It's the people and country that suffer when our government fails to ensure markets are free and fair.
Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices.
That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happening. Sometimes things just suck, and somebody bought the world's supply of RAM wafers to use as frisbees.
Tacit collusion requires at least signaling. There has to be some intent. Like in the US rental market where Realpage coordinates tacit collusion.
But if there is legitimately demand for far more memory than can be produced, it seems silly to claim collusion to raise prices.
That's not how commodity markets work. This stuff is essentially sold at auction with the price set by supply and demand. The way they would fix the price is by constraining supply so that people have to outbid each other on a smaller amount of inventory.
But that's not that hard to measure -- are they producing less than they were before prices went up? The answer is actually that they're producing more. The reason prices went up anyway is the huge increase in demand.
You would then have to make the case that it's not just that they're reducing supply but that they're not increasing it fast enough. That's theoretically possible but it's also very plausible that building new fabs just takes time, so if someone's theory is that they're colluding then they need to present some evidence.
That also isn't illegal. A business can choose to artificially restrict supply if they want, there's no mandate that they must meet demand.
It only crosses into illegal territory if multiple companies get together and secretly agree to cap production to keep prices high. Then it becomes collusion. It also becomes illegal if there's a monopoly power that is intentionally constricting supply to specifically stop a smaller competitor or lock them out of the market.
The hard part is how do you prove Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron are acting as a unified cartel when there obviously isn't going to be a paper trail for secret meetings.
There is, however, no incentive to do this when prices are high unless you expect competitors to do likewise, since otherwise you're just handing the business to the others when they increase production. Which strongly implies that if that's what everybody is doing, they're colluding.
> The hard part is how do you prove Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron are acting as a unified cartel when there obviously isn't going to be a paper trail for secret meetings.
Which is the problem when that's what's happening, and why we should maybe change the law to infer the collusion from the outcome in cases where prices are high yet nobody is responding by increasing their market share.
This imagines a world where water production can be dialed up and down instantly, at no cost, with no risk.
It doesn’t work that way though. Hiring people, scaling up factories, converting to 24/7 all have costs and risks.
Just google (or Claude, or whatever) memory companies that went backrupt overbuilding to meet a spike in demand. There are many. You probably don’t even know their names. Because Micron/etc stood pat and survived.
If it's the actual physical agreement that's the problem - the system is working as intended.
But if we are looking to prevent the negative outcomes associated with price fixing and collusion, our system is failing us.
They are never going to find proof of conspiracy. The people involved covered their tracks, and doing so is trivial. So the best we can do is punish the appearance of collusion. And if the goal is to actually prevent harm to customers, that's a better solution anyway, since it encourages leaders of companies to behave in a manner that's the opposite of collusion.
I would look at questions regarding what harm is created: Is it discriminatory? Are parts of society shutting down, and is that unreasonable? Are groups of people now unable to afford a living? Does it move the poverty line? Is that permanent? And how do you prove this is exclusively due to the price increase of tech components, and RAM specifically?
It needs to be unfuzzy in some way in order to make sense, but that's just my opinion.
I do agree prices are insane and wish for them to come down today. I liked the ubiquitous amounts of RAM any system could have. In those days, forums were also filled with how insanely expensive 32 gigabytes of RAM was, about $100 :)
"Things cost more because of collusion" is always a harm. It doesn't matter if the product is maize or gold-plated haute couture, competitors are supposed to compete.
The question is, what's the best way to tell the difference between tacit collusion and just normal supply and demand?
It's not that easy, but here's a decent test: It's tacit conclusion if 1) net margins have been high for e.g. 3 years and 2) no new companies have entered the market in that period of time, or were acquired by an incumbent if they did.
Notice that this works for everything. Even if you're making luxury goods, the price may be high, but so are production costs, and there is a lower volume to amortize fixed costs over, so long-term net margins should be the same as they are anywhere else or you should see new entrants. If you don't, it's reasonable to infer collusion and leave it on the companies to prove otherwise.
Yes it does lmao. If consumers can't get access to devices then they cannot be used for work or education. It's counterproductive.
How many "attention is all you need" papers aren't being written because as soon as there's a sniff of money the rabid suit and tie MBA fucks leap onto any opportunity like a dog in heat and fuck it to death.
Samsung is about to hand out ~$26B in bonuses. SK Hynix something similar-ish.
It’s different to, say, Google’s vertical monopoly in advertising where that’s most of their revenue.
AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.
When making long term plans in 2022, I don't think anyone expected DDR4 to need significant production in 2026. Since ram makers can pretty much sell whatever they make in today's marketplace, it makes sense (for those fabs that can) to stop making DDR4 and repurpose those fabs to make newer generation ram.
2. In a healthy, competitive market there would be smaller manufacturers that’d be happy to take up the big guys’ discarded business.
2. Semiconductor manufacturing is the most complex industrial process in the world. You need billions of capex and decades of experience. Even existing semi players like intel cannot switch production to memory.
China CXMT is gaing traction in DDR market. New fabs from all players wil come online in the next two years.
Have you seen how the modern stock markets works lmao? It hasn't been based on reality in a long time.
Hell just look at Trump, should've run outta money from all his bad deals ages ago but the grift continues.
I guess they would love to produce it themselves, but for the average scenario the production reserves they have with Samsung already work well enough and prevent them from having to get into such a complicated industry.
That's what I have in my gaming tower, and yeah I feel zero pressing need to upgrade. I did manage to put 64GB of DDR4 in it just before prices went totally bonkers, thankfully. Where I'm falling behind is my GPU I'm still on an nvidia 1660 super, but I just can't justify paying what they cost right now.
I would gain pretty much nothing moving to a newer board w/ DDR5.
Unfortunately, I opted for only 32GB of RAM because at that point more felt like overkill, which as a decision has aged poorly. I should've gotten more while it was still cheap.
Of course it might be a ploy to sheep-herd consumers and companies towards the expensive DDR-5. I would not put that below the ring of RAM producers.
How much % of the DRAM market do you think is made from computer enthusiasts upgrading their Zen 1/2 CPUs to Zen 3? Note intel and AMD both switched to DDR5 well before the exit from DDR3/DDR4 ("2024-2025", according to the complaint).
While I wouldn't necessarily agree with "a handful of people", the fact is that neither of us can prove their lean -- so no point pursuing that argument thread.
So you might be right that it's a pure numbers/statistics decision. Or I might be right that they want to herd people into the more expensive hardware while forcing them to do so by phasing out production of the cheaper hardware.
No way to truly know IMO. We are exchanging hypotheses.
DDR4 production is likely still quite profitable, just not drowning-in-money AI-bubble profitable. If smaller foundries existed they’d be happy to take up the business.
Maybe really what needs to happen is some busting up of the giants…
Otherwise they could continue to make DDR4 at a higher cost and sold at a higher price to which people will complain price fixing again.
Consumers use these every single day in embedded devices without knowing it.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the embedded DDR3/DDR4 market greatly exceeds the number of consumer desktop computing devices in terms of "devices with memory" (not in sheer IC count or nominal size though.)
The level of design effort and PCB expense to go from DDR3 to DDR5 is enormous.
The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.
So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.
If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.
The question is whether there’s enough meaningful demand for aftermarket DDR4 upgrades to make it worthwhile to a manufacturer to keep producing DDR4 instead of switching to HBM and DDR5.
Micron claimed retail is a rounding error, a market not worth serving. So you’d presumably need to find industrial buyers who would be willing to buy DDR4.
They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.
If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.
> South Korea announces $520bn chip plant project with Samsung, SK Hynix
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semiconductors/south-k...
Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies.
And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.
The thing about the US losing its grip on the world and the collapse of the global world order means that the words on the paper don't mean much. Embargoes on Russia didn't mean much so Europeans are physically taking over their ships and Ukrainians are physically sinking the rest of their ships. In Iran nothing other than physically sinking ships and blowing up places meant anything.
Europeans can ship EUV machines because they are physically building them for people who will use these to physically build the most valuable products currently there is. US wasn't able to enforce its will to Iran, what if Koreans, Europeans and the Chinese decide that its not into their interest to act according to US courts?
There is nothing that stops US from building their own Memory Fabs, or asking / funding Micron building more US Fabs. It will cost a more, but the complexity is certainly no where near replicating TSMC.
lol he is not. at no point was he a syrian. his mom was from ohio or something.
Note Steve’s biological mom and biological dad, the Syrian, kept their second child, a girl, and Steve even met her later on in life.
This is as biased an Anti-US take as any. Will not grace the rest of the claims with a response.
They would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?
Corporations avoid picking fights with large nations where lots of revenue comes from for very obvious reasons.
1) This is not good for Korean/Europen sellers, because it negatively affects sales volume, and is unlikely to be compensated by margins, because a good chunk of those will go towards circumvention instead of the original seller.
2) Some more money will go towards replacing those sellers completely. This is extra not good from the sellers perspective.
It’s been done with processors, modems, SSDs and many other specialized chips. The design and engineering part can already be done at several companies, they just elect not to do anything on the fab side. But they will, if they have to in the long run.
It takes two to four years and Five to twenty billion dollars. Some of the bigger companies, if pushed, particularly, if the alternative is getting chips from China, will do something on the fab side if they absolutely have to. They probably won’t live with the current conditions forever.
There was a company that had three companies say no over about 10 years, eventually, they made a decision to build their own processor known as the M-series…
OpenAI's original corporate agreements capped its returns at 100x, which is seen as too paltry for its current holders, so they scrapped those to prepare for an IPO [0]
That is, in a word, insane.
[0] https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-develo...
Yeah that's how law works. Everyone likes money, but that doesn't mean it's fine to steal money. Yes, even from maligned entities like "big tech" or "private equity"
Furthermore, I think there should be a tax on algorithmic inefficiency, in that if a LLM, frontier or not, consumes more than a certain amount of KWH per token, it should be taxed such as to put emphasis on models than can run locally, on a normal PC
Nobody ever made good native widgets.
Not like it'd be the first time someone shook a stick at them.
At this point the only hope for change is if China finally decides to get in the game rather than just threatening to.
The posterchild for this is RealPage [1]. But you're going to see this pop up in every aspect of life, such as gas prices [2] and meat processing [3].
The whole thing is kind of depressing because this is what "innovation" is now: fancy ways to collude on prices.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
[2]: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-col...
[3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-a...
Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades.
Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.
How many millions are we talking.
From consumer electronics to the data-center, the rising real mfg costs and lack of supply is putting huge pressure on pricing, and may just drive anyone who cant negotiate with these suppliers out of business.
Once the dominoes start, I fail to see how things recover in less than 3-5 years, not counting all the businesses wiped out in the meanwhile.
You can put some memory on the logic wafer (SRAM) but it's area inefficient, which is wasteful on your expensive N2 wafer. So a dedicated DRAM process is vastly cheaper per bit, even at current elevated prices.
Bonus though, Apple is using "defective" chips in other products now such as the Neo which will help some with costs, but overall, you can't just add memory to the chip because the chip can become very yield sensitive, the process has to be there to produce the yield effectively.
It is not in any way, shape, or form a ruling much less even a piece of well researched work. It's "my side of the story that makes me look perfect, with lawyers turning the heat up to 11"
However the practical penalty for filling absurd lawsuits is zero unless you do it repeatedly to random people for a decade.
Absolutely nothing bad will happen to the plaintiff or the lawyers representing them in this case.
Western legal systems are broken.
If the plaintiff loses the lawsuit a countersuit is pretty unlikely to succeed unless the lawyer participates in gross misconduct. Generally, countersuits are filed more to put the original plaintiff on the defense and don't result in a large judgement.
If you are operating in good faith, then you are pretty insular from kickback as a plaintiff
None, hence the high price of liability baked into basically everything in America. And not just in nominal prices, but in terms of things like restricting access to spaces, restricting access to information, etc.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...
That's indistinguishable from not wanting to get burned by another semiconductor boom/bust cycle.
So here Samsung and SK Hynix could say they price match to Micron and they are in the clear.
In the U.S., competitors are allowed to act in similar ways in response to economic realities, as long as they each arrive at that decision independently. But publicly anchoring your price to a competitor’s is potentially illegal.
> Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, orinferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.
[Emphasis added]
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
When I worked at a gas station as a teenager there was definitely an unspoken implicit agreement that the price of gas would be 6 cents/liter above wholesale IIRC. Which was highly competitive and didn't completely cover costs.
Huh? I can go to most any gas station-occupied intersection and you will always find two that match and one (usually a Persian-owned Chevron) which is consistently a dollar or more higher per gallon across all grades of fuel.
No, the key term is "collusion", which could be done in the open or not. If a competitor told you they were unilaterally raising prices in secret, that would still be legal. Where you get into trouble is if you are cooperating to set prices. And no, this is all determined by a judge so cute workarounds like "I'm telling my competitors that I'm raising prices then gauging his body language" won't work.
Gas prices are posted on massive highly visible signs and are public information. This wasn't collusion, it was a sign of intense but friendly competition.
Price fixing is a many-to-one all the manufactures agree to the highest prices they all agree on and set it there.
This is like if you showed a supermarket that their competitor's oranges were more expensive, and they "matched" by raising their prices for everyone.
But the challenge is in proving it.
The most expensive foundry / fab isn't the leading edge, it is the "empty" ones. You can't have a fab sitting idle.
How can they do price fixing and discontinuing a product at the same time? It just looks like some companies are angry that AI / VC industry is outpricing them.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Not saying I agree with the plaintiffs.