• Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Chinese factories are scaling to meet demand. The brands may not be the same but there will be new competition in the space because of the industry leaders abandoning a revenue stream.

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      They will. Otherwise they’re throwing money away and leaving room in the market for competitors.

      The big problem, though is that DRAM manufacturing requires a shitton of money to make and you’d have to poach talent from existing players. Otherwise you’ll never be able to get started. It’s just too complicated.

      China has been trying to catch up with Taiwan in chip manufacturing for like 20 years now and they’re still at least 10 years behind. Probably 15 or more because of the way funding/investment works over there.

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        Otherwise they’re throwing money away and leaving room in the market for competitors.

        Nope. Their costumers are throwing so much money at AI boondoggles that wasting time, materials, and manpower on the current tech bubble is now the most profitable move for the hardware producers.

        It’s the Shoe Event Horizon, except in stead of everyone being depressed and buying shoes, it’s a dozen billionaires becoming so greedy, arrogant, and shortsighted that they swallow an entire cornerstone industry for their latest obsession.

        • Riskable@programming.dev
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          2 days ago

          Haha, referencing the Shoe Event Horizon made me stop and pay attention!

          “Shit. Maybe they’re right… We could be about to evolve into bird people!”

        • TVA@thebrainbin.org
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          3 days ago

          Right! The manufacturers know this is a bubble and aren’t going to put themselves into debt to build new factories! They’re going to ride the bubble til it pops and then try to go back to normal, but significantly richer.

          • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            “As long as the music’s playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

            That’s Citi’s former CEO, who explained that he would devote his company’s resources to making money in a bubble (during the 2007 housing bubble), even when he knew it was a bubble.

            The memory chip producers are absolutely going to try to maximize production during this bubble. The normal life cycle is to run fabs on offsetting cycles where at any given time, the company has a few fabs in the planning stages, in the construction stages, R&D stages, early “risk” production, high volume production, and retooling for a new process.

            That means that during a bubble, it makes sense to try to accelerate the speed at which new fabs come online or old fabs get retooled. It makes sense to keep old fabs running longer at higher yields, even for previous generation product. These aren’t mature businesses that were already planning on running the same factories forever. They already anticipate the cycle of multiple generations, and what that looks like is going to be more aggressive during periods where customers are throwing money at them.