What a producer will do now is hedge their risk. They do this by forward-selling their product, in this case oil from an oil well. The peak for spot prices, depending on the particular flavor of oil, peaked at >$170/barrel while future prices (which are the prices we see) didn't really get above $100 while long-dated futures were significantly lower, rarely exceeding $70/barrel by much.
Now this is a problem because there's no incentive to invest in extra production when you can only sell it at $70/barrel, despite the spot price being up to $100/barrel higher. So new wells and new production in general is down despite the supply disruptions and high prices.
I imagine RAM is in a similar position. It takes a long time to bring on more supply and suppliers don't expect those prices to last. Likely a large amount of new supply will probably cause the next crash in the boom-bust cycle.
But there's another problem with all this. A lot of existing manufacturers are switching from DDR5 (and soon DDR6) to HBM because it's way more profitable and there's seemingly insatiable demand for high end GPUs. I expect that in the short-to-medium term we're both going to see no increase in supply and the DDR prices are going to keep rising to the point where in a year we'll probably look back on current prices fondly
All I can say is I'm happy I upgraded my laptop to 64GB (for $200) and my PC to 64GB (also for $200) last year. .
Nobody is "switching" old process node fabs to new processes, they just aren't building new fabs for old processes.
AI and high density tasks will use memory fabricated with newer processes, freeing the old supply for more elastic, price-sensitive tasks.
The vast majority of memory that has price impacts for most consumers isn't in personal computers, it's in embedded applications that were also impacted by the overall squeeze.
"In the AI era, technological competitiveness alone is not enough and the ability to supply the required volume at the exact moment customers need it is the ultimate competitive advantage," SK Hynix said in a press release. "We reached this investment decision after a thorough review of market demand."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/sk-hynix-to-invest-3...
Facility buildouts will continue at their own pace, independent of current market demands.
They also took quite some time to decide to ramp up, as this comes a year or more late after they announced they were fully booked for 2026 and 2027.
And, their stock sold off on the news, so investors are not having faith either on the demand to justify capex expansion.
Honestly, it sucks to be a ram company, you are either buying into the hype and then spending years losing money, or you don't and leave a lot of money on the table while competition ramps up and eats your lunch (and then spends years losing money)
The memory cartel would be crazy to actually invest into new capacity at this point.
If they do diversify, they are compromising a key policy protecting their homeland, it makes no sense!
Trump did do the initial deal though, but TSMC had to cough the money up for that
TSMC wouldn’t put tens of billons of dollars in irreversible investment just to virtue signal, the scale is too large
You can’t “undo” a fab