Comment by pixl97
17 hours ago
In general, no.
It takes billions to tens of billions to setup a fab. It also takes years to get it working. Then when you add in the IP for memory, it pretty much ain't happening.
All the RAM monopoly has to do is wait 3 days before you're producing and drop the price and you're ruined. Meanwhile they've built up a battle chest of hundreds of billions in profits.
China might be the only competition we see come out of this, but only because they are playing the long game and have trillions of US dollars to play the game with.
There are a lot of companies that have billions in cash and are also prodigious buyers of RAM. Companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Nvidia...
Do they want to get into a commodity business like RAM production? Maybe not, but if prices stay high long enough that demand for their products falls off, they might think about it.
I know that I personally and my employer are cutting way back on new technology purchases and squeezing as much as we can out of old equipment due to the cost of RAM and storage now.
And none of these companies are operating their own fabs, that's the problem.
Fabs are a cutthroat business that's very hard to get into. It costs billions of continual investment to stay a float. That's why there's really only about 3 different companies with cutting edge fabs. TSMC, Micron, and Samsung. Even intel, who built a huge portion of their business on cutting edge fab tech, has struggled to keep funding it. AMD got out of the fab business almost a decade ago (spinning off global foundries) and that spin off is no longer cutting edge. AMD uses TSMC.
Fabs are some of the most expensive factories to operate on this planet due to a constant need for brand new equipment and cutting edge research. That's why there's not an Apple, Google, Meta, or Nvidia fab. That's why there's not an AMD fab. That's why Intel fabs are treading water.
Without the constant investment, you very quickly find yourself in the company of yet another cutthroat industry, the "not cutting edge" fabrication industry. And that, by and large, has already been locked up by about a dozen fab companies.
I've made this same argument so let me make a counter-argument:
There are some ways to get this off the ground much quicker. One or more companies could buy an existing non-leading-edge fab like GlobalFoundaries. That buys a lot of expertise so you're not starting from zero.
DRAM also benefits from being very regular and relatively simple. It used to be what you bring up on a new process node to help prove things out.
It also isn't impossible to reduce reliance on ASML if you're willing to throw money at it. That's definitely a super-long-game move but it could be done.
I'm not going to argue that someone is going to do any of this but if demand is sustained it is possible.
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And a 64G DDR5 ECC DIMM costs $3K and is backordered. If ths isn't a bubble and demand persists, some new players are eventually going to want a cut of that.
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>a lot of companies that have billions in cash
They sit on billions because they avoid spending their money as much as possible.
The amount they spend on RAM in surrounding few years would represent almost nothing to the massive money hole that would happen if they tried to make their own fab.
Also, these problems tend to affect the entire market, which means if you're big, you're fine. It's when problems don't affect your competitors but affect you that the real issues for these companies crop up.