's margins from crashing.

The world exists outside the US too you know.

Plenty of countries gave Huawei the same treatment the US did, and the US and its allies have the weight to impose sanctions, tariffs, etc to punish consumers within their borders for daring to consider better and cheaper options.

There's a difference between cutting off a phone from Google apps and a memory stick. Huawei phones became basically useless for every day use.

With RAM you can always just AliExpress it. I live in a small country yet every day literally MILLIONS of packages come in from Asia.

The allies of the US all banned Huawei because the US asked them (quite forcefully) to do so.

CXMT is already under a full set of US long arm sanctions so probably only very little of their products will ever reach western markets.

However some Chinese demand will definitely be met by CXMTs product displacing western suppliers - so maybe there is a tiny bit of relief for western consumers there.

> However some Chinese demand will definitely be met by CXMTs product displacing western suppliers - so maybe there is a tiny bit of relief for western consumers there.

I recall years of hints that the affordable housing crunch would eventually be helped by developers - even tho they're only building tons of not-affordable housing.

We're five years in. No meaningful change is visible from the perspective of folks who need affordable housing.

Based on that lesson, I expect what CXMT does there to have no meaningful effect here.

> I recall years of hints that the affordable housing crunch would eventually be helped by developers - even tho they're only building tons of not-affordable housing.

If I may ask, what cities? For example, Austin has seen a 6.6% asking price decrease for 0- to 2-bedroom units [1]. The big problem is there is an absolutely massive hole, and very few places are building "enough" to make a dent.

[1] https://www.realtor.com/advice/hyperlocal/austin-rents-are-g...

The RAM market is much more commoditized than housing. Almost any increase in supply should reduce prices world-wide.

How could a subsidized housing number increase from building not-subsidized housing? That is illogical. The market rate housing will become cheaper and therefore more housing will be affordable to more people but you can’t make the number of “affordable housing” units go up by building anything else because “affordable housing” is a brand name for subsidized housing.

Is that because CXMT is using stolen tech?

Downvoting doesn't answer my question though.

No - all advanced semiconductor production in China is under an elaborate set of US sanctions regardless of company.

Ok, but BYD is everywhere

Chinese electric vehicles are unofficially banned in Polish army bases, probably in other countries too.

How much stolen tech does BYD use? Is that even a factor in not allowing them into the US?

I don't know about that. All I'm pointing out is that just because US doesn't like China doesn't mean there isn't a bigger market out there. So, even if China ends up servicing that market only, that's still a big chunk of the pie. So, case in point, a Chinese DRAM maker flooding the market with cheap(er) DRAMs (or any DRAM for that matter -- thanks Micron), will end up affecting the price of DRAM in the US.

That's true. The greater the numbers, the lower the demand on the global scale (unless those all be consumed by AI too). It makes me wonder if AI data centers will never be satisfied.

Yes, and? There are Huawei stores all over Asia, that little place where 60% of people live.

Sucks for everyone else is what I'm saying. 100% of people should be allowed access, not be preempted from it in order to protect the value of exalted tech cartels.

Doesn't matter given the current shortages.

If CXMT can fill more of China's domestic demand, that's still good news for us all.

Doesn’t matter, more supply equals lower costs. Also, China can barely afford all of its states propping up the BYU supply chain with free cashflow.

Are they known to supply Iran?

It's a colossal misallocation of resources by a handful of fucknuggets so wealthy that they will never experience real consequences for it. Meanwhile, everyone else is made to suffer.

What's horrifying is that many of them are going to ask for bailouts in the future - using the reason of "national security".

This is a situation in which a government would typically step in and force companies to stop ratfucking end users in favor of business partners, but the problem here is that (a) it's an international problem that would require cooperation with China and (b) the US has the most venal administration in history and has already taken bribes from AI and hardware companies.

These companies going all in on purely AI partnership sales are foolish because the aforementioned user ratfucking is step two of Doctorow's original description of enshittification:

1. Attract users and partners with market disrupting quality of service

2. Screw over users in favor of partners, knowing that users are less likely to be critical and more likely to be locked in

3. Screw over partners once you've achieved enough market dominance that they are also locked in

4. Use rent seeking behavior (government bribes, etc.) now that you've exhausted your users and partners for growth

This is an announcement of increased competition in a market with acute supply shortages. That’s exactly what is supposed to happen.

Jumping to regulating the global RAM market this early sounds like the worst of all solutions. You want people to get cross-government approval every time they want to buy or sell RAM? American companies will call up Korea to get their RAM rations.

Note that the company in question is specifically sanctioned by the US, so this is not exactly a glowing example of the utopia of the free market you seem to be holding it up as.

Rationing chips makes sense to me. You don't have to set the ration at a low enough level that it would ever impact legitimate businesses. You could just set a ration level that prevents a company that is losing hundreds of billions of dollars from spending imaginary money buying 40% of the annual raw material supply despite lacking the capability to refine the raw materials into a working product, for the sole purpose of denying it to their competition. You strawmanned the opposition as requiring cross-government approval "every time anyone wants to buy RAM", but maybe we could just start with requiring cross-government approval to buy 40% of the global supply.

Seems like supporting argument against governmental regulation. In this specific case, against sanctions.

It's all money circles. Everything's made up and nothing matters

How do you expect this comment to be interpreted? I'm ruling out RAM as a social construct, I'm pretty sure it exists in the physical world.

It actually kinda doesn't. I more meant around the GPUs where directly or otherwise Nvidia pays Microsoft, Microsoft pays Nvidia, both stocks go up by more than those amounts, profit.

But for RAM, Sam Altman didn't put in a purchase order for idk 10 trillion DIMMs or something. He said he would buy a bunch of wafers. A tweet had put it well: he said he'd buy wafers that don't yet exist for computers that don't exist for data centers that don't exist for AI models that don't exist for demand that doesn't exist.

So the demand is kinda made up the same way there were TP shortages at the height of covid. There's plenty enough to go around, but one person rocks the boat and everyone goes nuts.

These situations usually lead to price collapse in the long run. Prices are simply an information vector on what humans should be doing for others globally.

You'll never be able to buy their chips, the US will impose trade restrictions once it forces South Korea to ramp up production in US fabs

The entire price crisis stems from anticipation of that prospect

It’s essentially an economic death spiral, but that has a lot of energy and dynamism until it crashes. In this case as long as NVIDIA prints money and people are willing to play pretend for a paycheck, this will go on.

But it will end and who knows how many lives will be ruined in the fall.

Lives ruined by lack of DRAM? my guess is somewhere between 0 and 1

Reading comprehension! The GP was clearly referring to the current AI boom, which is the root cause of DRAM price surging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com