China stealing anything loses any bite when you realize every AI company stole everything and is supported by the Government.
RAM prices will fall now, this is good news. Fuck the cartel.
This was easy to predict.
Chinese government is not stupid. They have a strategy (more so than USA does). Years ago that was to dominate global manufacturing and supply chains. They were successful. Now the goal is to reach parity with Western chipmakers and/or get ahead. It’s happening.
The AI boom was like a golden gift to them. Semiconductor prices are through the roof. So if they can produce almost anything at all in quantity it will sell for inflated prices.
While the tech companies of the world jerk each other off with AI, China is building DRAM capacity. CXMT is the first and will not be the last. They will scale quickly. If they have the process perfected they will build a fab in the time it takes USA to conduct the environmental review for the consideration of allowing a permit application to build a fab. They will not build one fab they will build 5 or 10. I’m proud to be American and I love my country but I compare USA to China on the ability to execute large projects like this and China will win every time. We have too much red tape, too many lawsuits and insurance and moving parts. China executes faster and more decisively.
So give it a year or two and China will have a fleet of pretty good fabs. They will sell memory for way less than what the others do. And then just as China made themselves indispensable for manufacturing, they will make themselves indispensable for DRAM.
There’s also the issue of things not necessarily having to be the MOST profitable thing ever. Memory manufacturers decided to go to the highest bider because money. I suspect Chinese company will be quite happy to just flood the market with cheaply priced (relatively speaking) products and just get everyone’s money.
This 100%.
HBM has massive profit margins. It’s also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.
China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory ‘only’ 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, “They give us a price every month or something, and they say ‘you can buy that many’ and it’s yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again.” Source interview. If China says ‘we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs’ and the quality is decent then it doesn’t matter if it’s slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.
And play that ahead.
The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there’s less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.I suspect Chinese company will be quite happy to just flood the market with cheaply priced (relatively speaking) products and just get everyone’s money.
And will still be able to make a very healthy profit by doing that.
The quest for “max_profit” is not (and never has been) sustainable.
Much of that red tape is there for good reason. It protects our natural resources and our citizens. I don’t disagree the US could do better, but things like environmental studies are important to ensure healthy growth, not just rapid. AI data center bullshit happening right now is a perfect example of the impact and destruction of steamrolling these things.
In general I agree- the concept of red tape, environmental evaluations, etc is a good thing.
But we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
Key is to find a middle ground- that lets a fab be built in an environmentally friendly way but also rapidly.
Sure helps when you just steal the technology. Seems to be a theme over there… https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/cxmt-planned-to-use-stolen-samsung-ip-to-develop-its-dram-court-hears-former-samsung-engineer-who-jumped-to-chinese-memory-maker-now-behind-bars
As an earlier post pointed out - the Ai industry stole everything with the support of the government at our expense. The point is moot.
If the Chinese theft benefits us as consumers then they are the Robin Hood of computation hardware. The good guys.
They didn’t steal from “us”. They stole from the billionaires. I’m fine with it.
Yah I used to be on the “China steals” bandwagon, back when it had weight but now it doesn’t matter, even when it come to Chinas genocide of the ueagers, America is helping cause gaza with isreal not to mention what its doing to Cuba. America is no better then China now in my eyes.
Americans, and I say this as an American, have always been ignorant and hypocritical in what the US government has done and is continuing to do.
Not always.
Yeah, I’m with you on this. China has been a much more responsible member of the international community than the US. I strongly disagree with what China is doing with regard to Taiwan, the South China Sea, and suppression of free expression, but otherwise they’re the lesser of two evils.
I wouldn’t say theyre lesser, I’d say their a out as bad as eachother tho. China is a lot better then it used to be to add to that
The concept of IP is theft to begin with. No technology arises from a vacuum, it is all built on the collective efforts of humanity through the ages. The fact that some billionaire can claim ownership over an idea is a moral failing of capitalism.
Yeah, I generally agree with you. Just seems unfair that China gets to reap the rewards for the efforts of people working elsewhere. The fact that billionaires just pocket all the rewards anyway makes that point a bit moot.
As a member of the working class, I don’t particularly mind if a socialist country reaps the rewards of my work. Also, it’s not like IP is a zero-sum game, and that an idea put into use in one place means it can’t be put into use in another. It’s like ancient Babylon getting mad at Sumeria for putting seeds into the ground.
Tbh, I’m still mad at Sumeria
Is this a surprise?
Semiconductor production is a national priority for China.
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Okay, where can I buy them, below the price of “western” RAM?
They won’t sell it to you, they’re just making sure they aren’t beholden to the same ram shortages the rest of the world is.
There’s nothing Chinese won’t sell to you
I’m take one Beijing, please.
That’ll be 4 trillion (4×10^12) USD, please
What a bargain!
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I just looked at China’s GDP (PPP) in Wikipedia and grabbed 10 percent and truncated
unless they eventually don’t need foreign currency anymore because their own country produces everything they could ever need or want
Nope. China is too big of a country to produce everything they need themselves.
Contrary to popular belief, what china imports the most is actually electronic components. Followed by fossil fuels.
Those two categories alone account for ~40% of all Chineese imports as of 2024.
I’m sure the elites in China won’t take your money because they have gambling, sports cars, and hookers at home /s
RAM is a commodity, so if this stuff is produced in large quantities, it will affect the global market by lowering China’s demand for imported RAM.
Same as oil and gas, even if North America will never import Iranian product, their prices are affected by that stuff not reaching the market in Asia or whatever and driving up the Asian demand for oil elsewhere.
They won’t sell it to you
China is a major consumer of RAM. If they can supply it domestically, that has the potential to reduce the volume of global imports and subsequent price pressure.
If their competitors can’t keep up, you will eventually see Chinese RAM get out onto the secondary market in the same way Chinese EVs and Chinese cell phones and Chinese solar panels and Chinese steel have depressed global prices for these commodities.
If their competitors can’t keep up
Their competitors have already sold out their entire 2027 production.
The money they make selling RAM to private consumers is not even 1 promille of their revenue.
Their competitors have already sold out their entire 2027 production.
Plenty of which will inevitably turn up on the secondary market.
The money they make selling RAM to private consumers is not even 1 promille of their revenue.
The RAM they sell to home-labbers and hobbyists, sure. The RAM they’re selling to Dell and Lenovo and Apple? A significantly higher chunk of their revenues. But that’s a side issue. These kinds of RAM sticks are largerly fungible.
The new high end AI datacenters are building out specialty hardware that isn’t PC compatible. And the real worry is that these firms migrate over to the AI datacenter designs in a way that causes a semi-permanent shortage on the independent PC side.
Interesting. I have heard that hardware manufacturers create specific chip architecture to suit AI technology.
Though I had not considered that the hardware might shift so much as to be rendered “useless” for the average consumer
Force countries to pay for it with their currency and this will skyrocket their gdp and currency. Surpassing dollar.
What about all this other Chinese crap I own?
You see, that is in your own words crap, they keep the good stuff for themselves.
There is some decent Chinese stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to know though with the flood of crap. For example Anker seems consistently decent, but anything that sounds like Qihoon or Xiyomao or whatever random brand word they pop into existence on the other hand…
they keep the good stuff for themselves.
Do they? If anything, I believe China’s been exporting the high-end luxury items because they have absurd margins in western markets. Meanwhile, the good-enough goods stay at home, because it isn’t worth the time or effort to sail them across the ocean and market them.
I guess Temu and its peers have changed that, to a degree. But so much Temu crap just gets bought up by local American drop-shippers, marked up to American prices, and rebranded as western equivalent merch that it feels like much the same.
That was back before tariffs and any goodwill whatsoever dissolved.
Nothing a import ban can’t fix.
While making sure to write the ban in ways that doesn’t stop machines being assembled there just not in ways that lowers prices
Yeah that’s probably a sad truth for those in the good ol’ USA.
Nothing a import ban can’t fix.
Just because the US bans something, that doesn’t stop the rest of the world from buying.
No shit. What I want though is memory prices to go back down here.
What I want though is memory prices to go back down here.
A price war might lead in that direction.
Just like that price war between american cars and all those Chinese ones they let be imported. The whole point of import bans in the US is to prevent a true free market.
This is totally going to happen. And there is nothing you can do as far as spying with memory but I guarantee they will come up with some bullshit excuse related to that. I mean the only thing I can think of is some sort of kill switch but that would just kill the machine. Do that enough and nobody buys your RAM so what would be the point. Maybe just plain market manipulation but that’s pretty much happening now.
let’s be honest, these are already banned by the Chinese device ban that banned routers.
but, truthfully, if I can’t even trust Chinese IP cams to not snoop on me, why would I trust RAM?
it’s orders of magnitude harder to do with ram than with a complete, network-connected device. not saying it’s not possible, but I personally wouldn’t be very worried about it.
What’s your alternative?
rub two bricks together. doesn’t that sound grate?
Is it normal to refer to Taiwanese RAM manufacturers as “Western”?
I’m glad they distinguish it from China obviously, but calling G.Skill and MSI Western feels kinda weird.
Sort of the joke in the modern US attitude towards Taiwan. They see a break-away province and have no actual respect for their sovereignty. Independent small nations are just colonies-up-for-grabs in the eyes of the US State Department.
Found the Tankie.
tankie is when anti-imperialist i guess
that “tankie” would be right, it’s irredentism in ukraine’s case, which is also bad
So your argument is Russia trying to take over a democratic nation created in the 20th century is imperialism. But China trying to take over a democratic nation created in the 20th century is not…
😂
taiwan is just a breakaway province with its own government. even they think they’re china, just look at their name.
the republic of china (taiwan) is recognized by almost nobody, while ukraine is a universally recognized sovereign state.
and i never said russia attacking ukraine is imperialism, i said it’s irredentism.
I’m glad you seem proud of it, the picture you chose of Dukakis is chefs kiss.
They do so because while the manufacturing is taking place in Taiwan, the blueprints are not.
It’s why we call iPhone american phones. Despite them being manufactured in China
Well, they are to the west of the west…so…😁
don’t look what the government in taiwan calls themselves
Eastern China or westernmost state of the USA? You decide!
Yes, they chose to put themselves, economically and politically, within the western sphere of influence. It is not geographic. Weirdness is from your ignorance of geopolitics.
That’s nice. Affordable RAM when?
Afaik Chinese DDR4 ram production is already keeping prices in that segment sane. They are working to break the ASML monopoly and sanctions on extreme violet light lithography to make the most advances chips and then will ramp up production. They are churning out like 10 times more engineers than the US and EU. They are ramping up but not sure when they will be able to compete at the highest level. I read 2030 earliest.
Whenever the tariffs come down.
Wonder if a consumer can get around the tariff. If the price is too high, it becomes more economical to pay a bit extra for a roundabout way of getting it.
Gray market imports into the US from China have already been big business, especially among counterfeiters and drop-shippers. Idk about getting a full-sized SUV over the border. But designer bags, electronics, and the like have been coming over for at least a decade.
Idk how much retail buyers save, though. Much like with the drug trade and human trafficking, there’s inevitably an enormous mark-up for this kind of smuggling. And because it is functionally unregulated, you get a ton of refurbished, low-grade, and outright fraudulent sales. Smuggling tends to accrue money to the smugglers and the various officials you need to bribe to move the merchandise. You rarely see retail level discounts, unless the market is so glutted with knock-offs.
Canadian here …what’s a tariff?
Might be worth doing a little research. Canada’s never been shy about using them.
RAM has not come from China, and China isn’t exporting much of it yet. Unless Canada and the EU and Japan and everyone else is also handing out tariffs on Taiwan, Korea, etc like the US is, their point was the price of RAM doesn’t have anything to do with tariffs.
The price of RAM is high globally because the AI companies have bought future-RAM with money the RAM producing companies gave them to build data centers that don’t exist yet.
There is so much over investment in memory its going to be dirt cheap again in 2028
This is simply not true. All the major players are not investing in production. They are simply letting the demand stack and prices to rise.
China entering the market will help some, but expect these chips to be banned quite quickly in the western world for fear of communists. They are already blacklisted by many companies.
Yes they are. Samsung and SK hynix are building 4 new fabs I’m Korea 1 in the US. Sandisk and kioxia are building extra capacity in Japan. Micron is building new fan in the US. Its nearly a trillion in investment for additional capacity. These are expected to hit the market in 2027 and 2028 with lag to backfill demand.
Chinese ram will be good but not good enough to block it. Business will keep buying the high preformance stuff and consumers can have the cheap modules but they buy so little it won’t affect anything.
Sounds like it’d be a good idea to get an xl motherboard
Exactly. Expected to hit the market in 2027 and 2028. This investment in fabs happened years ago. For example, Samsung invested in the Taylor fab (which should start production, a little early, late this year) back in 2021. Samsung KRW6 was announced this year, but thats a new technology, not new capacity. You cant build and turn on a fab in the short term.
Can we just appreciate how you first told him he’s wrong for suggesting memory will be cheap again in 2028.
Only to immediately try to frame it as “memory won’t be cheap until 2028 so that proves my point!”
Which is exactly what he said to begin with. Top notch. 👌
I fully disagree that memory will be cheap in 2028. Please feel free to come and ping this thread in 2028 to tell me Im wrong.
My firm belief is that memory will continue to increase in price through the end of 2027 and likely level out in 2028. The price will not go ‘down’ in the next few years.
New technologies will be introduced, but all consumers and corporations want the latest and greatest. Demand will far outstrip supply for the foreseeable future.
Edit: just to add, if you keep up with the news and financial disclosurers, all the output from those new fabs has already been presold to the usual suspects.
Please feel free to come and ping this thread in 2028 to tell me Im wrong.
I’m honoured you think I’m petty enough to dig up a 2 year old post just to say “i told you so” to some random user on the Internet.
But unfortunately I’m only mortal. I’ll leave that kind of pursuit to the bots.
I eagerly await the 64GB mouse driver and the 5000PB home NAS for the discerning hoarder of the output of /dev/rnd
If I recall correctly is also on road to match western prices.
I’m not sure what would stop them from charging whatever they can, which will be a lot.
More competitors should create more downward pressure on what memory manufacturers can charge, but even with new entrants there still aren’t that many.
I’m not sure what would stop them from charging whatever they can
Undercutting the competition to gain market share is a time tested business strategy.
Sure, but unless there’s a surplus of supply they’ll sell their full capacity without doing that. I hope there is, though, or at least that demand for RAM chips will go down soon.
I wonder how long it will take the US to view RAM like they view oil and invade China?
I thought they had their eyes on South Korea.
¿Porque no los dos?
That would officially be WW3, and it wouldn’t go well for the US.
Pretty much the entire world either dislikes or outright hates the US right now, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. There’s far more positive sentiment towards China around the world than towards the US.
The US could never bring such a fantasy to reality. Anyone who still believes they could after the debacle with Iran should apply for a cabinet position.
The Chinese government being much more fans of a directed market than of a totally unregulated one (neither of which is a Free Market by the way - that thing only exists when barriers to market entry are incredibly low, and it’s not as if any Jack or Joe can set up their very own memory production cottage factory in their backyard, so it’s not possible for there to be a Free Market in RAM under current technology), they’ll probably make sure that RAM only ever leaves China as part of more complex products (i.e. computers, smartphones, tablets and so on) made in China, thus making also Made In China for those product lines be more competitive.
(In other words, want a gaming PC or smartphone with more memory - buy the whole thing from China or pay 10x more)
If properly managed this could boost quite a lot more digital electronics industries in China than merelly RAM.
they’ll probably make sure that RAM only ever leaves China as part of more complex products
Which other components are subject to this limitation in China?
It’s about complex products which contain RAM rather than other component.
Anything made in China which has RAM in it will have its price affected by the price of RAM so if Chinese brands of such products have access to cheaper RAM than non-Chinese brands, they can outcompete the latter on price whilst delivering similar quality products.
Personally I tend to assemble my own desktop PCs, but for example in the past when buying a Mini-PC I would pick a Chinese brand one if cheaper since the quality is the same. Now imagine if the Chinese brand is now 1/2 the price of the non-Chinese one because the former uses RAM from China whose price is nowhere as high as the hyper-inflated South Korean RAM - in this kind of device were the quality is the same, the Chinese product will always be the better option if it’s half the price because of using way cheaper RAM.
Honestly it’ll probably be more like 3 or 4 times cheaper. I’m excited for the effects of this to start to balloon outwards. Now China just needs a graphics card/GPU manufacturer that can be competitive.
They are working on cracking EUV lithography. From the sweatshop of the west to leading in 58 of 65 advanced technologies already. Neoliberalism has been the ruin of the west.
Do you have a link to a list of the 65 advanced technologies? I’d be quite interested in checking it out.
It was mentioned in the later part of this video: Eurasia Breaks USA: Three Front Defeat Forming | Prof. Radhika Desai.
But the source is this ASPI “Australian Strategy Policy Institute”. Ah found it: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-critical-technology-tracker-2025-updates-and-10-new-technologies/
In total, China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies tracked, with the United States leading in the remaining eight—an imbalance that underscores why trusted partners need to act together to leverage comparative advantages, reduce concentration risk and shape the trajectory of critical technologies together.
Here is the list of technologies: https://techtracker.aspi.org.au/list-of-technologies The website seems a bit of a mess.
The video frames this as a function of neoliberalism slowly bleeding education and fundamental research dry (and also destroying demand because nobody can afford anything any more).
And also China has 1.4 billion people, invested into them and has slowly crept up the technology ladder, and now turn out an order of magnitude more engineers every year than the west.
Well currently the Chinese manufacturers match current prices
Noice! Now gimme gimme
