this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
673 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
86219 readers
3514 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
yeah this is kind of the pattern with ram price fluctuations.
Ram demand goes up.
Ram prices go up.
Ram makers say they'll increase capacity.
Nothing happens, they may open new factories but close older lines, or they may start to open another fab but then for whatever reason it doesn't work.
Ram prices go up.
The decision to build the new Boise fab in question (to start production in 2027) was made in September 2022. ChatGPT was made available to the public in November 2022. The new fab is likely not a response to significantly increased demand at the time but an investment made in expectation of increased demand (GPT-4 could already be tested in 2020, maybe they foresaw the LLM hype). They make DRAM. Isn't it likely that prices are going to drop once production starts at the new fab?
https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-invest-15-billion-new-idaho-fab-bringing-leading-edge
Micron Locks In Historically High Memory Prices For Five Years
https://m.slashdot.org/story/455824
ho lee fuggin sheeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiit
Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren’t much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories – and when they come online there still won’t be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM.
Well, shit. So much for that. Is that even legal?
Another source with same info...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Micron-sets-high-memory-prices-for-5-years-11344834.html
AI should be illegal if this is the consequence. fuuuuUUUUuu
depends on the market; one of the things I've seen repeatedly is new fabs opening to produce newer processes - replacing older fabs with larger nodes that then are shut down.
sometimes it's advantageous to keep the old lines going and eek every bit of market share out of them, sometimes it's prohibitive to keep older processes open.
but to respond to your query: in this market? in these crazy times? I'd be striking while the iron is hot and getting the maximum I could from every dram chip because the valuations of the hyperscalers and the surrounding ecosystem - open AI, anthropic, meta, google, nvidia etc., will continue to gobble it up until the bubble blows up in their faces.