I'd take the opposite bet on this. They're diverting wafer capacity from lower-profit items to things like HBM, but all indications are that wafer starts are up a bit. Just not up enough.

For example: https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery

"Sequentially, DRAM revenue increased 15% with bit shipments increasing over 20% and prices decreasing in the low single-digit percentage range, primarily due to a higher consumer-oriented revenue mix"

(from june of this year).

The problem is that the DRAM market is pretty tight - supply or demand shocks tend to produce big swings. And right now we're seeing both an expected supply shock (transition to new processes/products) as well as a very sudden demand shock.

So it’s also the perfect time to constrain the product flow to jack up the prices.

They’ve been acting like a cartel for a long time now and somehow they never match the demand even after 18 months straight price increases. They already have the fab, the procedures, and everything, so stop acting like they’re setting up a brand new fab just to increase throughput.

This seems like a weird subject on which to be so aggressive, or at least I'm interpreting your tone that way. DRAM manufacturers absolutely have engaged in illegal price fixing in the past (1998-2002 in particular). But they've also overbuilt and underbuilt in fairly regular cycles, resulting in large swings in dram price and profitability. And they've had natural disasters reduce production capacity (e.g., micron in 2021). But there's no evidence right now that this is anything except finding themselves in the nice (but nervous) position of making a product that just just had a major demand spike, combined with some clever contract work by openai.

Demand right now is so high that they'd make more net profit if they could make more dram. They could still be charging insane prices. They're literally shutting down consumer sales - that's completely lost profit.

> I don’t think they’re working at 100% capacity or don’t have any other FAB that they can utilize for other low profit stuff.

I have a family member who works in a field related to memory and storage fabrication. At the moment Micron, etc, are running these money printers full time and forgoing routine maintenance to keep the money flowing.

What I said stands, let’s check their books and manufacturing schedule to see if they’re artificially constraining the supply.

The fact that they’re busy doesn’t hide the fact that they’re known to collude before, and they might even ship parts to phony resellers to keep the price high.

What’s next? A commodity memory chip is going to cost more than a cpu or gpu die?