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Comment by vlucas | Hacker News Reader

Same. There is huge, real demand for memory and storage everywhere you look. New capacity takes 3-5 years to come online. Every vendor has completely sold out capacity and is backlogged on top of that. This 5-year estimate is actually pretty realistic to me. I think we are stuck with high prices on these components for at least the next 3 years, minimum.

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There are some companies who need the memory right now and there are others the AI people who are just issuing future buying IOUs and I might buy some memory from you in the future and the cartel is using that as leverage to get more money out of the companies that really need memory right away.

At the end of this fiasco, there will be some companies that will move on from the cartel.

> New capacity takes 3-5 years to come online.

Why should that be set in stone? Surely there are corners that can be cut if there's so much profit on the table.

At a basic level, the steps involved in setting up a fab are extremely serial in nature. While there are ways in which each step has been cost-cut in the past, amdahl's law itself limits it to a minimum of 2-3 years. If you want good yields and do it more properly, you will need 3-5 like GP said. And that is still being optimistic

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.

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