SK Hynix CEO sees memory chip shortage lasting until 2030
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Fixed it for you.
Dell is making moves to introduce server grade hardware without ECC memory.
There is plenty of DDR5, its not even very expensive, its DDR5-ECC where the prices go stratospheric.
My 2x16GB of DDR5-6000 that I bought for 250€ is now 650€. 2x32GB that cost 200€ last July now goes for close to 1250€. Even my shitty ass DDR4-3000 sticks from over ten years ago would be selling for close to 300€.
DDR5 is horribly expensive, the only variants that are not as expensive are low frequencies or low amounts.
I think whatever happens it will be their last big payday because some of the companies that can do have the money and the capability are going to make plans to move away. From the Cartel.
https://www.polygon.com/ram-manufacturers-sued-supply-price-...
Can't they count on each other doing the profitable thing? Especially when they PR it:
> Furthermore, focused investment in HBM is creating a virtuous cycle that improves profitability in the general-purpose memory market. As resources are diverted to HBM, the supply-demand balance for general DRAM is improving.
January 5, 2026 - SK hynix market outlook.
https://news.skhynix.com/en/2026-market-outlook-focus-on-the...
If demand is projected continue for a long time, this may encourage more competitors to enter this space, so supply will increase.
On the other hand if everyone thought that the demand will end soon, nobody would invest in more capacity and shortage would last longer.
I think this is just for short term shareholder profit.
Competitors are going to come online anyway because of the threat of chip embargoes against China that mean they are investing in production regardless of what the outside world is doing.
There are no competitors that can muster the capital to make decent RAM... other than China but China is under a heavy sanctions and tariffs regime, when Apple mentioned using Chinese RAM to ease pricing they were quickly shushed by above.
The current monopolists aren't building new capacity either or are simply pretending to do it. It's a planned monopoly market for reasons I can only speculate about.
It's ram chips, the bottom of the barrel of semi manufacturing. If you get high prices for long enough, everyone is gonna jump into the market.
Whom exactly? Korea and Taiwan are already saturated. EU may take 5 yearrs just to approve plans formnew factory. US is interested in super fast super duper AIG, ddr5 is way too boring.
Only competitor is mainlaind china!
Exactly. China wil push for it as China factories will supply Chinese AI first.
Who is going to build a memory chip fab in Europe? Qimonda collapsed into insolvency 20+ years ago and Infineon has long since abandoned the market.
dude, DDR6 was planned for 2027 in 07/2025 [1] No one is going to build factories in 2026 to produce DDR5.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/339178/ddr6-memory-arrives-in-20...
Apple acquired Infineon from Intel, which was struggling, and developed an in-house modem. They certainly have the expertise to design memory and SSDs (PA Semi, Intrinsity, Anobit).
I believe Apple must implement this strategy if they intend to build their devices, and advance into the future in a timely manner, and Apple has demonstrated its ability to execute over time when necessary. This is undoubtedly one of those critical times.
I anticipate that the memory cartel will eventually experience its final significant financial gain, and those who can will design around them.
Yes, it will take time 2 to 4 years but that is nothing took 13 years to replace Intel and six years to replace Qualcomm which has already warned its investors on Apple, leaving them.
The rack assemblers like Dell, HPE, Supermicro, and Lenovo have 18 to 24 month backlogs on deliveries at the moment, and even the neoclouds have 6-9 month backlogs to onboard customers onto their SaaS platforms, and 12-24 month backlogs for delivering bare metal. All those require memory.
Also, 2030 is barely 3 years away from now as 2027 is around the corner. Yes we are ALL old now.
Using priors from 2015-2019 today is the equivalent of thinking your experience in 1995-1999 should inform decisions made in 2008-2013.
Why should that be set in stone? Surely there are corners that can be cut if there's so much profit on the table.
Additionally, HBM requires 3+ times the capacity of DRAM, so it gets crowded out. They do command 5x margins, so the unit economics is ok. But this means that even new capacity will mostly be used to service HBM demand, and consumer or enterprise DRAM is unlikely to benefit at the same pace - it will benefit somewhat of course.
At the end of this fiasco, there will be some companies that will move on from the cartel.
There are a bunch of things that happen in parallel to the AI boom:
a) everyone and their mother is building out capacity. For each GB of VRAM installed, you generally want at least 1 GB of RAM, if not more. So just take nvda's numbers and go from there. And that's just for the GPU servers. But you also need ancillary services around GPU farms. You need some compute for filtering, preprocessing, you need data storage, and so on. And they're all RAM hungry processes.
b) RL is giving lots of capabilities improvements for AI, but it needs lots and lots of parallel runners for scenarios. Those runners need RAM. So every bit of non-GPU capacity is also being used, and more installed.
c) With increasing capabilities comes increasing usage. Everyone is deploying "agents" and those need to run somewhere, and they take RAM (especially the badly coded ones). There've also been reports of labs / big players hoovering up every mac available, for "agentic computer control" / training / whatever. That's on top of people buying them to run "24/7" stuff a la claw/hermes/etc.
In all of this, RAM is the bottleneck. And for the skeptics, you don't have to take hynix's word for it. Just look at the sales for CPUs / Mobos. They're down, because building a computer now is bottlenecked at RAM.
I read the threads and don’t see unwarranted skepticism
There is a lot of SPV backed financial engineering upstream, but not here.
Many words have already been spilled as to whether or not that might happen, so I'll just shrug rather than adding to them.
Clearly it’s the fabrication of RAM/HBM chips. But if the margin is so high, why can’t other fabs like CPU fabs be used? I assume they’re not as CPU prices are going down. Or are they radically different and not easily reconfigured?
Meaning if the avg consumer is going to buy memory, they are going to have to fork a whole lot more money than they did before, because they will be paying the price of profit generating data companies.
The next phase of improvements will have to be in consumer software to be more memory efficient. Gone are the days of electron apps and other memory intensive systems of programming./
If a company is motivated and has the money they can get it done. I think those three memory companies are counting on people to be stupid.
Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm certainly thought they had Apple over the barrel…
There's still a part of me that thinks 2020 will be the bright shiny future that will solve all our problems, but the other parts know that 2020 showed us that we live in the dark future where all our dreams died.
FTFY. At the rate China's moving on this, it won't be long till they get a stranglehold on the consumer chip market.
We had to strip all of our office infra from Huawei to Ericsson and Axis after we found that practically everything Chinese was phoning back to home and sending GBs of data cumulatively.
You can respect an adversary without needing to trust them.
All you need to do is look at the way they do business across the world. They don’t want to be your mama and they don’t wanna be your daddy. They just want to close a business deal. The art of selling and trading is a hell of a lot older in China than the so-called communist party which only dates from 1921 in China. In short labeling them communist is very shortsighted The culture is thousands of years old.
Honestly I don't mind the Chinese approach - at least you don't get bullied, unlike dealing with America. Of course, experiences vary if you're in their sphere of influence.
That's the problem with monopolies.