Discussion
The RAM shortage could last years
fouc: [delayed]
ochre-ogre: can't read the article due to a paywall.
WesolyKubeczek: You can still use as much memory, but fit more things into it, so I don’t think the current market hogs will let go easily.
wolvoleo: https://archive.is/QGU89
tim-projects: The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.
majso: here is the source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-sk-g...
stuxnet79: Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years.It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all the dry powder out of the private markets. Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue. It is increasingly looking like they might not commit to the purchase order they made which kick-started this whole panic over RAM.Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?
WesolyKubeczek: I fear that the real reason we do have a shortage, I mean, the real reason for the demand, is AI companies scooping what they can so that their competitors, whether existing or incumbent, can’t get to it.
jeff_vader: Wait until China invades Taiwan.. (ok, it's not too likely, but what if?)
Bombthecat: You still need to hold the model in memory. If you have for example 16 GB ram, the gains aren't that much
rzmmm: It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?
anon373839: That's not what consumes the most memory at scale. The KV caches are per-user.
mschuster91: > Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?We aren't. The remaining memory manufacturers fear getting caught in a "pork cycle" yet again - that is why there's only the three large ones left anyway.
Renaud: I think RAM shortages would be the least of our problems…Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU.We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…
necovek: I am surprised we consider TSMC like a natural resource: isn't it really a combination of know-how and build-out according to that know-how? If smarts leave the country, perhaps this moves with them.The risk with China taking over Taiwan is that they mostly expedite their own production research by a couple of years.
danaris: What you say is absolutely true, and is a serious problem—but the way our system operates does not allow us to correct for it.Anyone trying to spin up a competitor to TSMC would have to first overcome a significant financial hurdle: the capital investment to build all the industrial equipment needed for fabrication.Then they'd have to convince institutions to choose them over TSMC when they're unproven, and likely objectively worse than TSMC, given that they would not have its decades of experience and process optimization.This would be mitigated somewhat if our institutions had common-sense rules in place requiring multiple vendors for every part of their supply chain—note, not just "multiple bids, leading to picking a single vendor" but "multiple vendors actively supplying them at all times". But our system prioritizes efficiency over resiliency.A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...). But it would require sustained investment at all levels—and not just investment in the simple financial sense; it requires people investing their time in education and research. Dedicating their lives to making the best chips in the world. And the only reason that would work is that it defies our system, and chooses to invest in plants that won't be finished for years, and then pay for chips that they know are inferior in quality, because they're our chips, and paying for them when they're lower quality is the only way to get them to be the best chips in the world.
Hamuko: I'm personally hoping that one of the AI or data center companies is suddenly unable to pay for their bills and deflate the entire industry. Probably the only hope of things getting better before the 2030s.
kubb: I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years.There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment.They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they want.
chintech2: I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of China's new memory companies.[0] https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...
danaris: The same thing everyone who's paying attention to the real world (and not the financial fantasy world) does: that OpenAI's purchase commitments are wildly unrealistic and unsustainable.
IshKebab: Maybe if they had no competitors...
tuetuopay: This was one of the theories behind the wafer buyout by OpenAI indeed. Pretty efficient way to make everyone panic and cut off of new hardware.
Cthulhu_: To add a more local hurdle as well, the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection.That is, memory capacity is reserved for datacenters yet to be built, but this will do weird things if said datacenter construction is postponed or cancelled altogether.
tuetuopay: That’s likely to happen if all the talks about OpenAI pulling out of their wafer deals are true.
tuetuopay: The net effect won’t be a memory use reduction to achieve the same thing. We’ll do more with the same amount of memory. Companies will increase the context windows of their offerings and people will use it.That is the sad reality of the future of memory.
