Comment by mrtksn
4 hours ago
What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?
They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices.
The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.
If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.
>It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies.
And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.
Everyone is using something from someone, you can even argue that US owes India and Europe huge compensation because pretty much everything US did in the last half century was made using technology or people funded by those people. Johny Ive is British, Almost all the AI stuff is created by Europeans, Israelis, and Canadians - thus funded by their respective taxpayers.
The thing about the US losing its grip on the world and the collapse of the global world order means that the words on the paper don't mean much. Embargoes on Russia didn't mean much so Europeans are physically taking over their ships and Ukrainians are physically sinking the rest of their ships. In Iran nothing other than physically sinking ships and blowing up places meant anything.
Europeans can ship EUV machines because they are physically building them for people who will use these to physically build the most valuable products currently there is. US wasn't able to enforce its will to Iran, what if Koreans, Europeans and the Chinese decide that its not into their interest to act according to US courts?
The collapse of global trade would greatly reduce economic efficiency, output, and investment. It has been coming for while, though greatly accelerated by the orange pdf file. It takes a lot longer to build systems of trust and belief in enforcements of global order than to disrupt them. I suppose we'll move closer to the fear side of the financial/political axis from the greed side.
If history is any guidelines that would be how World War III starts.
There is nothing that stops US from building their own Memory Fabs, or asking / funding Micron building more US Fabs. It will cost a more, but the complexity is certainly no where near replicating TSMC.
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> Steve Jobs is Syrian
lol he is not. at no point was he a syrian. his mom was from ohio or something.
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You are going to have to cite more for those claims. Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco. He is as Syrian as Trump is.
This is as biased an Anti-US take as any. Will not grace the rest of the claims with a response.
Then Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Kia would go bye-bye in the United States. I think the current memory fiasco will be their last big payday, so they should enjoy it while they can. There will be many companies that will rethink how they approach memory going into the future.
> What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?
They would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?
The market is the AI boom and the US is the host, they can sell the exact same stuff to someone else. What are the capitalists who fund the AI build up do? Invest in SaaS when they can't buy chips? I bet if something like that happens the chip manufacturers wouldn't end up with product they have no one to sell to.
US is the vast majority of their market - Apple, hyper-scalers, AI labs
Why can't they just buy the exact same product and install it in Kazakhstan or somewhere else?
The RAM buyers have no interest in entertaining something like that because their revenue comes mainly from the US, too.
Corporations avoid picking fights with large nations where lots of revenue comes from for very obvious reasons.
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And hyper-scalers, Apple, AI labs all will die if memory makers can't sell to them?
regime change in South Korea. President Lee Jae Myung isn't exactly popular among Washington circles
memory is a commodity is laughable. Then software engineering is even more a commodity, the amount of engineering going into making memory chips the vast majority of people don't understand. There are a lot of software engineers getting this field after leetcoding and copy from hellointerview. Claude can write you an app in 30 minutes. Try build a lpddr5 dram chip in 30 minutes. Manufacturing know how itself is a specialty and barrier to entry.
I mean your view isn't flawless but overall I agree. Too many people think building things amount to spending money and completely overlook the thousands of people required who are not just unskilled labor hired off the street.