I am a senior developer now with 8 years of experience on serious projects, and have been in IT probably for 20 years; I have tried to address on many occasions a simple private email for many companies for different subjects; They never respond.
On “at the request of …”, it looks like we are in the consumerism at its finest in IT, companies only communicate with each other, they have no relation with any entity outside of that, if it is not a consumer.
I couldn’t imagine our org spending time on some random request from a private email. How does that work at your company? What would your boss say if you spent a bunch of time on an inofficial email?
Yes, all computer parts should be made by one company on an internationally disputed island. What could go wrong?
China is taking Taiwan. Probably in 28.
I mean, Intel also makes high end chips and they do most of that in the US. And it’s unlikely TSMC would run all the other memory producers out of business.
It’s an interesting strategy if you’re Taiwan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_shield
Silicon shield is the principle in geopolitical relations regarding Chinese unification that the semiconductor industry in Taiwan is important enough to global economic prosperity that it would deter an attempt by China to seize Taiwan by force, and if not would induce foreign powers, particularly the United States, to defend Taiwan in order to preserve the stability of the semiconductor supply chain.
This is the real answer. Taiwan could have 0 military & China would STILL second guess a forced re-annexation.
They also have a factory in Arizona.
all the top of the line is made by taiwan on the island.
Only for obsolete fab technologies for underpowered IOT chips. The fabs that make 2nm current generation chips are all in Taiwan.
Remember: you will not get anything from that ram. 100% will go to nvidia and amd for their AI. And it will block production capacity for other stuff.
True but I wonder how longer will ai be in business. It’s all hype, they burn more money than gain, and maybe and hopefully the democratic congress will stop the build of new data centers or close some down.
They usurped the stock market. When they’re out of business so are you.
Yup, this is just AI capture reaching the top of the supply chain.
What’s stopping an American RAM plant? I would think we would have already broke ground.
Americans do crazy things like not tolerating 24 hour shifts and being required to sleep in a dormitory owned by the employer.
Who’s gonna pay for it? A ram fab costs hundreds of billions and takes years to get online, then takes tens of billions every year to constantly upgrade to new standards. And all that for a commodity that while right now is obnoxiously expensive is typically a razor thin margin and sometimes even sold at a loss
Foxcon wisconsin… Literally right freaking there just put it there there’s nothing stopping anyone …and pedantics aside its already paid for!
That was a political stunt for Walker, it was never ever going to actually happen (maybe some minor LCD fab but not high end compute)
The Foxconn deal fell through. IIRC, Microsoft datacenters are in there now.
If you’re spending hundreds of billions on a DRAM fab, you’re overpaying. Check Facebook Marketplace, you shouldn’t have to spend more than $25B to get what you’re looking for.
Who’s gonna pay for it?
Intel already has fabs. Ram is currently 3x more expensive per unit area than high end CPU’s. So just like Samsung make ram and ARM cpus at the same fabs, Intel could have some of its foundary make dram for 3x the profit of CPUs.
There’s no point in making so many CPU’s when there’s no DRAM to go with them.
Those fabs would need to be retooled. So intel spends billions, butchers their ability to fabricate their core product line, and all so that they can now fabricate a deprecating asset. By the time they got up and running ram prices would be about to drop significantly as 2028 has Samsung, micron, and sk Hynix all opening expanded fabrication capacity. Not to mention if the 3 main ram manufacturers take ~2 years to get additional capacity online god only knows how long it would take for someone who hasn’t fucked with dram manufacturing since like the 80s
Micron says Hi.
It’s wild how few Americans realize that Micron has fabs here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American multinational semiconductor company that manufactures computer memory and computer data storage products, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), flash memory, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and solid-state drives (SSDs). Founded in 1978 in Boise, Idaho, Micron is the only major American computer memory manufacturer.[3] It is one of the “Big Three” computer memory manufacturers, along with the South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.[4]
They have fabs in the US (and are building more).
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/
Micron is accelerating its U.S. fab and technology investments, increasing its planned spend to more than $250 billion through 2035, driven by surging demand for memory in the AI era. These investments reflect Micron’s confidence in its technology leadership and are designed to support its long-term goal of producing 40% of its DRAM in the U.S. while creating additional good-paying jobs.
How did I never know that?! Thanks.
Sure thing. If you’ve ever purchased Crucial memory, that’s their “consumer” brand, where they make the DIMMs themselves, so you’ll have some of their memory chips. There was a lot of outrage on here that they stopped doing that during the RAM shortage, prioritized filling B2B demand first.
There are also third-party DIMM manufacturers like PNY (also US-based) that make DIMMs with chips from memory chip manufacturers, and they might be using Micron memory chips as well.
If you’re on Linux, you can check what’s in your system at the DIMM level without pulling it open with:
$ sudo dmidecode -t memoryI don’t know if there’s a way to see where the chips on a third-party DIMM come from — like, potentially Micron, with a third-party manufacturer — without actually looking at the chip.
*was their consumer brand
In 2002, the United States Department of Justice began a probe into the activities of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) manufacturers in response to complaints by US computer makers, including Dell and Gateway. The computer makers said that inflated DRAM pricing was causing them lost profits and hindering their effectiveness in the marketplace, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.
They have also plead guilty to price fixing. Device information
There’s been a lot of efforts to expand American fabs. Intel, Micron, and TSMC are all working on it (and I’m pretty sure most of those projects have at least broken ground at this point). But even with infinity dollars to spend, it takes a very long time to build these plants. The fabs are similar in size to a “normal” factory, but the entire interior is a series of massive clean rooms that are hundreds if not thousands of times cleaner than an operating room, filled with equipment that is simultaneously very large and very sensitive.
I remember reading somewhere that one of Intel’s newest process nodes involves drilling holes measured in hundreds of picometers into the part at some point. A hydrogen atom is roughly 62 picometers across.
It takes an already-existing memory manufacturer 4–5 years to do a new factory.
I don’t know how much longer it’d take a non-memory manufacturer, but presumably more.
I’m not saying that this would be bad, but I’d expect that it’d be some way in the future if it happens.
If anyone can pull this off in a shorter timeframe it’s TSMC. But that’s very ambitious even for them, of course.
and the reason manufacturers aren’t building many more factories is because they’re extremely expensive and there’s no guarantee the same demand will still exist in 5 or 10 years. What if the AI bubble bursts, the market is flooded with second-hand supply, and all the new factories aren’t needed?
Micron is building new factories in New York, and they expect the first factory there to be online by 2030 at a cost of $50 billion (which is more than their entire 2025 revenue).
And yet there’s so much talk about this and demand putting pressure upon them. that they are certainly taking a hit when/if that bubble bursts, even expecting that.
I’m spitballing here, but one way it might be possible for TMSC (or whoever puts up the capital, which doesn’t have to necessarily be TMSC) to mitigate risk, given that this is Nvidia allegedly talking to them, is to build some kind of new memory specialized for AI use that would displace existing memory for AI use. Like, for neural nets, you don’t have the same constraints that you do on conventional DRAM. If you can have someone who builds neural net systems and a memory maker work together, you might be able to produce a new sort of memory that would be a better buy for neural net users.
A few things I can list off-the-cuff:
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Access patterns on neural nets are predictable long in advance. That means latency doesn’t matter much (so having far higher latency than current memory may be fine) and requesting large blocks of memory might be valuable. Accesses will be sequentially requesting memory over a large range, so it also may mean that one could change how cooling works in the memory, if one has some guarantees on a single spot not being frequently re-requested a lot. A given byte of memory won’t be re-written, once written, for a long time, so you could relax how rapidly the hardware needs to be able to sequentially do writes to a given byte.
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You have a lower ratio of writes to reads. I read one article talking about how HBM isn’t yet optimized for AI use on write/read bandwidth availability grounds. That’s talking about the memory interface, not the memory chip itself; they were just arguing for changing the ratio of bandwidth reserved for writes and reads. However, I would bet that you could also optimize the memory chip around this.
So you’d basically come up with, I dunno, “neural net memory (NNM)” or something like that. It’s not that you have to use it for neural nets, but that its characteristics would be optimized for neural net use. That only makes sense if there’s enough scale of demand for a single application to put engineering time in, expend the fixed costs, but there is presently a lot of demand, and might be more down the road.
That doesn’t make risk of demand dropping go away, but…it’d tend to shift that risk to conventional memory manufacturers, since if demand doesn’t meet expectations and you’re doing neural nets, a buyer would probably buy the specialized memory chip before the non-specialized memory chip. Still risk, but it’d be shifted to Micron/SK Hynix/Samsung.
At the start of the AI boom, we had hardware that was not optimized for AI use. It was generic random access memory with most of the hardware stack designed for rendering 3D graphics. I’d guess that it’s very likely that that hardware stack is substantially different from one optimized for neural net use, and I’d bet that Nvidia would be the most-likely party to be at the heart of attempts to re-engineer the hardware stack to optimize it, as that’s somewhere that they’re uniquely-well-positioned to make changes.
EDIT: I remember a while back when John Carmack was tossing the idea out there of using a loop of fiber-optic cable as a memory for AI use. That may not be the optimal design, but one does see that there is a lot of room to think about specializing the memory to the very different demands that neural nets place on memory rather than the demands that conventional RAM users have.
Access patterns on neural nets are predictable long in advance. That means latency doesn’t matter much
While the bag of experts approach has allowed segmentation of memory into vram and dram, the access in the particular expert isn’t predictable, access is spread across all the memory for that expert, and latency dramatically affects bandwith.
Not an expert on AI (or even software development), but geniune question: wouldn’t there still be the problem of silicon allocation involved?
Silicon allocation?
I mean, at the end of the day the same fabs that build “normal RAM” are going to be the ones to build NNM, so as NNM has higher margins, they would opt for more NNM production, and the problem still wouldn’t be solved, as instead of using HBM, they’d use NNM, while at the same time, consumer RAM wouldn’t be as much produced.
I think that the best thing for us consumers is a unified standard, that both consumers and AI-centered compute can utilize, as in that way, there would be just one type of RAM needed to be built for everyone, but even then, it wouldn’t be really good, as the demand for this ideological unified RAM would have price through the roof since its demand would come from AI, so I really have no clue what would be a good solution for RAMpocalypse.
Or maybe, if you still want to have NNM, another possibility is to create entirely new companies, that are independent from the established RAM suppliers. Maybe in this way it could work, but I could be huffing too much hopium here…
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We had this issue during the crypto boom and the manufacterers that added capacity then are glad they did.
What else could use up that RAM? How about standalone VR? We could get mainstream adoption by 2030.
The point is building factories sometimes pays off
I agree that more supply would be great and building factories can pay off. It’s still very expensive though, and some banks are growing skeptical of the ballooning costs of AI-related projects.
That’s why I don’t think we should limit the AI boom, give the supply chains a chance to pay for more capacity for the future
There are a few other reasons to stop building data centers.
My ask is that DC e held to adhere to environmental regs, rather than be given free rein like they have now
Like what? The economy is basically not in a recession because of a data center boom
Did you miss that google illegally clearcut 250,000 trees for a data center, or that they use tons of water and power and they’re building them in deserts. Or that they’re an absolute nuisance for miles around them?
The kind of memory the current manufacturers are focusing on is specialized for data-center-grade GPUs. These GPUs are insanely power-hungry and require data-center-grade cooling. When the bubble pops and data centers go under, you’re not going to see consumer-grade RAM flood the market. So if TSMC wants to enter the market conservatively with the assumption the AI surge will not last, going into the consumer RAM side would be a better bet.
Compared to today the PCs of 1999 were extremely power-hungry, and cooling was not so simple too.
I suppose those who want that compute could start making such home farms. That might not be everyone and their dog, but if such a gigantic supply increase occurs, it might make sense for a while.
Which could also be the real business model of big AI companies, to stockpile the resource that’s going to be very expensive when the demand raises due to popularization of local AI.
OK.
There’s a lot of regular RAM in the servers too though, since the servers can’t operate entirely from VRAM.
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Oddly it does say “adding memory back into its portfolio” which implies that they used to do memory, so they might have mothballed facilities.
It’s still a mammoth undertaking though.
Also, if they’re already producing on-die DRAM for SoC’s then perhaps that’s their entry point.
Not much more. They have the competence and colatteral
“…to capture more AI spending”
oh great, now everything else inside a computer will get expensive, too.
FCK NVDA
Please do, this could make war less likely
I’m waiting for the advent of 3d printable RAM. It doesn’t need to be good. I just need 8MB for my microcontrollers, that’s all.
That’s been done already with resin printed chambers, vacuum, and silicone seal at the top, which also serves as an indicator of the contents of the cell.
WAT. You’re telling me we can 3d print vacuum tubes?
