4 ms·

First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card sales

83 points by _tk_ 6mo ago

il 6mo ago
Why isn't production scaling to meet demand? Shouldn't the market address this.
- sosborn 6mo ago
  Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.
- helterskelter 6mo ago
  Building these factories goes way beyond "nontrivial". We may see a few come online in a couple of years though, but time will tell if the extra capacity alleviates the crunch.
- smallerize 6mo ago
  A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.
  - analognoise 6mo ago
    Modern cutting edge ones, yes. Not all fabs, by a long shot.
    - Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
      Shouldn't countries wanting sovereign infrastructure create subsidies for creation of factories/job creation and also selling first/primarily within the region if it might cost on just a few million dollars (preferably a new competitor) I think one flaw in my thinking could be that there might be a lack of experience within the people for something like this, do you consider it to be a factor and would it be difficult to hire people relevant to such fab?
      - spencerflem 6mo ago
        USA tried this with the CHIPS act
      - pjc50 6mo ago
        > just a few million dollars TSMC Arizona projected investment is $165 billion. Not millions. And yes apparently hiring the right staff has been one of the issues. People really underestimate the work of Maurice Chang.
    - dspillett 6mo ago
      Who is going to pay for a non-cutting-edge fab that might be completely out of date relatively soon though?
      - scrlk 6mo ago
        TI started production at their SM1 fab back in December 2025, which focuses on 28 nm to 130 nm.
        magicalhippo 6mo ago
        Because TI has a ton of microcontrollers, power management ICs, opamps and so on that doesn't need or is even desirable to produce on smaller processes.
      - mike50 6mo ago
        Automotive, space and defense happily use older processes at scale. Also embedded electronics in all sorts of electronics.
        dspillett 6mo ago
        Yes, but that isn't where the increase in demand is. Those things are affected by fabs that could be producing them producing something else, but there will be some stock floating in the system so some resistance to increased prices needed to justify new fab resource, and if things correct a bit in the coming year the maths for a new build might look more dubious. Those with the money to fund a new fab right now are more likely to fund something capable of producing the newer part types. I could be wrong, but the fact that significant new fabs like that are not in progress right now would suggest not.
- pfortuny 6mo ago
  It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale ones.
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists always tell us is magic?
  - FpUser 6mo ago
    Because it operates exactly as a drug dealer. It gives you first shot for free (reasonable opportunity to move up) and after you are hooked it makes sure that it extracts all your money (subscription and inability to own anything).
- littlecranky67 6mo ago
  Because the manufacturers of storage (and RAM) consider it to be an AI bubble, too. The surge in demand is a short burst, not a sustained one. Hence it makes no sense to throw a whole lot of ressources into scaling up production, when the demand won't be there anymore in 1-2 years when the factories will be ready.
- eschneider 6mo ago
  Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.
- miki123211 6mo ago
  Because: 1. Factories take time to build. 2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now. 3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years. 4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.
  - HerbManic 6mo ago
    No 4 is why nobody is willing to really move on new fascilities. China is doing it but that was for merely creating tech independence.
  - rolandog 6mo ago
    > 4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped. Why not normalize that, if things don't work out, the government steps in, buys the business, and offers a better regulated version of the business? Capitalism is generally touted as useful for innovation; but haven't we paid collectively for the initial investment for many businesses many times over now that there's little innovation done? By definition there's no innovation once the only thing happening in a business sector is consolidation. So, I'd conclude that capitalism isn't useful to us at that point, and actually harmfully inefficient (too costly for consumers), so we'd be wise to do away with it by that point in favor of a more efficiently run operational/economic system... That would actually be innovative! What that system looks like, I'm not sure, but I imagine it's something like a cooperative.
  - Modified3019 6mo ago
    And to add to that 4th point, there is a very real chance that many the “AI” companies that are buying all this hardware could go bankrupt at anytime and in rapid succession, leaving drive/memory manufactures with a bunch of unpaid orders and a second hand market now saturated with liquidated equipment. Much like the GPU/crypto boom/bust some years ago, but on an even larger scale.
  - itopaloglu83 6mo ago
    5. There are only limited number of suppliers and they’re making a killing from all of this. Didn’t these companies collude before? I’m sorry but I don’t believe that they’re also using this opportunity to make as much money as possible as well.
- downrightmike 6mo ago
  Free markets, yes
- dspillett 6mo ago
  Production was close to maximum anyway because of existing demand and how expensive new fabs are to bring up. The boom in AI use wasn't sufficiently planned for as it wasn't expected at the scale we are seeing, so to scale up means building more fabs - a long and expensive task. The situation is not helped by one of the AI companies successfully negotiating huge deals for a year worth of production with the two biggest providers at the same time and keeping it secret enough that neither bumped up prices in the deal as a result of knowing what the play was.
- PowerElectronix 6mo ago
  Adding to what others have said, several hdd, ssd and ram manufactures have said that they don't believe demand will be sustained in time for long enough to warrant extra investments in increasing production.
- Ekaros 6mo ago
  Most players are rational actors and this isn't their first time in this sort of market. Getting more production online if you do not have slack like downtime takes quite a while. And there is no guarantee that they can sell the new production even at previous rates if they end up in over supply. Generally people just don't understand how long ramping up new production facilities can take and what is the realistic pay off period for them.
- ChoGGi 6mo ago
  Because the old guard is at it again. Production is actually falling this year compared to last for Samsung and Hynix (there was an article on here a few days ago?).
red_admiral 6mo ago
Guess I'll find the old ones at the back of my cupboard for the time being ... oh wait. A 16MB SD card. Those were the days.
- jbverschoor 6mo ago
  Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards
tombert 6mo ago
I have a giant storage RAID for my home server, with a bunch of 16TB drives. I bought each of the drives used about three years ago, and they cost about $120 each. They have been working fine until last night. One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh. I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too. [1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet. ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.
- bluerooibos 6mo ago
  Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was covered by warranty.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    As I said, they were used, so I knew that a drive breaking was kind of an inevitability. As far as I'm aware there's no warranty, I certainly didn't pay for an extended one. Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.
    - HerbManic 6mo ago
      It makes sense, at the time you bought them there was no supply crunch plus being run in RAID. Would have been a decent deal. Nowadays I feel like an underworld scrap goblin, all the old PVRs from family and friends are being cracked open for the HDDs. Time to slink off to my cave of spinning platters.
- hirako2000 6mo ago
whatever1 6mo ago
Who cares guys, soon food shortages will start. In Europe they started rationing fuels. In Australia gas stations are out of diesel. We are trully doomed.
- hall0ween 6mo ago
  far be it for me to question your prophetic capacities. i wonder, do you have any historical examples or logic-based arguments that our doom of nigh?
  - xbmcuser 6mo ago
    Oil (diesel), gas and fertilizer is the backbone of the worlds agriculture. With shortages of all 3 the food production goes down dramatically. Even if the war ends today it will take years to bring back production to previous levels. In my opinion the effects will start showing up in food prices in the next few weeks once food producing countries realize the food shortages could happen they will start restricting exports.
- baxtr 6mo ago
  A bit tangential: it’s narratives like this which can create sudden crashes on the stock market.
  - whatever1 6mo ago
    Speculation at some point meets reality. This is when market crashes.
    - IAmBroom 6mo ago
      So, your proof is that some dire predictions in the past, about other things, by other people, were sometimes true?
      - whatever1 6mo ago
        I am not even predicting something. The global oil & gas supply has been disrupted and cannot recover overnight as actual infrastructure is gone. Someone will need to reduce consumption. These are just facts and physics of supply & demand. We can always debate on who will get hit more or what resources will be affected more.
profsummergig 6mo ago
Some years ago, Modi announced that he was going to make India go all-in on semiconductors. When I read that the first facility to begin commercial production was going to be Micron with memory chips, I did an eyeroll. Memory chips? And just an assembly and testing facility? To me that seemed like an easy cop-out. To me (my admittedly naive self), wafer fabs and CPUs seemed like the real game. Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now). Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.
- pjc50 6mo ago
  Just opened this year, apparently: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-celebrates-opening-indias-first-semiconductor-assembly https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
- ufmace 6mo ago
  I would think if you're a developing country looking to build some domestic semiconductor manufacturing expertise, it'd probably be best to start with something on the easier side. Something with closer to well-known and standard tech that can still be sold on the open market.
  - profsummergig 6mo ago
    This was exactly their thinking. Build an ecosystem by starting with easier things, and progressively doing more difficult things.
- mike50 6mo ago
  It's just an attempt to copy Taiwan and the Philippines by starting with the labor intensive low value add part of semiconductor manufacturing.
h4kunamata 6mo ago
I picked the worst era to build a NAS. I bought 8x 4TB NAS RED 5400RPM HDD and paid in total AUD$1.4k, I am not even joking. My pool is only 8TB mirrorer and I am keeping the other 16TB as spare because things will get worse. I bought them brand new because used ones cannot be trusted but even that brings risks. WD has been selling 7200RPM labelled as 5400RPM disks. WD was selling SMR disks instead of CMR disks. Seagate disks used into crypto farms are being sold as brand new, so folks are finding our their brand new disks have 65k hours.
- HDBaseT 6mo ago
  Likewise. I was planning on upgrading my disks about a year ago, but help holding off for discounts. The AI race to the bottom, driving up prices only really started happening within the last 12 months (at least for HDDs) and now I'm too late.
  - h4kunamata 6mo ago
    I am sticking to DDR4 which you can still pay AUD$47 for DDR4 8GB 2133 I had two Dell SFF with i7 LGA1151, I bought second hand motherboard on eBay which goes against my standard, because everything is so ridiculous expensive, to use those CPUs and memories. I have a few DDR4 2400 memories. My TrueNAS is running local brand SSD that are dirty cheap and for being in mirror gives me a somewhat peace of mind. I bought a WD Black NVMe as spare for my gaming laptop running Linux in case it dies, and 2x Crucial one from Amazon German, I won't be buying them any decade soon. Things are bad but it is better to buy things now while you can, if you don't and with things getting worse, second hand market will also become a carnage. Facebook Marketplace is usually a gold garden to buy good goods for cheap, even there now things are matching eBay prices. You can still find solid and cheap stuff but things are starting to change.

83 points by _tk_ 6mo ago

il 6mo ago

Why isn't production scaling to meet demand? Shouldn't the market address this.

sosborn 6mo ago
Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.
helterskelter 6mo ago
Building these factories goes way beyond "nontrivial". We may see a few come online in a couple of years though, but time will tell if the extra capacity alleviates the crunch.
smallerize 6mo ago
A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.
- analognoise 6mo ago
  Modern cutting edge ones, yes. Not all fabs, by a long shot.
  - Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
    Shouldn't countries wanting sovereign infrastructure create subsidies for creation of factories/job creation and also selling first/primarily within the region if it might cost on just a few million dollars (preferably a new competitor) I think one flaw in my thinking could be that there might be a lack of experience within the people for something like this, do you consider it to be a factor and would it be difficult to hire people relevant to such fab?
    - spencerflem 6mo ago
      USA tried this with the CHIPS act
    - pjc50 6mo ago
      > just a few million dollars TSMC Arizona projected investment is $165 billion. Not millions. And yes apparently hiring the right staff has been one of the issues. People really underestimate the work of Maurice Chang.
  - dspillett 6mo ago
    Who is going to pay for a non-cutting-edge fab that might be completely out of date relatively soon though?
    - scrlk 6mo ago
      TI started production at their SM1 fab back in December 2025, which focuses on 28 nm to 130 nm.
      - magicalhippo 6mo ago
        Because TI has a ton of microcontrollers, power management ICs, opamps and so on that doesn't need or is even desirable to produce on smaller processes.
    - mike50 6mo ago
      Automotive, space and defense happily use older processes at scale. Also embedded electronics in all sorts of electronics.
      - dspillett 6mo ago
        Yes, but that isn't where the increase in demand is. Those things are affected by fabs that could be producing them producing something else, but there will be some stock floating in the system so some resistance to increased prices needed to justify new fab resource, and if things correct a bit in the coming year the maths for a new build might look more dubious. Those with the money to fund a new fab right now are more likely to fund something capable of producing the newer part types. I could be wrong, but the fact that significant new fabs like that are not in progress right now would suggest not.
pfortuny 6mo ago
It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale ones.
cyanydeez 6mo ago
Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists always tell us is magic?
- FpUser 6mo ago
  Because it operates exactly as a drug dealer. It gives you first shot for free (reasonable opportunity to move up) and after you are hooked it makes sure that it extracts all your money (subscription and inability to own anything).
littlecranky67 6mo ago
Because the manufacturers of storage (and RAM) consider it to be an AI bubble, too. The surge in demand is a short burst, not a sustained one. Hence it makes no sense to throw a whole lot of ressources into scaling up production, when the demand won't be there anymore in 1-2 years when the factories will be ready.
eschneider 6mo ago
Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.
miki123211 6mo ago
Because: 1. Factories take time to build. 2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now. 3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years. 4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.
- HerbManic 6mo ago
  No 4 is why nobody is willing to really move on new fascilities. China is doing it but that was for merely creating tech independence.
- rolandog 6mo ago
  > 4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped. Why not normalize that, if things don't work out, the government steps in, buys the business, and offers a better regulated version of the business? Capitalism is generally touted as useful for innovation; but haven't we paid collectively for the initial investment for many businesses many times over now that there's little innovation done? By definition there's no innovation once the only thing happening in a business sector is consolidation. So, I'd conclude that capitalism isn't useful to us at that point, and actually harmfully inefficient (too costly for consumers), so we'd be wise to do away with it by that point in favor of a more efficiently run operational/economic system... That would actually be innovative! What that system looks like, I'm not sure, but I imagine it's something like a cooperative.
- Modified3019 6mo ago
  And to add to that 4th point, there is a very real chance that many the “AI” companies that are buying all this hardware could go bankrupt at anytime and in rapid succession, leaving drive/memory manufactures with a bunch of unpaid orders and a second hand market now saturated with liquidated equipment. Much like the GPU/crypto boom/bust some years ago, but on an even larger scale.
- itopaloglu83 6mo ago
  5. There are only limited number of suppliers and they’re making a killing from all of this. Didn’t these companies collude before? I’m sorry but I don’t believe that they’re also using this opportunity to make as much money as possible as well.
downrightmike 6mo ago
Free markets, yes
dspillett 6mo ago
Production was close to maximum anyway because of existing demand and how expensive new fabs are to bring up. The boom in AI use wasn't sufficiently planned for as it wasn't expected at the scale we are seeing, so to scale up means building more fabs - a long and expensive task. The situation is not helped by one of the AI companies successfully negotiating huge deals for a year worth of production with the two biggest providers at the same time and keeping it secret enough that neither bumped up prices in the deal as a result of knowing what the play was.
PowerElectronix 6mo ago
Adding to what others have said, several hdd, ssd and ram manufactures have said that they don't believe demand will be sustained in time for long enough to warrant extra investments in increasing production.
Ekaros 6mo ago
Most players are rational actors and this isn't their first time in this sort of market. Getting more production online if you do not have slack like downtime takes quite a while. And there is no guarantee that they can sell the new production even at previous rates if they end up in over supply. Generally people just don't understand how long ramping up new production facilities can take and what is the realistic pay off period for them.
ChoGGi 6mo ago
Because the old guard is at it again. Production is actually falling this year compared to last for Samsung and Hynix (there was an article on here a few days ago?).

red_admiral 6mo ago

Guess I'll find the old ones at the back of my cupboard for the time being ... oh wait. A 16MB SD card. Those were the days.

jbverschoor 6mo ago
Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards

tombert 6mo ago

I have a giant storage RAID for my home server, with a bunch of 16TB drives. I bought each of the drives used about three years ago, and they cost about $120 each. They have been working fine until last night. One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh. I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too. [1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet. ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.

bluerooibos 6mo ago
Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was covered by warranty.
- tombert 6mo ago
  As I said, they were used, so I knew that a drive breaking was kind of an inevitability. As far as I'm aware there's no warranty, I certainly didn't pay for an extended one. Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.
  - HerbManic 6mo ago
    It makes sense, at the time you bought them there was no supply crunch plus being run in RAID. Would have been a decent deal. Nowadays I feel like an underworld scrap goblin, all the old PVRs from family and friends are being cracked open for the HDDs. Time to slink off to my cave of spinning platters.
hirako2000 6mo ago

whatever1 6mo ago

Who cares guys, soon food shortages will start. In Europe they started rationing fuels. In Australia gas stations are out of diesel. We are trully doomed.

hall0ween 6mo ago
far be it for me to question your prophetic capacities. i wonder, do you have any historical examples or logic-based arguments that our doom of nigh?
- xbmcuser 6mo ago
  Oil (diesel), gas and fertilizer is the backbone of the worlds agriculture. With shortages of all 3 the food production goes down dramatically. Even if the war ends today it will take years to bring back production to previous levels. In my opinion the effects will start showing up in food prices in the next few weeks once food producing countries realize the food shortages could happen they will start restricting exports.
baxtr 6mo ago
A bit tangential: it’s narratives like this which can create sudden crashes on the stock market.
- whatever1 6mo ago
  Speculation at some point meets reality. This is when market crashes.
  - IAmBroom 6mo ago
    So, your proof is that some dire predictions in the past, about other things, by other people, were sometimes true?
    - whatever1 6mo ago
      I am not even predicting something. The global oil & gas supply has been disrupted and cannot recover overnight as actual infrastructure is gone. Someone will need to reduce consumption. These are just facts and physics of supply & demand. We can always debate on who will get hit more or what resources will be affected more.

profsummergig 6mo ago

Some years ago, Modi announced that he was going to make India go all-in on semiconductors. When I read that the first facility to begin commercial production was going to be Micron with memory chips, I did an eyeroll. Memory chips? And just an assembly and testing facility? To me that seemed like an easy cop-out. To me (my admittedly naive self), wafer fabs and CPUs seemed like the real game. Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now). Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.

pjc50 6mo ago
Just opened this year, apparently: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-celebrates-opening-indias-first-semiconductor-assembly https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
ufmace 6mo ago
I would think if you're a developing country looking to build some domestic semiconductor manufacturing expertise, it'd probably be best to start with something on the easier side. Something with closer to well-known and standard tech that can still be sold on the open market.
- profsummergig 6mo ago
  This was exactly their thinking. Build an ecosystem by starting with easier things, and progressively doing more difficult things.
mike50 6mo ago
It's just an attempt to copy Taiwan and the Philippines by starting with the labor intensive low value add part of semiconductor manufacturing.

h4kunamata 6mo ago

I picked the worst era to build a NAS. I bought 8x 4TB NAS RED 5400RPM HDD and paid in total AUD$1.4k, I am not even joking. My pool is only 8TB mirrorer and I am keeping the other 16TB as spare because things will get worse. I bought them brand new because used ones cannot be trusted but even that brings risks. WD has been selling 7200RPM labelled as 5400RPM disks. WD was selling SMR disks instead of CMR disks. Seagate disks used into crypto farms are being sold as brand new, so folks are finding our their brand new disks have 65k hours.

HDBaseT 6mo ago
Likewise. I was planning on upgrading my disks about a year ago, but help holding off for discounts. The AI race to the bottom, driving up prices only really started happening within the last 12 months (at least for HDDs) and now I'm too late.
- h4kunamata 6mo ago
  I am sticking to DDR4 which you can still pay AUD$47 for DDR4 8GB 2133 I had two Dell SFF with i7 LGA1151, I bought second hand motherboard on eBay which goes against my standard, because everything is so ridiculous expensive, to use those CPUs and memories. I have a few DDR4 2400 memories. My TrueNAS is running local brand SSD that are dirty cheap and for being in mirror gives me a somewhat peace of mind. I bought a WD Black NVMe as spare for my gaming laptop running Linux in case it dies, and 2x Crucial one from Amazon German, I won't be buying them any decade soon. Things are bad but it is better to buy things now while you can, if you don't and with things getting worse, second hand market will also become a carnage. Facebook Marketplace is usually a gold garden to buy good goods for cheap, even there now things are matching eBay prices. You can still find solid and cheap stuff but things are starting to change.