Comment by nutjob2
3 days ago
It's funny that you call this an "very aggressive dumping strategy" while AI vendors are doing the same but with even greater losses and on a much larger scale.
It's all simply a fight for market share.
The original sin is the existing DRAM vendors selling their entire (spare) capacity to the likes of OpenAI.
Can we please stop with this irritatingly persistent myth? AI companies, at least the big ones, do not sell inference at a loss - far from it. This has been debunked and explained many times and yet it keeps being repeated.
The numbers aren't public but most guesses I've heard are that Anthropic's markup is around 50% on average, and that if considered in isolation, most models are profitable overall. The constant losses are instead due to training the next models, which will also eventually recoup but later, and forward capex investment.
This idea that big AI companies are normally and systematically selling inference at a loss as some kind of market share strategy is just not supported by the facts.
You talk about myths and then quote vague guesses of 50% without sourcing.
No one sold their capacity to OpenAI. The vast majority of DRAM is transacted in what is essentially a quarterly auction.
"RAM is going to AI: OpenAI has secured up to 40% of the market."
https://globalcio.com/news/16062/
You're maybe talking about the spot market, but companies are free to make any sort of supply contract.
AI slop article
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