> window of extremely elevated RAM and SSD prices
Is it a window? It seems likely to me that we're going to be paying the LLM tax on all of our consumer electronics for the rest of our lives.
Is it a window? It seems likely to me that we're going to be paying the LLM tax on all of our consumer electronics for the rest of our lives.
Do they? Is that why they've committed to literally doubling their production capacity in 5 years?
And most of that is just announcements from SK Hynix and CXMT coming online. Samsung's announcements are more conservative, and Micron is barely building shit. All of it put together still drags far behind demand, according to every financial statement by every DRAM manufacturer.
This is intentional because DRAM historically follow boom-bust cycles. Literally, they have all said they are intentionally aiming to build less than demand. Nobody wants to be stuck paying for a fab that isn't running at capacity 10 years from now.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sky-high-dram-prices-set-1229...
In this supply constrained market, DRAM manufacturers literally aren't the ones deciding to increase prices, buyers who are bidding up the price of future capacity are the ones increasing the prices.
If memory manufacturers believed that elevated demand were likely to persist indefinitely, expanding supply to reach the optimal market-clearing price is exactly what taking advantage of the situation would look like.
The extent to which they're not investing in expanded production capacity is the extent to which they manifestly don't believe the current demand spike will sustain over the long term