Comment by thijson
4 hours ago
Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.
4 hours ago
Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.
Several Chinese manufacturers are doing just that, and have already expanded production: https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c... But because of tech trade barriers their primary focus is on the domestic market and only secondarily global markets.
Fortunately RAM is largely a commodity and more for sale only in China means more for sale elsewhere.
We are down to 3 manufacturers thanks to RAM boom and bust cycles. The remaining ones are the one that know how not to over invest.
With China’s CXMT and YMTC it’s now going to be five again.
A fab for high end memory costs $20B and 5 years to build.
It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
$20B is like pocket money at the scale the whole industry is moving.
It will only happen if the bottom doesn't fall out of the market for AI datacenters in the next few months.
It's coming up on a year since the crisis started and at every single point it's been "next few months"
Sometime I wish China had capacity to manufacture RAM. They would build fab within 1 year..
Am I missing something?
https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...
https://wccftech.com/another-chinese-dram-maker-breaks-into-...
They do, it’s called CXMT and they are making RAM under contract for Corsair
4 replies →
So far haven't we seen the opposite? Consumer focused ram production shutting down to make more volume for server dimms or etc?
The bottleneck isn't the sticks, it's the chips. The chips are the same for consumer and server applications. What's been happening is that big companies have bought nearly all the wafer capacity for the next year or so, and perhaps some of that capacity has also been redirected from DDR5 to LPDDR5. If a stick manufacturer drops out of the consumer market that kinda doesn't matter, because manufacturing sticks is relatively low tech compared to manufacturing the memory chips. You can compare it to manufacturing video cards vs. manufacturing GPUs (as in the actual processing elements).
The fabs are the same and are the actual bottleneck. The chips are different for CPUs and GPUs.
What do you mean? RAM manufacturers shifting their capacities to server RAM and HBM is exactly what’s happening.
Government needs to get out of the way. Micron announced a memory fab in Syracuse in 2023. It took 3 years, 20,000 pages of "environmental review", deals with the government on amount of union contracts during building, etc. for them to break ground in 2026 for a 2030 opening date. In any reasonable world, a 2023 announcement should have broke ground in 2023.
OTOH, a celulose factory near me, built in the 1950's, got their permits fast and with little regard to environment. FF three decades, and their entire surroundings are destoyed for everyone else. Trials go nowhere, because they have all authorizations needed (and a lot of political leverage because they are the main employer in the region). Careful fast-tracking business that have zero incentives to avoid externalization of costs.
Oh, yeah, we are in this calamity because of government interference, not unbridled capitalism. Sure.
Buddy they ain't building an ice-cream parlor. 200 miles of the Hudson river is a Superfund site. The biggest polluters, PCB's, lead and mercury.
The main blocker was that there were bats there so they needed to buy separate land to preserve. 20k pages of environmental review is just make work to spend money and create an unnecessary paper trail. If polluting with x is illegal then its illegal. The review doesnt stop that.
And? The primary goal should be to catch and stop pollution, not make manufacturers spend years promising not to do something they're not allowed to do. If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
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Why manufacturers would build more capacity to decrease the price (and profits)?
This is similar situation to housing market. Prices are going up and supply is being restricted by whatever means.
It will be a bit of Catch 22.