[Gigachad]

The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run.

Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.

[dijit]

There's a few things to note here:

1) Prices aren't returning to "normal".

The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it

2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome.

If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about competing on price, maybe they become price competitive before the launch of your new fab in order to kill it, but, it will have an effect and probably before it even opens

3) A western supply chain has benefits by itself.

There's a reason some industries are not allowed to die, most notably farming- because security and external pressure are concerning.

---

Realistically there's no reason not to do this. It will be long, painful and expensive. The best time was a decade ago. The next best time is now.

[josephg]

> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it

I disagree.

Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. So we can't exactly increase global manufacturing capacity overnight.

The way I see, there's 2 ways this goes:

1. AI is a fad. RAM and storage demand falls. Prices drop back to normal.

2. AI is not a fad. Over time, more and more fabs come online to meet the supply needs of the AI industry. The price comes down as manufacturing supply increases.

Or some combination of the two.

The high prices right now are because there's a demand shock. There's way more demand for RAM than anyone expected, so the RAM that is produced sells at a premium. High prices aren't because RAM costs more to manufacture than it did a couple years ago. There's just not enough to go around. In 5-10 years, manufacturing capacity will match demand and prices will drop. Just give it time.

[amluto]

> 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal".

> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it

RAM isn’t some commodity that gets mined at a fixed rate and therefore costs more when people want large amounts of it. It’s a manufactured good, made from raw materials that are available in huge quantity, that was produced and sold at a profit at 2024 prices, even accounting for the capex needed to produce it.

Two things have changed. First, demand increased quickly. Second, big buyers sort of demonstrated that they’re willing to pay current prices, at least temporarily, so maybe the demand price elasticity has changed, or at least people’s perception of it has changed.

None of prevents the price from going back down. The high prices have made it economical for new manufacturers to invest more to compete — look at CXMT. And CXMT doesn’t have EUV machines, which doesn’t appear to be a showstopper for them.

[Gigachad]

Your first point highlights the huge unmitigated risk. There is no guarantee that this won't all implode, triggering a huge recession. And even if no one can afford the ram after, they especially won't be able to afford the more expensive European ram.

Really the only way it could work is if the government declares it it a national security issue and will promise to subsidize it. Because in just a free market, it's most likely to flop.

[jorvi]

Prices are returning to normal, probably 2-3 years from now. SK Hynix is making absolutely monstrous investments in memory fabs and CMXT will be entering the market in force more and more.

The biggest problem is that the industry wants HBM, whereas consumers want DRAM. Until the need for HBM has been sufficiently satisfied, fabs will prefer being tooled for HBM because businesses can be squeezed much harder than consumers.

Then again, as consumer you don't really need DDR5 or even DDR4 so long as you aren't using an iGPU. Its all about being around CL15 timings.

[NooneAtAll3]

> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode

you're missing the picture that it's not companIES - the crisis primarily was caused by only one company OpenAI buying out wafers

but even more than that - that wafer buyout is *an excuse* used by cartel - there are several mechanisms that could have eased out most of the problem (e.g. Samsung selling old equipment) that was not done to ride the money wave

(also said "hyperscalers and AI companies" existed in spring 2025 too, yet the price was low)

the winners will not be the ones who build new fabs - but ones who'll have enough money and government subsidies/import taxes to protect such investments after cartel decides to oversupply again, flushing the price down

[nl]

> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it

This isn't right.

RAM prices (and most components) are very finely balanced between supply and demand. A small shortfall in supply leads to a large increase in price, and a large shortfall in supply leads to very large price increases.

It takes 2 years for an existing RAM supplier to build a new clean room factory to make RAM.

All the RAM manufactures saw this shortage coming 6 months ago.

If you follow the news, the existing manufactures are investing heavily. Here's Hynix annoucements:

Nov 25: Hynix plans 8-fold boost to cutting-edge DRAM production in 2026, https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/sk-hynix-plans-8-fold-bo...

Dec 25: Hynix investing $500B (I guess this is a mistranslation somewhere!!???) in new RAM factories, https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/hot-on-the-heels-of-...

Jan 26: Hynix to spend $13 billion on the world's largest HBM memory assembly plant, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/sk-hynix-to-...

The supply is being built to match the demand. Prices will stabilize, and the manufactures know there is lots of latent demand.

In 2 years time RAM prices for consumers will be normal again (not sure about GPU RAM though!)

[danny_codes]

FWIW I agree with you. The US should provide stable, consistent policy & funding so companies understand the regulatory environment and do long-term planning.

Which is a good idea for when we don't have a dementia patient in charge of our country.

EU should get on that though.

[mullingitover]

> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it

You can't reshore domestic manufacturing without creating legions of desperate workers with no other choice but to accept minimum wage factory jobs.

[m4rtink]

I don't think anything other then a major implosion of the AI companies is possible. It is just not physically possible to go any other way due to he ridiculous amount of funny money they have invested to this dead-end & the non-existent revenue these companies are getting back for it.

[nektro]

> The only way they will is if the [..] AI companies start to implode

this is the theory of those who are expecting the ram shortage to be short, yes

[cyanydeez]

You think AI can't implode..wat

[autoexec]

Not everyone but a supplier in the Europe would be a massive benefit long after the AI driven demand dies off. It'd free them from dependence on other countries for a critical resource making chips more affordable and the supply more stable which is good because the stability of the rest of the world is already questionable and big shocks are expected in the near future.

[usrusr]

I guess the idea would have to be to look at it in the reverse: have some domestic capacity for those usual strategic supply independence reasons, even if it operates at a loss. And hope that occasionally, one of those demand surge waves will swipe through and make the cost not quite so bad. Outlier waves like the current one might even create a net positive, but that bet would not be the primary purpose, that honor would go to hedging against getting cut off.

[noosphr]

AI demand isn't going away. It will just move from the data center to the local machine. On device AI is much better for the customer than it being in the cloud. Expecting people to stick with a few dozen gb of hbm is going to be the 'no one needs more than 640kb' of the 2030s.

[bandrami]

> On device AI is much better for the customer than it being in the cloud

Which is exactly how you know it will always be nerfed. The last thing these guys want is to take their claws out of our data.

[bilekas]

It's being delayed by ai companies from running on local consumer grade machines specifically by making the cost of entry too expensive. OpenAi buys 40% of wafers to ensure the price of memory stays high.

[egorfine]

> AI demand isn't going away.

I'm not sure about that. When was the last time you have used Copilot prompt in Run dialog or Notepad?

[iamnothere]

Then use tariffs to ensure that local price matches foreign price, or have government, military, and sensitive industry buy local for security reasons. (Obviously you need to be careful with this to ensure that corruption doesn’t take hold.)

Having your own chips is a national security issue. Spreading out fabs across the world is a global resilience issue.

[vincnetas]

there is another industry that is not economical in EU but we still do it. Food production. Because its strategic decision. Not saying that RAM is of equal importance like food, but saying that if there is a will there is a way.

[Aerroon]

Imo there's never enough RAM. If everyone has more RAM available then software will find a use for this RAM. Sure, some of it is going to be wasteful, but we would almost certainly get new products that weren't feasible before. You can trade space for compute after all.

That being said, AI is not going to go away already. And AI is about as memory hungry as you can get.

[bigfatkitten]

> And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run.

People forget quickly why we only have a handful of DRAM manufacturers today.

[christophilus]

Exactly. Anyone who's been in the business a long time knows that this market has crazy boom / bust cycles. This is probably the craziest boom I've ever seen, but manufacturers are rightly hesitant to spend billions building out capacity only to get caught by the bust again.

[hinkley]

I used to know people who lived near Micron factories and it was just boom and bust over there for decades. Hire a bunch of people, then big layoff.