Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring.

This seems to almost be mentioned off-hand, but isn't this a really bad and un-free market, and a much bigger issue? Korean companies are afraid of doing business with Chinese companies because of the US, because of retaliation? This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.

If production lines of DRAM are hindered by the politics of a unrelated 3rd party, then this seems to be a stronger cause of the current shortage than "a very large customer buying a lot in a short period of time".

Moves like this should be illegal.

It's becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI is going to get lapped by Google on technical merits. So this is the "code red" solution? Supply shenanigans?

They are getting beat in the developer market by Anthropic. And getting beat on fundamental tech by Google. This is a company whose ostensible mission is to "benefit all of humanity" ...

There's nothing dirty about this deal. When making a large deal with one vendor he didn't disclose to them that he was making a deal with another vendor. That's pretty normal when you're trying to buy a lot of stuff. Otherwise, they can collude to shake you down.

I'm not thrilled about this genre of "guy I don't like does totally normal thing so it's bad". It's too engagement baity.

EDIT: Though even that may be wrong. TechCrunch reports that it was a joint meeting between the South Korean President, the heads of the two companies, and Sam Altman. I won't claim that TC is the bible but there's lots of stuff being reported that makes no sense, and this is a good deal for both these companies so it's more believable than news from someone that OpenAI is going to buy a bunch of wafers and stick it in a warehouse.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/openai-ropes-in-samsung-sk...

> To be clear - the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously

That's not "dirty." That's hiding your intentions from suppliers so they don't crank prices before you walk through their front door.

If you want to buy a cake, never let the baker know it's for a wedding.

I like how one of the reference links betrays how the article itself was researched, possibly written; HN hides the end of the url, which is "utm_source=chatgpt.com":

> https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/19/cracks-are-app...

You have to appreciate the irony :)

If OpenAI were actually using the RAM that’s one thing - but stockpiling raw wafers in warehouses is egregious.

Secondary RAM Manufacturing Had Stalled. Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring.

My takeaway, this sounds like an comparably easy fix for the consumer market, if prices are somewhat guarenteed to stay mid term significantly above this years spring floor for someone to sweep up the margins and negotiate a somewhat reliable way to get the last gen production lines up and running again. Will take at least half a year to pick up, but this is not a longterm RAM doomsday scenario in any sense.

I'm more worried about the low to mid-end embedded systems, that a have a dollar budget for memory components, that could get unbearably slow for the current/next gen if manufactures just use the bare minimum of RAM the bloated TV or tablet OS can run on, if the 1GB raspberry move is any indication of that. And consumers stuck with no way to upgrade them to a reasonably usable state.

I'm reminded of the 1983 deal to corner the market on Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.

I have a 32 GiB DDR5 set, happy to exchange for $500K in cash or a nice little house in Spain.

"...their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard..."

wtf. life sucks.

I'm curious how OpenAI has the funds to pay for 40% of the worlds ram production? Sure they are big and have a few billions but I kind of assumed that 40% for a year or whatever they are buying is easily double digit billions? That has to hurt even them, especially because they cant buy anything else?

Also what are these contracts? Surely Samsung could decide to cancel the contract by paying a large fee but is that fee truly so large that getting their ram back when prices are now 4x of what they used to be is not worth it?

Guess OpenAI finally found a business model that works: memory futures.

With the amount of hatred for anything OpenAI it’s not surprising the author chose a clickbaity title. HNs quality of posts are going down and instead of objective analysis I often see very polarized and flamy articles, titles etc.

This is missing a key part of the picture - Nvidia just announced that partners will need to source RAM themselves.

OpenAI is basically ensuring that they can actually get the chips they need for the DCs they are building.

I can’t guess as to what move came first (Nvidia policy change or these DRAM deals) but I would bet this is a large if not larger factor here than “bloc my competitors.

https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/12/05/exclusive-memory-...

> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.

Matt Levine, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-12-01/ope... | https://archive.is/S3MPq

> your business model might end up being sort of a … startup incubator or private equity firm; you’d spend your time starting or acquiring companies on which the robot could work its magic. Your business model would be “general business, but with AI.” .. OpenAI has a $500 billion valuation largely as a bet that a lot of the value of AI will accrue to its builders, but it could hedge that bet by owning the users too. Either it will sell AI at high margins to lots of businesses, or it will sell AI at lower margins to lucrative businesses that it owns.

If it's confirmed that Altman's played the Koreans against each other, it's going to cause a furore in Korea.

An American company, combined with American tariffs, and fear of American retaliation.

Getting pretty tired of that place tbh.

I wonder if this kills Valve's Steam Machine and Steam Frame

Can OpenAI use their stockpile as leverage? e.g. threaten to sell their stockpile to a market that's about to stabilize to crash prices.

And are Samsung, etc. happy for this state of affairs to keep their prices elevated but not seem like the bad guy.

I see no real evidence of any of the claims in this article. Why is it garnering so much attention?

The biggest question is, can they even pay for half of the deals they have been making?

What happens to enterprise apps like SAP and S4 on the cloud that swallow huge amounts of RAM for their in-memory database? AWS, GCP, and Azure must be running around? With their predatory pricing customers were already hesitant about upgrades, it now gets more difficult. Extend EOL for ECC?

Can OpenAI hurry up and go bankrupt?

nice 5d chess move, saltman paobably got this idea from GPT 4.5 high thinking

Force a divestiture of Microsoft.

I can’t help but wonder if their product orchestrated this deal.

Does this violate anti trust law?

Why would one sell something cheaper than the current market value? I wouldnt care if i had stock or not, prices should be what things cost.

> On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply.

The market doesn't believe they can pay for the Oracle cloud deal. Why do these vendors believe OpenAI can pay for 40% of the world's DRAM?

Strange how LLM vendors are flooding the market with reasons not to do business with them. Every paid agentic interaction contributes to all the bad behavior we are seeing. From out of control web scraping to buying up available hardware LLMs are turning out to be highly efficient misery manufacturing mechanisms.

Imagine the outrage if OpenAI built their own fab or memory factory. Like back when Henry Ford built his own steel foundry.

Altman was already unpopular. After this will he be able to show his face in Silicon Valley?

almost feel like OpenAI's recent "fall" is a decoy setup by them intentionally.. something's cooking.. maybe they wanted to buy back their own shares at a lower price?

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This will make AI even more palatable for the general population /s

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Now this... was a really good move.

OP is also marginally underestimating the impact this move would have on Google's competitiveness - they are making huge gains prototyping at light speed; this will halt their AI hardware acceleration plans pushing them back into slower software development on ever aging hardware.

It also shows why Nvidia is not afraid of competitors coming out with new desgings that obsolete their hardware: what good are superior designs with no fabs to produce them?

More anti sam anti AI propaganda, nothing dirty about this deal