I am hopeful but I am not confident China has the capability to do it.

They're already doing it

https://www.techspot.com/news/112502-memory-prices-tipped-fa...

As if it requires some unique genes or brains?

If a place can do it, another place, with a huge track record on manufacturing and lately expanding all kinds of tech, can.

It might help to not have much in the way of environmental, safety or labor regulations.

Whether or not you feel like those are good overall (I do), they do actually also slow things down.

>It might help to not have much in the way of environmental, safety or labor regulations.

Yes, like how it helped western industry early on. Or, well into the 70s for the most part.

where is this cheap Chinese RAM? I'd like to buy some

Ebay and Amazon are flooded with it. Especially if you are looking for anything prior to DDR5. DDR2 and DDR3 are especially flooded with weird brands you've never heard of before.

Unfortunately its not so cheap anymore as everyone ramped prices up of course.

Last year I could still get 32GB of DDR4 for under $60 from chinese brands.

DDR3 is from 10 years ago. DDR2 is from 15.

And?

I just upgraded my 2008 Thinkpad R61i to 8GB of DDR2 a few months ago while I was also upgrading to a core2duo.

DDR2 and DDR3 are still in active use by SBC manufacturers.

> I just upgraded my 2008 Thinkpad R61i to 8GB of DDR2 a few months ago while I was also upgrading to a core2duo

Uhhh… ok… good for you I guess…

Some of us keep the worthwhile trash alive forever. This laptop is gonna be twenty years old soon and it's too comfortable of a machine to be tossed to ewaste.

It's the euv machines that are the bottleneck. Pretty hard to ramp those up any faster in the next few years.

DDR5 is still mostly made with DUV (remember Intel 14+++++++++?), and even though manufacturers have slowly been moving a few layers to EUV the advantage is at the margin. Lack of EUV at scale will not prevent China from ramping useful RAM into this market.

spinning up fabs takes ages, micron has a US fab started bulding in 2023, its still not operational (projected to start mid-2027)

That proves that spinning up US fabs takes ages.

Chinese fabs might not be so tied with red tape and regulation upon regulation (which is a funny reversal, in terms of "communism vs capitalism" bureucracy/inefficiency cold war thinking)

The Chinese don't have access to new EUV machines.

All of their fabrication ability is based on old processes.

Not so sure about that: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...

DDR5 is DUV not EUV

1.) China is not communist, even remotely so. China is fascist in every sense of the word.

2.) Authoritarianism can move faster than anything. They can just say "wipe out that village, build the coal plant there, data center here, fab here.

3.) If it's red tape and regulation holding the US back, then that's clearly not "capitalism."

>1.) China is not communist, even remotely so. China is fascist in every sense of the word.

Except in the actual historical sense. They appear to enjoy all sorts of freedoms, increased prosperity, even have elections at different levels but under a single party system. Which is not necessarily that different than a effectively two party system.

>2.) Authoritarianism can move faster than anything. They can just say "wipe out that village, build the coal plant there, data center here, fab here.

Now that China is more effective, "it's easy because they're authoritarian". Before the argument was "authoritarianism can never be as effective as free-market democracy".

>3.) If it's red tape and regulation holding the US back, then that's clearly not "capitalism."

It's real world capitalism, not some fantasy some guy imagined removing all warts.

I think the most ironic fact of the 21st century is that there are less than 20,000 naturalized citizens in China. Western leftists don't really have a good explanation for that one and it definitely leans into the fascist characterization.

How is that ironic or necessary? Why should they hand out citizenships, when work or resident permits will do?

And that's somehow fascist, as if the problem with fascist Italy or nazi Germany was that they didn't hand out citizenships?