this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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maybe i'm naive, but if it's so profitable to make RAM in the long-term, why wouldn't competition emerge? I get not investing in the startup costs just for a bubble, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Capital/time intensive start up costs make it a barrier to entry. This is why the prices are so high. Supply is inelastic because the producers know this is a bubble. If they do the capital intensive thing and the bubble pops before realizing the additional capacity, they are left holding the bag.
Yes, that's literally what I said about bubbles. The assertion in OP is that RAM pricing won't go back to pre-bubble prices. If that is true, RAM manufacturing will be incredibly profitable post-AI-bubble and competition should emerge eventually.
It takes double digit billions to start a manufacturing plant and that's when you already have people who know what to do.
Most countries can't really afford this in their budgets and I'm saying countries because it'd be a stupid endeavour for most private enterprises to even attempt. CXMT (DRAM) and YMTC (NAND) absolutely are sponsored by China, which is the only real way to get one of those companies going these days.
Google, Apple, etc could start their own memory companies if they wanted to. But it's a hell of an expense to justify to your investors.
Making RAM isn’t like making a shirt or a suitcase v it’s an extremely specialised and extremely expensive business, and this should be apparent given there are literally only 3 manufacturers in the world.
Making ram is incredibly hard and expensive, that’s why there are only 3 companies in the entire world that do it. For a new company to attempt to do it now, they’d have to outlay tens/hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade before they see a cent of revenue.
And ASML making the lithography machines for basically everyone... You can't just "make more" ram without scaling ASML too.