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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.

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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.

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.

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