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TSMC is apparently considering getting into the RAM business at the request of Nvidia.
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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What's stopping an American RAM plant? I would think we would have already broke ground.
Americans do crazy things like not tolerating 24 hour shifts and being required to sleep in a dormitory owned by the employer.
The horrendous workers’ rights in Taiwan and S Korea are not talked about enough when discussing their silicon manufacturing dominance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology
They have fabs in the US (and are building more).
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/
How did I never know that?! Thanks.
Sure thing. If you've ever purchased Crucial memory, that's their "consumer" brand, where they make the DIMMs themselves, so you'll have some of their memory chips. There was a lot of outrage on here that they stopped doing that during the RAM shortage, prioritized filling B2B demand first.
There are also third-party DIMM manufacturers like PNY (also US-based) that make DIMMs with chips from memory chip manufacturers, and they might be using Micron memory chips as well.
If you're on Linux, you can check what's in your system at the DIMM level without pulling it open with:
I don't know if there's a way to see where the chips on a third-party DIMM come from
like, potentially Micron, with a third-party manufacturer
without actually looking at the chip.
*was their consumer brand
They have also plead guilty to price fixing. Device information
Micron says Hi.
It’s wild how few Americans realize that Micron has fabs here.
Who’s gonna pay for it? A ram fab costs hundreds of billions and takes years to get online, then takes tens of billions every year to constantly upgrade to new standards. And all that for a commodity that while right now is obnoxiously expensive is typically a razor thin margin and sometimes even sold at a loss
Foxcon wisconsin..... Literally right freaking there just put it there there's nothing stopping anyone ...and pedantics aside its already paid for!
The Foxconn deal fell through. IIRC, Microsoft datacenters are in there now.
That was a political stunt for Walker, it was never ever going to actually happen (maybe some minor LCD fab but not high end compute)
If you’re spending hundreds of billions on a DRAM fab, you’re overpaying. Check Facebook Marketplace, you shouldn’t have to spend more than $25B to get what you’re looking for.
Intel already has fabs. Ram is currently 3x more expensive per unit area than high end CPU's. So just like Samsung make ram and ARM cpus at the same fabs, Intel could have some of its foundary make dram for 3x the profit of CPUs.
There's no point in making so many CPU's when there's no DRAM to go with them.
Those fabs would need to be retooled. So intel spends billions, butchers their ability to fabricate their core product line, and all so that they can now fabricate a deprecating asset. By the time they got up and running ram prices would be about to drop significantly as 2028 has Samsung, micron, and sk Hynix all opening expanded fabrication capacity. Not to mention if the 3 main ram manufacturers take ~2 years to get additional capacity online god only knows how long it would take for someone who hasn’t fucked with dram manufacturing since like the 80s
There's been a lot of efforts to expand American fabs. Intel, Micron, and TSMC are all working on it (and I'm pretty sure most of those projects have at least broken ground at this point). But even with infinity dollars to spend, it takes a very long time to build these plants. The fabs are similar in size to a "normal" factory, but the entire interior is a series of massive clean rooms that are hundreds if not thousands of times cleaner than an operating room, filled with equipment that is simultaneously very large and very sensitive.
I remember reading somewhere that one of Intel's newest process nodes involves drilling holes measured in hundreds of picometers into the part at some point. A hydrogen atom is roughly 62 picometers across.