alt Hacker NewsI'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?
Replies
Ponzi scheme [1] , Anticompetitive hoarding [2] , Cornering the market, Raising rivals' costs (RRC), Consumer welfare harm, and so on
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics)
I think the event is big enough to stop them and send them behind bars.
> Samsung
I think that Samsung -and other manufacturers- have been intentionally limiting their production capacities so as not to devalue the prices of their chips (for SSD at least) so may be they are an interested part. This, combined with the madness we are seeing, is abuse^2 . I think they should also end up behind bars.
I found this which claims ram market in 2024 was almost 100 billion: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/random-a...
I assume this includes more than just the raw price of modules but Openai only has 60 billion in funding altogether and was aiming for 20 billion ARR this year. This sounds like they are spending maybe half their money on RAM they never use? That just doesn't add up.