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The same Micron that plead guilty to price fixing of memory 20 years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2004/02/27/memory-makers-hit-by-price-fixing-claims/1070959
gross margin for Micron
Gross indeed. Fucking greedy scumbags
Hopefully Chinese firms recognize the gap in the market and increase their capacity.
They make whatever is most profitable as individual companies.
And China as a government, absolutely loves the idea of everyone's computer usage going thru giant corporations because the Chinese government owns part of every Chinese company and doesn't need a backdoor since they have a set of keys.
Like, why would they make something that they don't want and would sell for less profit margin overseas?
Why build for a bunch of broke consumers when there's a blank check for anything related to data centers right now?
That demand could disappear tomorrow. Personal computers will just get more expensive so prices will keep going up for when they have to switch back.
Why would you ever hope China would save us from this?
Edit:
It seems like people are confused here:
Reason 1 they want to make data center stuff, is just money:
They make whatever is most profitable as individual companies.
Separate reason #2 to prefer data center stuff as a product, is everything in China goes thru Chinese companies which China controls.
And China as a government, absolutely loves the idea of everyone’s computer usage going thru giant corporations because the Chinese government owns part of every Chinese company and doesn’t need a backdoor since they have a set of keys.
If Chinese consumers have to offload their data processing to large corporations, then since China owns a piece of every corporations, they now see everything people process.
Which is why the next sentence references two reason the Chinese government would want to squash home computing in favor of "cloud computing" thru data centers:
Like, why would they make something that they don't (reason 2) want and would sell for less profit margin overseas (reason 1)?
If the Chinese government is doing this to spread hardware backdoors in all the RAM (technically quite difficult to do without detection, btw, and people will be looking) then it will be in their interests to lower the price of Chinese RAM to well below Western RAM, so the world buys as much as possible.
I think it's more likely to be similar to their photovoltaic cell, battery, and industry policy in general: economically dominate the world's markets and give China all the advantages that the previous industrial centres of the world had.
The ability to deprive rival nations of valuable resources, or help allied nations by guaranteeing their supply, is incredibly useful, which is why most nations do so if they are able to.
The US gets backdoors in many electronic systems by simply asking, and in some cases creating laws to do so. Why would China not do the same instead of owning shares in the companies? It's probably more that they want the Party to financially share in the wealth created by those companies, as well as more directly control their corporate actions.
Chinese companies are very competitive, especially between each other. If there is a way to take market share, they will do it. If they make too much profit their CEO risks being disappeared by the chinese government.
Just look at the crazy low solar panel prices which mostly come from china.
Market share is meaningless when the same infrastructure can be used to crank out a slightly different product with an insane profit margin.
There is no logical reason for Chinese corporations to produce consumer RAM for less profit than what datacenters use.
If RAM prices rise to where profit margin is comparable, they'll make consumer RAM.
Which is literally why RAM.prices are astronomical right now....
Does none of this make sense to you?
How the hell does one hide and then use a backdoor in ram?
You add a piece of code that scans for a specific very big prime number and if it finds that, you look for any process and inject into stdlibc any backdoor of your choice
could have a chip that looks for a certain sequence of bytes then changes some other bytes as a result... it would probably introduce massive latency though...
The gap is in consumer market not enterprise. Micron even focused entirely on enterprise customers. New or small chinese companies can't compete with that but can enter the consumer market with smaller prices, since no one seems to care for this gap because of higher revenue in enterprise market (just like you said). Why smaller prices? Otherwise why bothering with them instead of known brands.
They aren't going to "save us" because they're good people. It's a company like the others but must get in the global maket in someway and this is a good way.
It’s a company like the others but must get in the global maket in someway and this is a good way.
Buddy...
If they can make 5 million selling consumer of 500 million selling to data centers...
They're going all in on data center.
Hey I recommend learning about how the different parts of a computer work what supply chain attacks are and are not realistic before potentially misinforming others. Your concerns are unfounded
absolutely loves the idea of everyone’s computer usage going thru giant corporations because the Chinese government owns part of every Chinese company and doesn’t need a backdoor since they have a set of keys.
We are still taking about NAND chips. Can you backdoor those? I would think you need to backdoor the controllers or smth at least.
Ok .ml, you all are known for your unbiased China takes after all....
because other governments wont. other governments have embraced comoanies buying eachother up so there is no competition. the enemy of my enemy is my friend
Remember they are traitors to actual customers when the bubble burtsts.
They should fail, totally, and vanish from the world.
Traitors would mean they were ever on your side. Welcome to capitalism, bud. They've always been on the side of maximum profit, like all other corporations.
Five years is too long for the buyers. The AI bubble will burst before then and then the market price will drop as the inflated demand disappears, especially if this continues long enough for more production capacity to come online.
They might not have had much of a choice in making the deal, though. Micron has been extracting the absolute maximum they can out of this situation. Make a deal or get nothing. Their clients will remember, though, and flag them as an unreliable supplier. Once this ends—and these always end—they’ll likely have a lower market share and end up having to cut prices.
Micron is optimistic in saying the demand won’t start easing until 2028. A lot of the rest of the technology manufacturing industry is about to grind to a crawl if not a halt because it’s nearly impossible to get components. Some companies are already delaying product launches and I think a lot more are about to this summer as they realize what’s happening. If non-AI businesses start to slow, the whole economy starts to slow, the AI demand will falter and that’s when the bubble bursts. I’m thinking maybe by the end of this year, more likely next year.
When the bubble bursts I’m guessing at least a couple of the companies Micron signed SCAs with will fold and Micron won’t get anything.
Interesting analysis. I was thinking the same, their customers might not make it.
About this point:
They might not have had much of a choice in making the deal, though. Micron has been extracting the absolute maximum they can out of this situation. Make a deal or get nothing. Their clients will remember, though, and flag them as an unreliable supplier.
Are the other two any better? If not Micron might get away with it. It doesn't strike me as a very competitive market.
Soooo if you raise the price sooo high then it lowers the price of barriers to entry. Congrats on maybe a year of monopoly before memory becomes a commodity like corn. Or AI crashes so hard that your customers refuse to come back. I feel like the later since using Micron memory for the past 30~ years.
Does it go something like this? Those companies who buy the NAND chips to make AI accelerators, SSDs and RAM for data centers are the Microns customers, like Nvidia. Even if they are in trouble and know that the datacenters are not being built, they can't cancel the deals because that would call the bubble into question. They will have to take any markup deal that Micron gives, them because if they don't there will be nothing for them nor Micron anyway.
is there any good reason to charge more? I remember a long time ago, the people who run youtube had to have new technology invented to be able to store the videos on there.
is anything like that happening with ram chips?
Simple supply and demand problem