I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
1) Prices aren't returning to "normal".
The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome.
If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about competing on price, maybe they become price competitive before the launch of your new fab in order to kill it, but, it will have an effect and probably before it even opens
3) A western supply chain has benefits by itself.
There's a reason some industries are not allowed to die, most notably farming- because security and external pressure are concerning.
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Realistically there's no reason not to do this. It will be long, painful and expensive. The best time was a decade ago. The next best time is now.
Really the only way it could work is if the government declares it it a national security issue and will promise to subsidize it. Because in just a free market, it's most likely to flop.
This does not really help EU and US businesses to be competitive though, neither does it stop consumers going for the cheapest option...
Except EU and US tech giants also get massive government subsidies making such accusations hypocritical. Silicon Valley has its roots in cold war defense funding.
What the US and EU don't like it that China has beaten them at their own game using their own rules, so now they need to move the goalposts on why we shouldn't buy Chinese RAM and protect western DRAM monopolies making amazing margins.
Subsidize what? Copilot prompt in the Run dialog or Notepad? Is this what you think might be considered for subsidizing?
Which is a good idea for when we don't have a dementia patient in charge of our country.
EU should get on that though.
I disagree.
Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. So we can't exactly increase global manufacturing capacity overnight.
The way I see, there's 2 ways this goes:
1. AI is a fad. RAM and storage demand falls. Prices drop back to normal.
2. AI is not a fad. Over time, more and more fabs come online to meet the supply needs of the AI industry. The price comes down as manufacturing supply increases.
Or some combination of the two.
The high prices right now are because there's a demand shock. There's way more demand for RAM than anyone expected, so the RAM that is produced sells at a premium. High prices aren't because RAM costs more to manufacture than it did a couple years ago. There's just not enough to go around. In 5-10 years, manufacturing capacity will match demand and prices will drop. Just give it time.
and waiting for 5-10 yrs for a lower price is a long wait for consumers.
If food prices were high, would you say to the starving person to wait for 5-10yrs for food?
If all consumer devices only shipped with 1gb of RAM maximum, we'd get over it remarkably quickly. Just about the only times large amounts of RAM is an actual requirement is AI, some data science / simulation, and editing video in 8k. And maybe 3d modelling. Lots of programs we run today are memory hogs for no good reason - like the rust compiler, cyberpunk 2077 and google chrome. But we could make those programs much more memory efficient if we really had to. Cyberpunk wouldn't look as pretty. But nobody would really care.
The economy won't die due to expensive RAM. Programmers will just adapt, like we've always done.
no, you should say that you personally wouldn't care, but that does not generalize.
People do care, just like people prefer eating better food than just bread and milk. And after having had a taste of the good stuff, people do not want to revert - loss aversion is real.
So if consumer devices regressed back to only having 1gb of ram, they will feel the loss, and they will complain if nothing else. The world of lean, efficient software that require little ram will not return. Programmers (read:companies selling products) will not adapt, but instead, the requirements for computing will become more exclusionary to those with the means.
Your assertion that a world of lean software won't return is backwards looking; that was all driven by hardware being cheaper than developer effort.
If we now enter a world of AI-enhanced developer effort being cheaper than hardware, perhaps we can have lean efficient software again.
And that company is in Europe, isn't it? The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market: it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.
You can't just get into RAM manufacturing overnight whenever you feel like it, like you're building washing machines. You need a lot more than just ASML machines, you need the supply chain, the IP, the experienced professionals with know-how, the education system, the energy, the right regulations, etc.
The EU exited the RAM manufacturing business a long time ago when RAM prices sunk, see Qimonda, meaning it would be a long, expensive uphill battle to get back in, and currently EU has no major semiconductor manufacturing ambitions, or ambitions in commodity hardware manufacturing of any kind, so that's not gonna happen.
Of course, RAM is no longer a commodity right now, but nobody can guarantee it won't be again when the AI bubble burst and RAM prices crash, so spinning up the know-how, manufacturing facilities and supply chains from the ground up just for RAM is insanely expensive and risky and might leave you holding the bag.
> it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.
Except semiconductor manufacturing DOES require cheap labor relative to the high degrees of skills and specialization needed at that cutting edge. Unlike in Taiwan, skilled STEM grads in the EU (and even more in the US) who invest that time and effort in education and specialization, will go to better paying careers with better WLB like software or pharma, than in hardware and semi manufacturing that pays peanuts by comparison and works you to death in deadlines.
Also, profitable semi manufacturing requires cheap energy and lax environmental regulations, which EU lacks. So even more compounding reasons why you won't see too many new semi fabs opening here.
I hope we (Europe) can try some things even when they are not guaranteed to succeed and generate huge profits. Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.
The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.
If EU hopes were cookies, I would have died of obesity 100 times over. EU is bad at learning from its own mistakes and being proactive on rapid changes on the world stage, that's why it's share of global GDP has dropped by half in 20 years. EU is always reactive and then only when it's far too late and its actions are always limp-dicked("we are monitoring the situation"). See the rise of US tech, Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, rise of Chinese EVs, etc
>Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.
We already are toast for the long run, we just ignore it via printing more money and going into more debt, while kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with the fallout. EU's biggest economies are working around the clock on how to fund the ever growing pension and welfare deficits, how to beat Russia, and how to stop people from voting right wing, not on how to claw back and on-shore cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing.
>The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.
Yeah but someone still needs to pay for that and take a risk. And EU investors don't like risking billions of their money to try out new things that are in competition with Asia on manufacturing because we cannot compete there. Labor costs too high, regulations too high, energy costs too high, environmentalism too high, we miss critical know-how. That's why nobody is investing in EU fabs and instead in other things that guarantee higher returns like services, pharma and weapons.
But then people shouldn't moan that the EU is absent from the RAM manufacturing industry or pretend like it's something easy they could do on a whim if the EU suddenly wanted to.
>Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed?
There will always be sick people and people killing each other.
Any given drug or weapon can still fail or not make a profit. As well it could be said that computers will still need memory for the foreseeable future. You're not keeping a coherent position in this discussion, just replying with cool soundbites.
You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.
Ah. Please check that. Which types of DRAM can be made in a DUV fab? Obviously the older ones, but are those obsolete for new computers. This really matters.
Keep in mind that the high bandwidths of modern RAM modules aren’t really a property of the RAM cells so much as a property of the read and write circuitry and the DDR or HBM transceivers, and those are a large part of the IP but a small part of the die. There is no such thing as “double data rate” or “high bandwidth” DRAM cells. Even DRAM cells from the 1990s could be read in microseconds. Reading and streaming your fancy AI model weights is an embarrassingly parallel problem and even 1 TB/sec does not even come close to stressing the ability of the raw cells to be read. This in contrast to, say, modern tensor processors where the actual ALUs set a hard cap on throughput and everyone works hard to come closer to the cap.
Take a look at what makes a modern computer with good RAM performance work: it’s the interconnect between the RAM and processor.
Maybe some RAM chips don't need EUV lithography. but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.
100 million DUV machine is not your limiting factor when a whole fab costs 2-3 billion and requires specialized knowhow that few people in the world have in order to get good yields and be profitable. Otherwise everyone would be making chips if all you needed was to go out and buy a 100 million DUV machine then hit the "print" button to churn out chips like it's a Bambu 3d printer.
>I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market.
Nobody spends 2-3 billion to open new fab just to make commodity low margin chips. New fabs are almost always built for the cutting edge, then once they pay off their investment costs, they slowly transition into making low margin chips as they age out of the cutting edge, but nobody builds fabs for legacy nodes that have a lot of competition and low profitability, except maybe if national security(the taxpayer) would subsidize those losses somehow.
>but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.
You are not.
The biggest problem is that the industry wants HBM, whereas consumers want DRAM. Until the need for HBM has been sufficiently satisfied, fabs will prefer being tooled for HBM because businesses can be squeezed much harder than consumers.
Then again, as consumer you don't really need DDR5 or even DDR4 so long as you aren't using an iGPU. Its all about being around CL15 timings.
you're missing the picture that it's not companIES - the crisis primarily was caused by only one company OpenAI buying out wafers
but even more than that - that wafer buyout is *an excuse* used by cartel - there are several mechanisms that could have eased out most of the problem (e.g. Samsung selling old equipment) that was not done to ride the money wave
(also said "hyperscalers and AI companies" existed in spring 2025 too, yet the price was low)
the winners will not be the ones who build new fabs - but ones who'll have enough money and government subsidies/import taxes to protect such investments after cartel decides to oversupply again, flushing the price down
You can't reshore domestic manufacturing without creating legions of desperate workers with no other choice but to accept minimum wage factory jobs.
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
RAM isn’t some commodity that gets mined at a fixed rate and therefore costs more when people want large amounts of it. It’s a manufactured good, made from raw materials that are available in huge quantity, that was produced and sold at a profit at 2024 prices, even accounting for the capex needed to produce it.
Two things have changed. First, demand increased quickly. Second, big buyers sort of demonstrated that they’re willing to pay current prices, at least temporarily, so maybe the demand price elasticity has changed, or at least people’s perception of it has changed.
None of prevents the price from going back down. The high prices have made it economical for new manufacturers to invest more to compete — look at CXMT. And CXMT doesn’t have EUV machines, which doesn’t appear to be a showstopper for them.
2024 prices were at a historical low, so we can't be sure that this is correct. Regardless, when production capacity is short-term constant, new RAM does get "mined" at a constant rate, a bit like bitcoin with its mining ASICs.
This isn't right.
RAM prices (and most components) are very finely balanced between supply and demand. A small shortfall in supply leads to a large increase in price, and a large shortfall in supply leads to very large price increases.
It takes 2 years for an existing RAM supplier to build a new clean room factory to make RAM.
All the RAM manufactures saw this shortage coming 6 months ago.
If you follow the news, the existing manufactures are investing heavily. Here's Hynix annoucements:
Nov 25: Hynix plans 8-fold boost to cutting-edge DRAM production in 2026, https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/sk-hynix-plans-8-fold-bo...
Dec 25: Hynix investing $500B (I guess this is a mistranslation somewhere!!???) in new RAM factories, https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/hot-on-the-heels-of-...
Jan 26: Hynix to spend $13 billion on the world's largest HBM memory assembly plant, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/sk-hynix-to-...
The supply is being built to match the demand. Prices will stabilize, and the manufactures know there is lots of latent demand.
In 2 years time RAM prices for consumers will be normal again (not sure about GPU RAM though!)
this is the theory of those who are expecting the ram shortage to be short, yes
People forget quickly why we only have a handful of DRAM manufacturers today.
Which is exactly how you know it will always be nerfed. The last thing these guys want is to take their claws out of our data.
Another thread suggested that OpenAIs primary play is to get big enough that it's too big to fail, funny to think that it's not a funding runway or algorithmic moat, just a hardware vault and the longer you can stop boats crossing it the more chance you get your fingers in all the pies.
I'm not sure about that. When was the last time you have used Copilot prompt in Run dialog or Notepad?
Now try to really sincerely use copilot prompt in the Run dialog.
Having your own chips is a national security issue. Spreading out fabs across the world is a global resilience issue.
That being said, AI is not going to go away already. And AI is about as memory hungry as you can get.
Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exports?
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
Or their consumers will enjoy cheap PC part prices. With possible gray zone re-export market.
Of course we could see retreat from global markets to mercantilism, but that has yet to fully happen.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/xi-putin-hail-tie...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-president-xi-meet...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-calls-closer-defen...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-steps-up-efforts-cut-...
[4] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
Who antagonized who first, again?
Also, I don't think you've seen true consumer rage until the opposition in the EU would start pointing out the current parties are making the smartphones, laptops, TVs and whatnot consumers wanna buy much more expensive (or more crappy). Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to be wavering for young people especially, and tech / gadgets being cheap was one of the sole rays of light left.
Huh?
Those base stations are only security critical because mobile networks are deliberately insecure to enable government surveillance.
And I can image backdooring RAM. At least the controller part.
Plus, even taking a low unemployment numbers at face value, the job quality has fallen a lot, with a lot of people still technically employed but not in great jobs, but in shitty jobs they do for survival, like fast food delivery.
The reality is that mass layoffs and SME bankruptcies are a current occurrence in many EU countries.
People appreciated cheap YMTC 232-layers when that happened where I live.
Australia for example is a large and growing market for Chinese electric cars. China is the biggest export market for Australian raw materials so it doesn't just put random trade barriers up.
There's actually a free trade agreement between Australia and China.
The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more locked-down design, such as soldered RAM or even SSD. My current ThinkPad already got soldered LPDDR5 RAM chips on it with no user-end RAM upgrade possible, so there's a reason to suspect they'll take more pagers from Apple's book if they can get away doing it, just like what they did when they pushed out those internally mounted unswappable batteries.
My personal guess is that the RAM price will fall down after this period of AI expansion is over and major players starts to consolidate. But it will not fall as much as we're hopping for, because the manufacturers could just reduce production to control the price.
This isn't some conspiracy, it's electrical reality.
BUT... a smart consumer would also recognize the other side of the story: do we really need HBM on consumer devices? We don't serve 1000 users at the same time, a slower, cheaper device is good enough for most use cases (including the professional ones), better if it's also somewhat future-proof. After all, smart people usually have better foresight.
It should. And it should enact the political reforms they would make large capital projects like fabs possible. The current confederacy is proving just as much a stepping stone for Europe as it was for America. I’m not saying a full united Europe should emerge. But a system of vetoes is barely a system at all.
You don't see their products in stores too often as they're focused on B2B - particularly the automotive sector.
That being said I have a 128GB memory stick from this manufacturer and I hope they make the most out of this windfall.
SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron don't treat good people well enough to give them taxpayer money.
> but this is only if you do not take into account the bribes from Intel to specific officials and their relatives who make decisions about subsidizing Intel.
Brandolini's Law is out of control here. You are making a bold fucking claim. From the tone of your post, it seems pointless to ask if you have any evidence. From and outsider's view, I would say the German political system is much less corrupted by lobbyists compared to the United States. Do you say the same about the CHIPS Act in the United States?
I highly doubt it. I'm certainly no expert on Germany, but has Germany's bureaucratic machine spent decades destroying its own energy sector to buy energy from Russia, funding the war machine of Putin's totalitarian dictatorship?
And not just by buying these resources, but by OVERPAYING for them many times over. I just opened a chart of the prices at which Germany bought natural gas from Russia before the war with Ukraine, and it's wild, it is several times more expensive than Germany is now paying for gas delivered from the other side of the globe on tiny ships. It was a direct subsidizing of this war.
And then you look at these high-ranking (and not so high-ranking) bureaucrats who made all these decisions... And literally all of their families got richer during the time these decisions were made, by tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions. There's zero accountability, zero media coverage, and it's all being hushed up to such an extent that I can't think of any other explanation other than EVERYONE was taking the money. We are literally talking about the level of existence of a centralized totalitarian machine for the forceful silencing of anyone who tries to talk about this topic.
So do I say the same about the CHIPS Act in the US? Probably. But the level of corruption seen in Germany – pervasive, bloody, destructive – is simply unimaginable in the US.
For context, the German manufacturing sector is losing something like 15k jobs PER MONTH.
What are you talking about?
It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, chip factories do pollute... a lot.
Countries like South Korea or Taiwan have adapted all their legislations and tax, environmental regulations to allow such factories to operate easily. The EU and EU countries will never do that... better outsource pollution and claim they care about the planet...
Well, the EU has not manufactured a whole lot of chips in the last 30 years, where do you get the people with the professional experience to teach new engineers... Oh you mean you have to import the teachers from South Asia too? /s and it takes what, 5 years at the minimum to train an engineer? France and UK used to produce entire home computers... in the 80's...
This is not comparable to Taiwan or the Shenzen area, but it's definitely not nothing. Some local expertise exists, even though it may be not the most cutting-edge.
So, we're looking at a decade-long project at least, even if everything goes as planned, and crazy fast, in the technical and administrative departments.
Excellent universities, overall. But results from primary and secondary schools are nose diving at a more than alarming rate in several EU countries. Literacy rates are falling, math grades are falling. There's IMO only so much time before universities begin to be affected as well.
The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.
We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!
The same applies to your comment.
How?
Most foundries across Asia and the US are being given subsidizes that outstrip those that the EU is providing, with the only mega-foundry project in Europe was canceled by Intel last year [0].
Additionally, much of the backend work like OSAT and packaging is done in ASEAN (especially Malaysia), Taiwan, China, and India. As much of the work for memory chips is largely backend work (OSAT and packaging), this is a field the EU simply cannot compete in given that it has FTAs with the US, Japan, South Korea, India, and Vietnam so any EU attempt would be crushed well before imitating the process.
Furthermore, much of the IP in the memory space is owned by Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and American champions who are largely investing either domestically or in Asia, as was seen with MUFG's announcement earlier today to create a dedicated end-to-end semiconductor fund specifically to unify Japan, Taiwan, and India into a single fab-to-fabless ecosystem [1]. SoftBank announced something similar to unify the US, Japan, Malaysia, and India into a similar end-to-end ecosystem as well a couple weeks ago [2]. Meanwhile, South Korea is trying to further shore up their domestic capacity [3] via subsidies and industrial policy.
When Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese technology and capital partners are uninterested in investing in building European capacity, American technology and capital partners have pulled out of similar initiatives in Europe, and the EU working to ban Chinese players [4] what can the EU even do?
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Edit: can't reply
> Why are you overlooking European semiconductor champions
Because they don't have the IP for the flash memory supply chain. And whatever capacity and IP they have in chip design, front-end fab, or back-end fab is domiciled in the US, ASEAN, and India.
> STMicroelectronics
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for IoT and embedded applications.
> Infineon
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for automotive applications.
> NXP
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for embedded applications.
> All of them are skilled enough to build and operate a DRAM fab in Europe. A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.
They don't have the IP. Much of the IP for the memory space is owned by Japanese, American, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese companies.
Additionally, most Asian funds own both the IP and capital (often with government backing), making European attempts futile.
Essentially, the EU would have to start from scratch and decades behind countries with whom the EU already has FTAs with that have expanded capacity well before the EU and thus would be able to crush any incipient European competitor.
[0] - https://www.it-daily.net/shortnews-en/intel-officially-cance...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260224VL219/taiwan-talent-...
[2] - https://asia.nikkei.com/economy/trade-war/trump-tariffs/soft...
[3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251230PD220/semiconductor-...
[4] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
Champions at what? They pale in comparison to the likes of Samsung and TSM at IP and manufacturing.
> A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.
Why would EU banks risk their money on a DRAM fab meant to compete with Asia that has lower wages, lower regulations, less environmentalism, etc?