Good. Punish the cartel.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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If ordinary users could get a good supply of even DDR4 from China it would be a big relief. Not everyone needs to be at the cutting edge of performance, but we all need enough RAM to make a useful machine.
"We all" = not only consumer products, but literally everything that makes the world tick, and the even more invisible things that make those things tick...
I wonder what the gray market for this kind of hardware is eventually going to look like.
Am I going to be getting my RAM from the back of a van, like I'm buying bootleg DVDs during the mid '00s?
It'll probably look like the electric kettle market. Where you can buy 11,000 different brands on Amazon for barely more than material costs.
There's nothing rare about RAM other than the ability to do high resolution lithography, China is more than capable of mass producing this just like any other product.
US Tech companies have relied on their monopoly status to charge whatever prices they would like. There is a HUUUUGE amount of room between the material costs and the wholesale price and any Econ 101 student will tell you that this creates fertile ground for new competition.
Even selling RAM at half price, they're still earning nearly 2x pre-AI RAM prices. That's way more than enough to grown a company.
Dude opens a trench coat lined with 16gb sticks of DDR4.
Liisten, all this is great, but I'm still not in the market for your 5 1/4" floppy
“At this stage, Chinese manufacturers are relying on aggressive pricing to build scale in legacy DRAM,” the anonymous source said. “But over time, the technology gap may narrow more quickly than expected. Even if Korean firms maintain leadership in HBM, neglecting the mainstream segment could weigh on profitability in the longer run.”
This has been obvious for a while, but I guess the heads of memory companies want to hear none of it.