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Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would

Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction? It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.

jeffbee 11mo ago
If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I would say much less than 1%.
- simlevesque 11mo ago
  It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
  - wmf 11mo ago
    Yeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
    - jeffbee 11mo ago
      They will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who offers to buy 1000 of them.
      - londons_explore 11mo ago
        This. And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc. A consumer facing business is a lot of overhead, and since more and more hardware now has soldered ram, it is a shrinking business too. Shrinking businesses are super hard to run - it's far easier to grow a business than shrink it whilst maintaining the same margins.
        derefr 11mo ago
        > And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc. When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
- walterbell 11mo ago
  It's not just retail DIMMS, most notebook and smartphone vendors are also impacted by NAND being redirected to datacenters.
newsclues 11mo ago
Devices like smartphones and tablets that are locked down will continue to exist. It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s
venturecruelty 11mo ago
We can prevent this from happening by enforcing 100-year-old antitrust laws.
- octoberfranklin 11mo ago
  Antitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and are enforced by political appointees. The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room. If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1
- snsosjsjbs 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - pogue 11mo ago
    > Religion, nationalism, race, etc are the correct ways and historically successful ways to deal with this What??
    - snsosjsjbs 11mo ago
      [flagged]
- cogman10 11mo ago
  I don't think that works in the situation of fabs. They are big and expensive pieces of tech with the latest fabs being the most expensive to construct. You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory. IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.
fn-mote 11mo ago
These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics. This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).
- overfeed 11mo ago
  > These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics Perhaps the limited competition caused by 25+ memory manufacturers consolidating down to a 3-member cartel is a sign of market failure. I use "cartel" deservedly, as the RAM manufacturers were found guilty of price-fixing in multiple times in the past.
  - Libidinalecon 11mo ago
    "The market is always right" -Thoughtless, deluded, Homo economicus religion, idiot
mikestorrent 11mo ago
What if we realize that 8 GB of memory is actually a tremendous amount, and experience a resurgence in desktop operating systems as people begin to prioritize memory for productive computation again instead of using up a gigabyte for a chat client?
- walterbell 11mo ago
  Phones are already memory constrained and affected by artificial NAND shortage, it's not specific to one form factor.
Aurornis 11mo ago
> Should countries have an upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction? You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want. DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market. > It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer. Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate. No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.
- walterbell 11mo ago
  > DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535 Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain.. https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-surge https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su... The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.

jeffbee 11mo ago

If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I would say much less than 1%.

simlevesque 11mo ago
It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
- wmf 11mo ago
  Yeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
  - jeffbee 11mo ago
    They will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who offers to buy 1000 of them.
    - londons_explore 11mo ago
      This. And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc. A consumer facing business is a lot of overhead, and since more and more hardware now has soldered ram, it is a shrinking business too. Shrinking businesses are super hard to run - it's far easier to grow a business than shrink it whilst maintaining the same margins.
      - derefr 11mo ago
        > And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc. When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
walterbell 11mo ago
It's not just retail DIMMS, most notebook and smartphone vendors are also impacted by NAND being redirected to datacenters.

newsclues 11mo ago

Devices like smartphones and tablets that are locked down will continue to exist. It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s

venturecruelty 11mo ago

We can prevent this from happening by enforcing 100-year-old antitrust laws.

octoberfranklin 11mo ago
Antitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and are enforced by political appointees. The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room. If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1
snsosjsjbs 11mo ago
[flagged]
- pogue 11mo ago
  > Religion, nationalism, race, etc are the correct ways and historically successful ways to deal with this What??
  - snsosjsjbs 11mo ago
    [flagged]
cogman10 11mo ago
I don't think that works in the situation of fabs. They are big and expensive pieces of tech with the latest fabs being the most expensive to construct. You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory. IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.

fn-mote 11mo ago

These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics. This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).

overfeed 11mo ago
> These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics Perhaps the limited competition caused by 25+ memory manufacturers consolidating down to a 3-member cartel is a sign of market failure. I use "cartel" deservedly, as the RAM manufacturers were found guilty of price-fixing in multiple times in the past.
- Libidinalecon 11mo ago
  "The market is always right" -Thoughtless, deluded, Homo economicus religion, idiot

mikestorrent 11mo ago

What if we realize that 8 GB of memory is actually a tremendous amount, and experience a resurgence in desktop operating systems as people begin to prioritize memory for productive computation again instead of using up a gigabyte for a chat client?

walterbell 11mo ago
Phones are already memory constrained and affected by artificial NAND shortage, it's not specific to one form factor.

Aurornis 11mo ago

> Should countries have an upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction? You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want. DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market. > It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer. Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate. No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.

walterbell 11mo ago
> DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535 Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain.. https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-surge https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su... The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.