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Comment by luma | Hacker News Reader

There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.

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You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.

Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity.

This was not created by the manufacturers.

The manufacturers are not doing a whole lot to fix the problem l and I don’t blame them. It’s expensive to build out and they know demand will slow down and don’t want to be stuck with excess capacity. Better to be sold out and high prices.

Samsung said they were “moderating demand” which doesn’t sound like they want this problem to be solved either.

It's actually both. DRAM manufactures operate on a boom bust cycle and by 2023 there was significant oversupply. This meant even leading up to that they had already decided not to invest in further capacity explicitly to recover profit on their existing lines.

So a lack of builds coupled with AI boom at the same time created a perfect storm with no new capacity coming online for years after demand rapidly escalated.

If you are talking CXMT Apple recently learned the hard way that even with price fixed RAM from the big 3, CXMT is struggling to provide cheaper prices as they are using much older design/manufacturing systems.

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/money/general/apple-s-cxmt-memory-...

> There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total.

...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

Uhm, your link states that they were price fixing over 20 years ago, and were in court for almost a decade. There was another accusation in 2018, but it was dismissed.

That's not a long history of pricing fixing, just accusations.

The difference between 2002 and now is that it is so much easier to follow each other's leads on pricing without explicitly communicating about it and leaving a paper trail. But they never stopped acting indistinguishable from a cartel.

who is the 4th?

Probaby CXMT

What about YMTC?

Tiny market share compared to top 4, but also looking to expand into HBM in collaboration with CXMT

https://chipletsummit.com/proceeding_files/a0qVV0000032cp3/2...

Intel is also looking into returning to making RAM, but it's probably the Chinese that will enter the market faster

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