This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I mean... Also assuming this is all real, and the rushed schedule doesn't produce low quality botched RAM sticks that die in six months.
When it comes to products from China, they can be incredible; unprecedented quality for so much cheaper! Or they can be exactly what everyone says they are and end up in a landfill after a short amount of time.
It's quite the coin flip.
Honestly cheap ram that has a 50% chance to fail in a year sounds perfect for the llm industry, they already struggle to plan a year in advance, and all their hardware would be obsolete by then anyway, so why the hell not? Plus they could keep the bubble going a few more months by blaming their problems on hardware failures and claiming they’ll sue China or something
But quick delivery would lead a bubble pop....
Just like back in 2008 the investors will try to fake it until they can't and the entire economy will crash over the whole world.
China making a crap ton of RAM won't help with that.
This shit is so over. This gang ain't gonna collude on price with Micron. They're in for eating Micron. First its market share, then its IP by buying it for pennies on the dollar.
Especially pay attention to the CCP's directive to share IP among RAM manufacturers. They appear to be looking at this problem as a supply shortage of an essential component for the rest of the economy, which it is. But that also means they aren't playing for profit.
After watching recent ram cartel investigation from gamernexus: fuck them. They got what they fucking deserve.
i seem to recall micron getting in trouble a while back for this same thing hmm… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
And it happened again in 2018 and they were acquitted, and now there's this and I doubt anything will come from it
A smart decision which the Americans are probably not gonna make would be to nationalize Micron once they become unviable for-profit business, in order to keep the competency and ability to make RAM, which is an essential economic input these days. Instead I think they'll just let the CXMT gang buy them at that point, just like they've let that happen to so many important firms. That's unless democratic socialism has taken enough control of the US political power.
nationalize Micron
No, no, no, you don't understand, that doesn't happen in the US.
What will happen is that they'll get a trillion dollar bailout, a yuuuuge amount of protectionary tarrifs on overseas competitors and then some other company will scoop them up with no obligations.
And then - and this is very important - maximum profit will be extracted from consumers, who end up being measurably worse off.
ability to make RAM, which is an essential economic input these days
It's kind of cool to think about...that we're living in the silicon age. The next step after bronze and iron and steel. We're still making useful things out of rocks...but different rocks, and now we boil water to use them. Like a stone soup, which itself is based upon a pre-revolution French folk-tale about the joys of communism....but now the government is "encouraging" manufacturers to throw in their vegetables. I don't think government strong-arming the peoole was a part of the original tale but I could be wrong.
aren't playing for profit
CXMT is probably the most profitable tech company in China right now.
But the country is not playing for profit of this single company, which would probably be the case in USA (as the company would have lobbying power yo secure that)
I meant the CCP isn't, not CXMT.
Watch how quickly the US government will try to ban them in the name of security. They'll claim that they transmit RAM data to the Chinese government 😛.
I hope they do. More for the rest of the world. If Americans want RAM they should start looting data centers.
They don’t use the same kind :(
"assuming all current projects are completed on schedule"
From the article. This is the single largest fallacy one can engage in in engineering.
"CXMT is projected to produce about 350,000 DRAM wafers per month by the end of 2026, assuming all current projects are completed on schedule."
This is a small blurb on a random tech site, it's just giving a simple 'if all goes well' projection.
I'm sure they're not setting the entire undertaking up so that if one thing ends up slightly delayed everyone's heads will explode. It seems likely that they also have projections that take varying delays with varying parts and numbers of parts of the project into account, but that someone writing a small blurb on a tech site isn't really privy to the entirety of their forecasting.
I don't think they need you to rush in and save them from their folly.
Why would you assume any of that? If there is one constant in large-scale engineering projects, it is project managers over-promising on what their teams can deliver. In this case, they are promising a miracle salvation from the global DRAM shortage, so a measure of scepticism is, I believe, warranted.
Everything, everywhere, doesn't always happen as it does in your frame of reference and experience. I find it unlikely that you're genuinely an expert in engineering projects of this sort and specifically in exactly how they're undertaken in China with large scale government support.
I am not an expert in engineering projects in China, which is why I rely on 3rd party reporting to give me an idea of what is going on in that space. And when China makes what seems to me to be a preposterous claim, qualified by "if everything goes according to schedule," I am suspicious. Not because I particularly distrust Chinese engineers, but because the project managers in my own country are prone to the same tendency to overstate scope, and understate budget and schedule.
Micron doesn't seem interested in competing for consumer memory anyway, since they exited the consumer memory market. Latent demand exists for memory at not-outrageous prices so good for CXMT for filling that niche.
Do you think they'll stop expanding after filling the consumer memory market though?
I don't think so, domestic electronics manufacturers have an enormous need for memory that is performant but doesn't necessarily need the top-of-the-line, and probably China's government is pushing to reduce the need for imported memory components from Korea or Taiwan as well, so demand for production is there coming from both the private and public sector.
That's what I'm thinking too. They're gonna go as far and as wide as they can go.
CXMT will also sell at outrageous prices. It's free money.
CXMT will sell the chips to memory manufacturers in China for "domestic use only" at near cost price as directed by the CCP.
Those manufacturers will construct consumer ram modules and sell them locally, and there will be grey market exports to other countries for ridiculously low prices compared to everyone else.
This way the CCP props up domestic supply, and chips away at foreign manufacturer market share by turning a blind eye to the massive grey market export of RAM.
Having actually done this, the clean room part is super easy. Getting all the equipment in and running is extremely hard. Finding out all the things you messed up along the way and getting actual yields is extremely hard and also time consuming. So I'd like to know where along that process they are doing the timeline comparison.
Standing by for "Chinese memory is spying on you, don't buy it".
If this memory is high quality, it will become very popular with consumers and still have high prices. No reason to lower it a lot for consumer market if they are alone there. Maybe make it 10% cheaper.
Or as they did with cobalt alloys: use slave labor to flood the market and push out all competition, then rug pull and cut off all supplies.
They're in the middle of this process with electric vehicles as well.
Another thing they like to do is make manufacturing deals with foreign companies in order to steal the technology for the state, which there is a lot of opportunity to do in the Silicon industry.
use slave labor to flood the market and push out all competition, then rug pull and cut off all supplies.
So, the Walmart model.
I can tell you're making an analogy of how Walmart pushes out smaller stores in towns,
but after Sam Walton died Walmart has sold primarily Chinese products,
so, yes, exactly, in more ways than one.
This is why all the fear of Chinese stuff is nonsense. Specially coming from America who are the only ones who got exposed for a massive spy program by Snowden.
We are literally having American government being able to get into any cisco router they want. It was done in the recent conflict with Iran. But people forget these things so quickly.
Watch international* ram be banned like international* EVs
*Chinese
Ram prices would still fall since other countries would not ban it and would put less stress on the current supply that already exists.
Competition is good. Hopefully an end to memory manufacturer price collusion is near. I’m not holding my breath for it though.
