Re:The RAM shortage could last years
by PunchyHamster on Monday April 20, 2026 @04:38AM
(#47831676)
> Failing that, you'd like to think a regulatory agency somewhere would step in to keep a single player from hosing everybody else, but...
Up until AI there weren't really players being able to gobble 40% of the market so nobody was looking.
> Neither party apparently knew he was negotiating with the other.
I don’t buy it that two of the largest manufacturers of DRAM in the world, from the same country, didn’t know this. Even of you ignore each company’s intelligence teams, that’s also the job of the country’s internal intelligence services, to make sure they know what all companies are doing and then make it so they have the best leverage to gain as much as possible. Both companies would have known “somehow” and played hardball.
Re:The RAM shortage could last years
by high_na_euv on Monday April 20, 2026 @06:01AM
(#47832226)
Wut? How they [gov] would know that?
By spying?
How would the country’s internal intelligence services know what’s happening? Yes, by spying. That’s literally their job and they have assets in every critical area in a country. Every institution, every major industry player, they are monitored to a degree by the internal intelligence in every country in the world. There are more nefarious reasons to do this but the ostensible one is that if it’s of strategic importance the country needs to know everything there is to know.
The companies also do a lot of spying themselves, every bit of info could give them an edge.
If they had actually been communicating or colluding with each other, they would have put the screws to him, making it harder for OpenAI to assert control over the vast majority of the DRAM market.
Failing that, you'd like to think a regulatory agency somewhere would step in to keep a single player from hosing everybody else, but...