32 ms·

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram... On October 1st OpenAI signe

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram... On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other's deal was, nor how close to simultaneous they were. And this secrecy mattered. It mattered a lot. 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…and it's worked so far... OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!

llama052 11mo ago
The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.
- walterbell 11mo ago
  If manufacturing fake demand (warehousing 900,000 memory wafers per month?) doubles and triples customer prices, it would decrease real demand, hurting the manufacturers after the artificial demand ends.
  - llama052 11mo ago
    I think I explained that poorly. Basically artificially reducing supply so that these manufactures can get more for less. They've been caught doing it in the past before between each other, so why not use OpenAI as a bridge for that.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  Fake demand? Either they’re selling the RAM or they’re not. They don’t make money by pretending to sell into fake demand. They make money by selling chips. A sale is a sale.
- jandrese 11mo ago
  > while also making OpenAI look good on paper On paper this makes OpenAI look like absolute assholes. Like they have realized that all of their potential competitors will be memory constrained and have poured billions of dollars into making sure that happens instead of using that money to improve their own product.
ctoth 11mo ago
> 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 Wouldn't this be ... collusion? Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something. OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.
- amenaijp 11mo ago
  They have, rather famously, been caught doing financial shenanigans before. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- walterbell 11mo ago
  A competitive auction would not be collusion.
- zarzavat 11mo ago
  No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal. OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.
  - mike_d 11mo ago
    What?? Replace DRAM with peaches or table legs and you have the exact example they give you during management training to explain implicit collusion.
    - zarzavat 11mo ago
      That's when you raise prices without a change in the market conditions. OpenAI is creating more demand, therefore the price must go up, if it didn't then there'd be shortages.
VladVladikoff 11mo ago
Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- mistercheph 11mo ago
  shorter traces than soldered DIMM allow higher MT/s, this is fixed by CUDIMM/CAMM2, the other part of this is # of memory channels on the board, not sure why, but most consumer DDR5 boards have been 2 memory channels, you need to go to threadripper to get 4 or 8, It's unclear to me if this will still be an issue with future platforms.
  - wtallis 11mo ago
    You're not paying enough attention to the performance and cost impact of connectors and sockets. CAMM2/LPCAMM and CUDIMM have yet to be demonstrated operating at speeds that speeds that match the fastest soldered LPDDR, let alone GDDR; there's still a clear advantage for soldering memory. CPU sockets with more than two memory channels are also far more expensive; the higher pin count usually increases the number of layers the motherboard needs, and the larger size of the socket requires more metal for stiffening (and EPYC CPUs still have issues with imperfect mounting leading to some IO lanes not working). Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges.
    - kasabali 11mo ago
      > Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges. by trading them with longevity challenges. Even though 2 decades have past after the "usual suspect" lead-free solder, gpu or vram chips needing a reball is still a common occurrence from a cursory look at YouTube channels of professional electronics repairmen.
energy123 11mo ago
Only 50-60% of the recent price appreciation is after October 1st, so this is not likely the biggest direct cause, more likely it's everyone buying the finished stock on the market in a frenzy because they anticipate things like this will impact availability in the future, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
HenryMulligan 11mo ago
Sounds like OpenAI might be trying their hand at TPUs, like what Google has. They are one of Google's biggest advantages in AI right now. It would also give them insurance against Nvidia being everybody's hardware supplier.
- mike_d 11mo ago
  This actually points the opposite direction, to doubling down on commercial GPUs. NVIDIA recently told their board partners that they will need to source their own RAM and will not be bundling it with chips anymore. If there is a supply crunch on DRAM, commercial GPU production lines will start having idle downtime. That is literally the worst possible thing that can happen to a company that has invested heavily in tooling and they will negotiate at or below cost production runs to fill the gaps if a customer can bring their own DRAM to the table.
- kccqzy 11mo ago
  What do you mean “might be” trying their hand? It’s been widely reported that they are doing exactly that. It’s even known that they are doing it with Broadcom. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/openai_broadcom_deal/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/openai_broadcom_deal/
alecco 11mo ago
That's blogspam. Actual Tom's Hardware article from October 1st: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
- kasabali 11mo ago
  That's not blogspam. There's a lot more in the mlid post than the linked news item above. Whether it's commentary or speculation I urge everyone to read and decide for themselves.
pengaru 11mo ago
In case you needed more confirmation OpenAI has no IP moat...

llama052 11mo ago

The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.

walterbell 11mo ago
If manufacturing fake demand (warehousing 900,000 memory wafers per month?) doubles and triples customer prices, it would decrease real demand, hurting the manufacturers after the artificial demand ends.
- llama052 11mo ago
  I think I explained that poorly. Basically artificially reducing supply so that these manufactures can get more for less. They've been caught doing it in the past before between each other, so why not use OpenAI as a bridge for that.
Aurornis 11mo ago
Fake demand? Either they’re selling the RAM or they’re not. They don’t make money by pretending to sell into fake demand. They make money by selling chips. A sale is a sale.
jandrese 11mo ago
> while also making OpenAI look good on paper On paper this makes OpenAI look like absolute assholes. Like they have realized that all of their potential competitors will be memory constrained and have poured billions of dollars into making sure that happens instead of using that money to improve their own product.

ctoth 11mo ago

> 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 Wouldn't this be ... collusion? Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something. OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.

amenaijp 11mo ago
They have, rather famously, been caught doing financial shenanigans before. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
walterbell 11mo ago
A competitive auction would not be collusion.
zarzavat 11mo ago
No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal. OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.
- mike_d 11mo ago
  What?? Replace DRAM with peaches or table legs and you have the exact example they give you during management training to explain implicit collusion.
  - zarzavat 11mo ago
    That's when you raise prices without a change in the market conditions. OpenAI is creating more demand, therefore the price must go up, if it didn't then there'd be shortages.

VladVladikoff 11mo ago

Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
mistercheph 11mo ago
shorter traces than soldered DIMM allow higher MT/s, this is fixed by CUDIMM/CAMM2, the other part of this is # of memory channels on the board, not sure why, but most consumer DDR5 boards have been 2 memory channels, you need to go to threadripper to get 4 or 8, It's unclear to me if this will still be an issue with future platforms.
- wtallis 11mo ago
  You're not paying enough attention to the performance and cost impact of connectors and sockets. CAMM2/LPCAMM and CUDIMM have yet to be demonstrated operating at speeds that speeds that match the fastest soldered LPDDR, let alone GDDR; there's still a clear advantage for soldering memory. CPU sockets with more than two memory channels are also far more expensive; the higher pin count usually increases the number of layers the motherboard needs, and the larger size of the socket requires more metal for stiffening (and EPYC CPUs still have issues with imperfect mounting leading to some IO lanes not working). Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges.
  - kasabali 11mo ago
    > Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges. by trading them with longevity challenges. Even though 2 decades have past after the "usual suspect" lead-free solder, gpu or vram chips needing a reball is still a common occurrence from a cursory look at YouTube channels of professional electronics repairmen.

energy123 11mo ago

Only 50-60% of the recent price appreciation is after October 1st, so this is not likely the biggest direct cause, more likely it's everyone buying the finished stock on the market in a frenzy because they anticipate things like this will impact availability in the future, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

HenryMulligan 11mo ago

Sounds like OpenAI might be trying their hand at TPUs, like what Google has. They are one of Google's biggest advantages in AI right now. It would also give them insurance against Nvidia being everybody's hardware supplier.

mike_d 11mo ago
This actually points the opposite direction, to doubling down on commercial GPUs. NVIDIA recently told their board partners that they will need to source their own RAM and will not be bundling it with chips anymore. If there is a supply crunch on DRAM, commercial GPU production lines will start having idle downtime. That is literally the worst possible thing that can happen to a company that has invested heavily in tooling and they will negotiate at or below cost production runs to fill the gaps if a customer can bring their own DRAM to the table.
kccqzy 11mo ago
What do you mean “might be” trying their hand? It’s been widely reported that they are doing exactly that. It’s even known that they are doing it with Broadcom. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/openai_broadcom_deal/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/openai_broadcom_deal/

alecco 11mo ago

That's blogspam. Actual Tom's Hardware article from October 1st: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

kasabali 11mo ago
That's not blogspam. There's a lot more in the mlid post than the linked news item above. Whether it's commentary or speculation I urge everyone to read and decide for themselves.

pengaru 11mo ago

In case you needed more confirmation OpenAI has no IP moat...