It is one of the thing with consumer when they remember they brought it at the absolutely lowest price point when DRAM maker were bleeding money.

Those are not normal pricing. Before the pricing collapse in early 2020, 96GB DDR5 would have cost about $450 to $500. And I will need to restate again the cost of DRAM hasn't really changed much in the past 20 years. Its price just goes up and down in cycles.

So in reality it is more like going from $500 to $1300. But consumer felt it was more like going from $200 to $1300.

Crucial are already selling DRAM made by CXMT. And China are already throwing money at it. I doubt the memory bubble will burst in next 12-24 months. As in going back to money losing DRAM pricing. As they will all pivot to HBM or other money making products. But the bulk of lower end consumer DDR5 or LPDDR5 will goes to Chinese Foundry. Assuming they have figure out how to do them well. Which they have improved but are still so far away from industry leaders.

Normally memory maker will push the next DDR standard to market just to push out Chinese competitors, I am not sure it will work the same this time around. DDR5 have plenty of other usage / demands.

I mean, god willing, but it'll be just as likely that we'll blissfully consume 100 million token contexts in that case.

Or will more efficient algorithms just mean we run even more AI models, increasing the demand for AI chips even more?

also for ones fully into AI

Keeping prices at this level is precisely how one or more competitor will rise up. Making memory isn’t super hard. That’s why it is a commodity. The problem with the memory market is that up and down cycles have bankrupted the vast majority of players in the past. Now we only have 3 players left except for a few smaller ones in China.

The reason memory prices can stay high for years in this mega cycle is because the 3 players will be very cautious on overbuilding. They’d rather under build, make great profit (not maximum) and reduce the risk of going bust if this suddenly ends.

Same for TSMC in chips.

Great opportunity for Chinese companies though. This shortage is exactly what Chinese companies need to scale.

Then China will come and eat their lunch. I for one will only buy Chinese RAM from now on, no matter the prices.

Then that's a cartel and hopefully regulators will act.

If the collude to say make the price $1000 for a component that costs them $100(including opportunity costs), then either a new company or a greedy company in the collusion can make their price secretly $900 and get massively more profit.

Right now their opportunity cost is too high.

> risky it is to spin up a new fab

You don't need a new fab. You can build memory in 20 years old fab.

Do we though? DLSS 5 changes that somewhat from a “we need powah” to “we need models”. I think the future consumer GPU market will be tuned for image and world inference while workstation cards will be tuned for image and video inference. The old way of thinking about this will come to an end when we stop looking at the render loop as the be-all-end-all…

Or, we could be fucked.

It’s fab capacity. Fwiw dram is different enough that fabs are not transferable between dram memory and other usages. It’s nice to think ‘wow if they made the current 10nm dram on the latest 2nm processes it’d be much faster’ but it doesn’t work that way. The specific size is needed for the capacitance. Sram can be made on fabs that make other circuitry since it’s transistor not capacitor based but is less dense.

Dram is just extremely specialised.