I think everyone is aware now that you don't build a fab by snapping your fingers, and you need to amortise it over many years. The said manufacturers are just out of a massive slump in demand during covid, when they were selling at a loss, and these cycles happened many times in this industry. It is understandable that they don't jump all-in on the AI bandwagon, which, god knows where it is going and for how long.

If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.

> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?

Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.

Yes when there are large fixed costs to expanding production, that will happen more slowly, after determining that the high demand isn't just a short term spike.

It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).

I'm not super familiar with farming, but I'm pretty sure there is an upper bound on how much wheat you can plant dictated by the amount of land you own.

I feel like I and HN live in different worlds,

https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2026/01/20/samsung-sk-h...

Big manufactures have absolutely cut production of lower margin products and it's not like they can re-purpose all of the equipment used for it for HBM yet. edit They can definitely focus more resource because of it on HBM though.

Things have improved a bit since govts are starting to get angry.

Tldr; no one is cutting the production of high margin stuff, but low margin stuff can go and die, because it's not a free market it's a stock market these companies want to show off better margins in every unit there is no reason to keep inefficient things running when not doing it pays more.

They just don't want 30-40% margins anymore. That is not free market that is quite literally serving their own interests because they know there is a monopoly.

All big memory manufacturers are heavily supported by the govt, that's what has made them the monopolies they are Micron supported by USA (they crushed Japan's memory industry for it), and Korean giants are more tangled up with the govt than well most people in US would realize.

Somehow people think free market means anything goes, which honestly is where we stand today so I don't blame anyone.

But using govts to crush competitions and build yourself up on subsidies and similar isn't really free markets. China hasn't been able to grow a significant memory chip industry yet because of lack of EUV machines and similar technologies blocked by the US, which is also not "free market".

As for WD, and Sandisk separating I feel like this was more mutual and they new HDDs or SSDs being together was a distraction for both. Which feels more strategic, think of it like this, the shareholders who had the shares how hold shares in both and together they might have likely been worth less so shareholders made money.

Aka good for free market. I don't see how that relates to the actual memory crunch issue more broadly.

Margins pre-AI were more like 5-15%. Even if the margin was 5%, if prices increased 5 times but product cost didn't move, then margins are now 80%. That's not a 30-40% product, your argument doesn't make any sense.

Feel free to spin up a fab and undercut the current prices, I'd certainly appreciate it!

I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.

How about I threaten you with mandatory 10 Electron applications / AI agent harness on your computer? Now you must be ready to fund my venture :)

If you did, then the big manufacturers would just sell a competitive product, at a loss if necessary, until you are driven out of business.

CXMT is about to reel in Apple as a customer and I don’t see Samsung doing a whole lot about it.

> the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs

That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.

Then perhaps we’re seeing one of the downsides of that. When 0->1 is prohibitively expensive, existing players can continue to raise prices *very* high because cost-of-entry is extreme, until it’s not sufficiently extreme.

And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.

In addition of being expensive, it's also a gamble. If it wasn't risky then I don't think financing it would be that big of an issue.

This is also caused by the FREE market - consolidation, all markets tend to consolidate around a few companies due to economy of scale.

The fix is regulation - we are going to have NOT-FREE-MARKET electricity, NOT-FREE-MARKET water supply, .... for vital services.

I'm not talking about you, it's funny to see anti-regulation HN complain about a FREE MARKET working as such. Suddenly it's not so fun where you are at the losing end of the free market when it turns out some are willing to pay way more for RAM than you are.

Everybody needs electricity and water, but nobody needs more RAM except for companies. And they can pay for it.

You can travel to the ends of the earth, to a village down miles and miles of dirt roads and still see someone bent over their phone. People buy RAM.

Hello!? Us consumers need it too.

Really depends how you're defining "need".

Will you die without it?

Will your life as you know it end if your next phone has 8GB instead of 12GB?

Those questions can’t get to the root of how the GGP is using the word for two reasons: 1. Companies, not being alive, can’t possibly need in this sense without analogy. 2. The poster included electricity as something everybody needs but there are people surviving without it.

You need 8GB at the very most, which isn't out of reach for any consumer. If you need more, then you are a professional and can afford more. Or you are a hobbyist, and your hobby doesn't deserve any subsidies from the hard working tax payer.

> You need 8GB at the very most

I call total bullshit on that. I need more.

Why would you need more compute power than other people? An 8GB machine is already way beyond capable for anything a consumer - and most professional - can throw at it.

And why in the world should the government force tax payers to subsidize your extraordinary computing needs?

Have you ever used a computer?

No, have you?

> but nobody needs more RAM except for companies.

I'm amazed you could write this in apparent seriousness.

Be so kind then and tell me what a normal citizen would need more than 8GB of RAM for, if it isn't for professional work or a specialized hobby?

A Mac with 8GB of RAM is blazingly fast for any task your average person would need for it to do. Which doesn't include gaming, mining crypto, or heavy AI models.

Maybe I've missed something? So please tell me exactly what task requires more than 8GB of RAM which is so necessary for the average citizen that the government should subsidize it?

A Windows 11 machine with 8GB of memory is borderline unusable.

We can go in circles about how developers need to optimize their applications, etc but truth of the matter is that 8GB is considered pretty low for a lot of "average" use cases. MacOS is an exception to the rule and even 8GB on MacOS is limited with multiple Electron apps.

And why should the government and the tax payers be held responsible and be forced to pay for the bad decisions of Microsoft and their customers?

MacOS is not limited in any way for the needs an average citizen has from computers. The average citizen is even fine with an iPad. 8GB is considered "low" by people here, just like a 170 horse power hatchback is considered "low" by muscle car enthusiasts and mining companies looking for dump trucks. But those uses have no bearing on reality for most people.

> And why should the government and the tax payers be held responsible and be forced to pay for the bad decisions of Microsoft and their customers?

Ah, a motte and bailey argument! I always love those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

I don't find anything hard to defend about my argument. It origins in response to people arguing on the lines that the government should subsidize RAM because it is expensive. But it is not expensive for a customer unless they're getting a lot of it. My argument has been the same all through this thread, while hackers are arguing all over the place.

The most absurd argument is that any consumer would need more than 8GB, when it is proven beyond all doubt in physical reality that 8GB gives you extreme amounts of power in for example an Apple device - at consumer friendly prices.

> I don't find anything hard to defend about my argument.

Of course. Because "I need more than 8 GB of RAM" and "the government should subsidize Microsoft" are logically equivalent statements. If you're insane.

You have provoked yourself into a rage, because you didn't understand the arguments being made here. Whether you have the capacity to understand, I don't know. But I'll assume so, and explain:

1. Nobody has argued either for or against for the government to subsidize Microsoft.

2. However people are arguing that the government should subsidize RAM makers. And their extended argument for it is that people choose to purchase Microsoft Windows. A well known low quality product.

That's a very weak argument. If you choose to make bad decisions and use sub-par solutions when good solutions are readily available, that isn't something that the government should take to account when deciding on subsidies.

Could you explain how you chose the 8GB number? Would you still have used 8GB as the baseline 10 years ago? 20? 30? No? Then at what point would say 16GB will become acceptable?

What reasoning are you using to figure out what exact amount of RAM is acceptable at a given time period?

> But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution

...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.