@fname Ed Zitron and others have been banging the pots and pans for a while saying chips are being stockpiled in warehouses gathering dust, https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/ which is in large part to keep up the charade of huge data center buildouts of course but also accords with the premise that they want to keep the chips from everyone else more than they want to use the capacity themselves.
Oct 31, 2026, 1:56 PM@ljwrites
In a truly rational market, companies would be scrambling to build new chip fabs to meet the demand. New companies would be popping up all over the place!
Where is Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' in all this? 🤔
@fname Coming from a country (South Korea) where a lot of these chips come from, I will say that it's not easy or fast to build fabs, and the companies that can even start on them are extremely limited in the first place. If that weren't the case Samsung and Hynix couldn't be running basically extortion rings to the tune of something like 60–80% margins. (I am so so positive this is a cartel of epic proportions, but the Korean authorities won't move when public retirement funds are neck-deep in these companies' stock and these two are paying historically unprecedented corporate taxes, U.S. should be the maddest about this but its antitrust enforcement is in shambles and it suits the USian hyperscalers just fine to be burning all that capex, and the EU doesn't care evidently.)
To drag myself back on topic, yes, there are plans to build new fabs in Korea but it's a huge, huge, huge undertaking on the order of a decade+ with like a million moving pieces. There are incredible political, financial, economic, regional, environmental, etc. etc. issues that are causing some seismic conflicts, so it's not simple to say the least!
All this is due to the uniquely specialized nature of these chips which doesn't obey the usual workings of capitalism, that's for sure. They're not normal products, which is how their margins and their makers' bargaining power got so abnormal. I think any hope of opening up supply at consumer level in the short term will lie with China (which has ramped up RAM production already), B2B for AI GPUs is still up in the air with CXMT rejecting Apple's offer.
@jfmezei @fname Doubling RAM production is exactly what CXMT is doing, though, to the extent we could be looking at an oversupply in consumer RAM a couple years down the line. https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/china-is-doubling-ram-production-to-keep-everyday-gadget-prices-from-skyrocketing/ar-AA2fBISk So that's a definite reason hang on to current devices, because a better time to buy may be coming soon-ish.