alt Hacker NewsThat's true.
Coke and Pepsi dominate the worldwide drink market, but due to the immense size of the market, there are always up-and-coming competitors.
Go to your local superstore, supermarket, or your local convenience store.
You'll find Coke and Pepsi, lots of it, but you'll also find no-name drinks and sodas from drink companies that are not as well established yet or well known.
That those exist is a good thing, at least for consumers, at least for those that consume, because the root of all consumer prosperity brought on by capitalism (global trade = capitalism, regardless of the names of countries involved) comes from the relentless competition brought on by two or more companies, ideally as many as possible...
We would not have the super high performing desktop computers we have today if it were not for the historic early competition between AMD and Intel (later entered by other CPU manufacturers), and we would not have choice if it were not for competition.
Getting back to DRAM manufacturers, The first three do dominate 95+% of the market as of 2026.
But there might be some interesting up-and-coming smaller companies to watch...
Let's remember that OpenAI came from basically nowhere -- to give Google a run for its money -- as did Google with Microsoft's behemoth 20+ years ago...
What new DRAM manufacturer might be the next up-and-coming DRAM manufacturer in the space?
Well, we don't as-of-yet know... but the space is an interesting one to watch, to be sure!
But you are correct!
The first three do currently dominate 95+% of the market as of 2026...
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I'm not forced to drink Coke or Pepsi if I go to a bar. Only if I specifically want a cola I very likely get whatever cola they got (likely either Coke or Pepsi). If you want to use a computer, it will have DRAM, and you'll end up with one of the DRAM hardware manufacturers.
> Let's remember that OpenAI came from basically nowhere -- to give Google a run for its money -- as did Google with Microsoft's behemoth 20+ years ago...
Yeah, but the capital behind it certainly did not:
> OpenAI was initially founded as a nonprofit organization by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised pledges for $1 billion. [1]
Altman was well connected, with rich friends. People like Thiel and Musk. Under the guise of a non-profit they eventually pulled a rug to make OpenAI for-profit.
The barrier of entry for hardware design is also just plain different than software. There was a good talk on that recently on 39c3.
Isn't there higher barriers to entry than OpenAI and soda? They were able to compete with "commodity" hardware. A DRAM manufacturer would need expensive machines from ASML, right?