alt Hacker NewsI understand this is ultimately due to AI boom.
A couple of naive questions:
1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted.
Replies
The entire capacity of RAM production is basically booked out, for at least the next year. All fabs have sold their allocations already, and it takes years to build a new one. As a result, no it will likely not ease up if demand continues like this, again for at least a year.
> 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.
1. Factory limits basically. There's a limit to the amount of fabrication lines that can create ram. Combined with the market incentives right now to make high bandwidth memory (HBM) over server memory (DRAM)... HBM starts as DRAM dies, so it competes with normal DRAM for wafer starts / cleanroom fab capacity.
2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but these can take O(years) to come online.