That Trump makes us very motivated to stop relying on American tech.
We are tied to American economy and if AI companies start driving prices up not only DRAM but basically everything will become more expensive.
E.g., if I’m running a business in the US and I don’t kiss Trump’s ring (and pay bribes), if he becomes dictator for life in 2028, all bets are off for my business.
Both the EU and USA import the majority of their computer equipment, and the USA is placing heavy and unpredictable tariffs on those goods. It’s hard to argue that a business should bet that data centers will be cheaper in the US than in the EU if Trump is the last democratically elected president.
The most stable places to do business in 2026 are probably the EU and China.
Where do you get your information from?
DOGE cut basically all staff from the CHIPS Program Office, congress passed the money but Trump is choosing to turn it into a slush-fund the admin spends on industrial policy (such as buying a stake in Intel). Wolfspeed went into bankruptcy in part because the admin delayed CHIPS funding agreed by the previous admin [1] (it's unclear whether they received the grant now that they have left it).
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4aac09f9-19df-401a-9ab3-ef14a47bb...
https://wtop.com/government/2025/11/doge-quietly-disbands-8-...
What's the state of your house now?
This is news to a lot of Americans! The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act is codified federal law. I think a lot of states (Arizona, Idaho, New York) would be very interested to learn that the funding for the infrastructure that they are already building has somehow gone poof.
They make DRAM for cars, not computers, in the USA. They've promised they'll bring manufacturing onshore any time soon, which effectively means they'll wait until Trump forgets about it.
0: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/06/president-trum...
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
> Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027.
https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
> Production is expected to start in 2030 with the fabs ramping throughout the decade.
Until they start outputting DRAM in any meaningful quantity, they're not relevant.
There is also https://www.vishay.com/ which expanded several sites in .de, without much fuss, or begging for subsidies. That is neither RAM, HBM, NAND, nor NOR, but nonetheless much needed stuff, for all the electrified cyber.
According to wikipedia Micron Fab 6 in Virginia started production in 1997 and is still operating
Building a factory is one thing, they can have 50 of them built, but that doesn't mean much if all 50 together amount to like 0.1% of the company's output.
Once those factories scale up to 1-2%, then we can start considering that they've actually built a domestic supply, but that's a whole different goal than simply building the factories. Building factories is trivial. Making them output something is also "trivial". Scaling that up to a meaningful amount is a whole different, much harder goal to accomplish.
Say you use a magic wand and build 15 new state-of-the-art factories tomorrow. Who's gonna run them? Does any location in the US have enough qualified workers that can simply take over and produce RAM in them from day 1 with no major fuckups?
No, you need a ton of time to teach thousands of people how to run those 15 factories. To even begin to teach people, you need to have 1 factory up and running. That 1 factory is at first going to be run by some of their existent workforce that they temporarily migrate from South Asia. Only then can they start to teach local populace how to run those factories on their own.
This is why it's much cheaper to simply build an additional one in South Asia than it is to build more than one in a whole new location. South Asia already has a bunch of workers that know what they're doing because they've been doing it for a long time. Build a new factory, promote some of your existent workforce up the chain, fill the lowest positions with fresh graduates that are gonna be equally good every year and you're good to go. It's nowhere near that simple in a brand new location, where even the most optimistic scenario would take longer than a decade to produce a meaningful amount of output.
Europe doesn't have local manufacturers. So it cannot exert control over the manufacturers to keep its internal / strategic market sane. All European hardware manufacturers have to put up with and compete in irrationality inflated prices.
This should have not been allowed to happen.