The RAM Crunch Could Kill Products and Even Entire Companies, Memory Exec Admits (theverge.com) 56
Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 -- and that some may not survive at all if they cannot secure enough memory.
The interview, conducted in Chinese by Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, drew an important distinction: it was the interviewer who raised the possibility of shutdowns and product discontinuations, and Khein-Seng largely agreed rather than volunteering the prediction himself. The shortage stems from AI data centers consuming the vast majority of the world's memory supply, a buildout that has sent RAM prices up by three to six times over the past several months. Only three companies control 93% of the global DRAM market, and all three have chosen to prioritize profits over rapid capacity expansion. Even Nvidia may skip shipping a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, and Apple could struggle to secure enough chips. Khein-Seng also expects consumers will increasingly repair broken products rather than replace them.
The interview, conducted in Chinese by Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, drew an important distinction: it was the interviewer who raised the possibility of shutdowns and product discontinuations, and Khein-Seng largely agreed rather than volunteering the prediction himself. The shortage stems from AI data centers consuming the vast majority of the world's memory supply, a buildout that has sent RAM prices up by three to six times over the past several months. Only three companies control 93% of the global DRAM market, and all three have chosen to prioritize profits over rapid capacity expansion. Even Nvidia may skip shipping a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, and Apple could struggle to secure enough chips. Khein-Seng also expects consumers will increasingly repair broken products rather than replace them.
Great chance for new business (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great chance for new business (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it's that simple.
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Re: Great chance for new business (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds good, until the AI hyperscale market collapses in a year or two. Then RAM (and storage) will sell for ten cents on the dollar. Just as your new DRAM foundry rolls it's first wafers off the assembly line.
Re: Great chance for new business (Score:4)
Two years to roll out a fab for ddr5?
That is unbelievable optimistic.
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Someone will probably say "something something AI" to say we could build out faster.
Re: Great chance for new business (Score:2)
About 40 months in the US and EU, more like 20 months in China and Taiwan. Somewhere inbetween for S. Korea.
Successfully producing top tier DRAM with high enough yield to be profitable is a little harder to pin down. If you hired a bunch of people that walked out of Samsung and SK Hynix maybe 5 months. Or if you do things from the ground up, 5 years. Doing a previous generation and then catching up on your next foundry build out is perhaps safer.
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No. Not even with retooling an existing fab that already makes something else with the same structure density.
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Don't know what to say, that's what it takes in this industry. And you don't really build your own tooling, you buy it. Spend your money on ASML instead of LAM or AM. Nordson is a good deal for tooling for bonding and packaging. And there was some cool stuff on plant layout simulations one of the other teams did (I saw the company demo is all) to help arrange and optimize the manufacturing lines around the plant layout. Plus some flash virtual walkthroughs which aren't strictly necessary but easy to do once
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You could just stop claiming things when you actually have no clue how things really work. Sure, that sounds outlandish, but give it a try, maybe?
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Even more unbelievable that somebody will lend you the money for it, because FABs on that level are extremely expensive.
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Consumer DDR5 platforms have a hard time using more than a pair of DDR5 modules at any but the slowest timing and currently don't support DIMMs larger than 64GB. Workstation and Server Platforms can already support more RAM than that, but if you're buying a new enough Threadripper, Epyc, Xeon or Ampere platform to handle DDR5, you're almost certainly buying it with rDIMMs in the first place.
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Everything new enough to use DDR5 has the DRAM controller embedded in the CPU, so we'd be talking about something more than just new motherboards.
I spent about 3 weeks trying to get 4x64GB DDR5 6400 working on an AM5 workstation. I never got it to run for more than about six hours at anything faster than 4200MHz, no matter how much I fiddled with timings and voltages.
Hilariously, that spare 128GB RAM kit is worth like $2000 right now.
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Good signal integrity when you have a lot of modules is hard, you end up needing a lot of channels. And modern CPUs have the SDRAM controller built-in and you get the channels that you get. You can attach more modules with buffered or registered memory (FB-DIMM, RDIMM, LR-DIMM), but then those aren't consumer grade prices. And poor FB-DIMM is such a massive power hog and high latency, really not worth messing with these days.
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Further, even if the market doesn't "collapse", it would still transition to something more like a "sustaining" market rather than ever expanding buildout.
Very slow and expensive to try to solve what will, one way or another, be a temporary problem.
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I agree that it is slow, expensive, and ultimately, a temporary problem.
My question is, how long will it last? When will demand for RAM decrease or when will RAM production capabilities catch up with demand?
I don't have a clue. One could make an argument for a crash in demand this year or five years from now.. Too many unknowns.
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And that is why the RAM manufacturers will do no or only very careful extension of production volumes.
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Start a business making RAM
It's generally cyclical. Shortage of product X hits a market, and so new companies enter that market to strike gold. All of them start making product X, which then is no longer in shortage - and also, some of the demand for product X has disappeared since some customers find alternatives. Result then is a glut of product X, which then results in a price crash, and several of those suppliers going belly-up. Then it crosses the equilibrium point again where demand equals supply, until there is another sho
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Not only can the market remain irrational for longer than the individual can remain solvent, it can irrationally crash faster than the individual recoup their investment.
We never learn. (Score:5, Interesting)
Consolidation is not an intelligent path long term. Yet, somehow, we're allowing a singular industry trend to capture not just the speculative market, but entire giant segments of the manufacturing sphere, as well as starting to make preparations to allow it to allow it to capture other resources, like electrical production, access to fresh water, and, of course, the all important tax dollar subsidies that all big business actually runs on.
When you pull back from this, and look at it from afar, what it looks like is an attempt to clamp down and maintain a hold of an entire society via technological means. We're putting all our eggs in one basket, and potentially limitless profit generating basket for a very small number of people, at the expense of all the rest of us. It's already consolidating the data of people, of books, of music, of movies, all data. And it seems determined to consolidate the rest of humanity's available resources. And when that consolidation is complete, will there be anything left for the rest of us? And even if there is, what happens if/when that one, singular entity that we have given all power, all resources, all data, and all focus suddenly breaks, or loses momentum? Do we just shrug and standby watching as our world falls into the technologically driven blackhole we've created?
We, the collective we, are being absolute idiots about this whole AI/LLM thing. We've allowed it to subsume too much already, and it seems all world leaders are determined to keep throwing resources at it. "We must or someone else will." It seems stupid to continue down this path, but no one with the power to top it or even slow it a bit and consider the consequences, has any interest in doing anything other than continuing to accelerate the consolidation. It's like the greed of the elites manifested in a completely carcinogenic and caustic manner, and it will not be stopped until it has metastasized and subsumed the entirety of human society.
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Butlerian Jihad?
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We, the collective we, are being absolute idiots about this whole AI/LLM thing.
Indeed. It is both fascinating and really embarrassing to watch. At the same time, the best figures on "efficiency gain" are currently at something like 4%. That is likely way below the measurement error, i.e. there may not be any gains at all and the whole thing is a loss.
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If you think having the RAM market supplied by 10 manufacturers rather than 3 would make the slightest bit of difference to the current price hikes, I have a bridge to sell you.
Clearly failed Economics 101. The same market forces pushing manufacturers to supply AI data centres would still exist, and RAM manufacturers would likely make the same choices they are making now.
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Most people do not mean forever. In the tech world, forever is a decade.
They will make more RAM due to demand and competition... but it takes a long time to ramp up and it is expensive. This will feel like forever.
Furthermore, AI wants the best RAM and not everybody is making the best RAM. So, when DDR6 happens, it'll be possibly out of consumer hardware for a longer delay and priced higher for longer obviously. The bubble will burst but it doesn't have to be like other bubbles. Many view this as existen
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Consolidation is not an intelligent path long term. Yet, somehow, we're allowing a singular industry trend to capture not just the speculative market, but entire giant segments of the manufacturing sphere, as well as starting to make preparations to allow it to allow it to capture other resources, like electrical production, access to fresh water, and, of course, the all important tax dollar subsidies that all big business actually runs on.
Everybody wants to rule the world. Some get closer than others.
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Consolidation is not an intelligent path long term. Yet, somehow, we're allowing a singular industry trend to capture not just the speculative market, but entire giant segments of the manufacturing sphere, as well as starting to make preparations to allow it to allow it to capture other resources, like electrical production, access to fresh water, and, of course, the all important tax dollar subsidies that all big business actually runs on.
Everybody wants to rule the world. Some get closer than others.
As a dude in his teens during the 80s, I'll now have Tears for Fears running through my head all day. Props.
This means prices go up even more (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to be able to afford things in the future you need to start giving serious thought to politicians that enforce antitrust law.
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Russia ended up with a president for life. China ended up with a president for life. The USA is currently dipping it's toes into a president for life.
If you want to be able to afford things in the future you need to start giving serious thought to politicians that enforce antitrust law.
Voting isn't going to fix this. The masks are off, the bell has rung, and the people are up against psychologists and other professionals who know every trick in the book. The lack of education has manifested.
windows 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
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And on top of that, Win11 runs much, much worse than Win10 with bizarre problems and unreliabilities on hardware that was perfectly fine with Win10.
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If only a free alternative existed that ran better on that "obsolete hardware" than the new devices nobody can afford.
Microsoft could exit the way they arrived: on the availability of the hardware they require.
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>If only a free alternative existed that ran better on that "obsolete hardware" than the new devices nobody can afford. ;p
Indeed ! 2026 will be the year of the desktop for ReactOS !! Right ?
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The only reasons I have Windows on my teaching laptop is because Linux kept crashing projectors with bad firmware and I had some lectures where I was obliged to use PowerPoint. PowerPoint is gone now and today I streamed and recorded my first lecture with BigBlueButton instead of MS Teams, so maybe that machine will go to Linux soon. Then only my gaming PC is left and there I was just too lazy so far to do anything.
Wrong question... (Score:5, Informative)
Some are asking if this is a business opportunity to start a new RAM fab/manufacturer. Those responding are correctly commenting that if could take 2-3+ years to build a State-of-the-Art fab from the ground up. I work in that industry, and frankly those timeframes are optimistic.
The question we should really be asking is, why do most consumer devices need State-of-the-Art DRAM? Sure, maybe the gaming folks want it. Maybe even CAD, Animation Labs, etc. But for my phone? Nahh. 6-year old RAM tech is fine.
Mass Semiconductor manufacturing is hard and expensive, but if an acceptable platform can be legacy tech, it should be WAY easier and cheaper to spin up, especially since a lot of that equipment is being replaced and is likely available for sale pre-owned, not to mention all the fab space likely being abandoned in favor of newer fab space (because that's how fab companies typically roll out new tech...build new fab, convert the older fab to the next tech.) And then there's Intel and TI in the US with tons of fab space sitting idle anyway.
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I wonder if there's a big industrial economy that's motivated to beef up its domestic chip making capability that would be interested in capturing the 20ish nm flash, psram, DDR4 etc market?
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There isn't a meaningful difference in the industrial requirements for making DDR6 vs DDR4 that are being impacted by AI. The real crunch is in the wafers, which HBM uses as well. That's what's driving up the prices.
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The real crunch is in the wafers
No, it's not. The crunch is on =15nm process nodes. That has little to do with the wafer, other than perhaps quality/yield, in which case those not passing QA for =15nm processes might in fact work for 20-30nm just fine. Die yield might be down slightly, but otherwise those wafers would be scrap, so...
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Usually the profit margin on top-of-the-line is higher than commodity chips, especially if competing with lower-wage countries. Shortages usually don't last forever so financial boffins target an average market, not the current market.
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You can't make good DRAM on a logic process, so you can't just slip new masks onto an existing line.
Re: Wrong question... (Score:2)
Probably why Nvidia took a stake in Intelâ¦
Make sure they donâ(TM)t get any funny ideas about spinning up those old fabs again
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The question we should really be asking is, why do most consumer devices need State-of-the-Art DRAM?
Because there can only be ONE. One ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. We have been told about these human weaknesses for thousands of years... and yet each time, it is like it is all new again. It is like the evangelicals being some of the most fiercest Jesus warriors while absolutely ignoring everything that Jesus said.
Consolidation and monopoly is how a person rules the world. *shrug*
'overcapacity bad' until it isn't (Score:2)
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The big 3 memory producers have 95% of the market and they aren't adding capacity. Even if everyone else could double capacity that's still only 5% growth and you still have to wait for it to be built.
Well, there's always the Defense Production Act (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
If enough critical systems can't procure RAM because AI is gobbling up the lion's share of the supply, then It seems to me that things will start crashing down around us. Think medical diagnostic machines such as MRI's, Control electronics in farm machinery for food production, etc.
So the question is, who will dominate if the Defense Production Act is invoked?
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"if the Defense Production Act is invoked"
Comedy gold
And Yet Nobody Does Anything (Score:2)