Comment on Memory Makers Expect Shortages to End in Late 2028, Could Pause Expansion Plans

• XLE@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Either that or, optimistically, memory manufacturers see a bubble about to burst, and they don’t want to be stuck holding excessive manufacturing equipment.

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  • SippyCup@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Frequently the attitude towards equipment is that it can be sold once they’re done with it. Particularly specialized equipment might sit a little longer but that’s built in to the calculation.

    There’s a bottleneck in hiring skilled workers to run that equipment, and time to get that equipment up and running. It can take months from when the equipment is in the building before it’s making parts, up to a year for very sensitive equipment. And troubleshooting it to get it working at capacity takes even longer.

    Which is great, if you need time to find people to run it, but usually those skilled workers already have jobs, and there are only so many available in any given area. Even if you have them available you’re stuck paying them for months before you’re ready to put them to work.

    It’s high risk and it takes a long time to pay off. A miscalculation is the end of the CEOs career and may bankrupt the company. The first to pull it off though will be in a great spot, assuming it’s not a bubble and it doesn’t burst. Manufacturers are going to want some solid guarantees before taking the plunge. Optimally they want someone else to pay for it. They may actually be negotiating with these companies now about funding their expansion.

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    • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Frequently the attitude towards equipment is that it can be sold once they’re done with it. Particularly specialized equipment might sit a little longer but that’s built in to the calculation.

      As someone tangentially related to all this, I’m not so sure how accurate this is. The equipment we have isn’t ever sold until its completely deprecated and the space is needed for new tooling as a lot of this equipment takes years of planning, installation, and qualification before its ever allowed into production (along with strict service term contracts). The market is also relatively small and this would effect everyone equally, so I’m not sure how solid a plan like this would be. I imagine it would be similar to the housing market after the '08 crash where everyone is trying to unload dead weight at the same time which further devalues everything at a time when capital is desperately needed and sales have plunged off a cliff.

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• cogman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Maybe. I mean at least a major part of it is that AI pays a lot more money than the consumer does, and even if the consumer market pulls back, they are banking on the raised prices to stay around even if they can increase capacity.

  I think what scares them is that CXMT is rapidly catching up to the state of the art. If they dick around for too long, they run the real risk that China and CXMT will do what China does and sweep the market with really cheap memory they can’t compete with.

  These companies still care about non-ai servers, and that’s a big part of the market that could be obliterate pretty quickly.

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• THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  They’ll have to pry my DDR5 out of my cold dead motherboard before that happens. Tech has stagnated so much that my last rig lasted 12 years from 2012 to 2024. This current rig will outlast this entire administration.

  I do feel bad for all of you who want or need a new build now. That’s where it hurts the most.

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• CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The whole plan is to make personal computing unaffordable so we have to rent cloud services to do anything.

  That’s certainly a byproduct of what they’re doing but I’m not convinced thats the goal as the biggest PC buyers these days are businesses and I don’t see them jumping on board with that since it doesn’t benefit them at all. You could argue it would reduce their IT needs, but it won’t really as they’ll still need physical devices for everyone, networking gear, dedicated PCs for certain tasks/uses (like running equipment), not to mention having to store all IP on third party hardware.

  For consumers, I think most people have enough computing power with their phones as it is and most of the rest can be handled by some 10 year old thin office client. Outside of higher prices across the board, this will really hurt gamers and PC enthusiasts the hardest which is probably quite a niche market.

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• krisevol@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  That isn’t the plan. Person computers are still available, but ram production didn’t match demand.

  Also billionaires don’t have a billion dollars so they don’t effect you. Their wealth is stocks that only home value because you keep buying them. If the bubble pops those “billions” disappear.

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