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AnthonyMouse • yesterday at 7:27 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

> I would be very worried if I created any opening (even on the very long term) for competition to justify itself being built up to meet demand

The interesting question is, why aren't other companies looking at this from the other direction?

For example, AMD now has a trillion dollar market cap. They make consumer and enterprise GPUs with integrated GDDR/HBM and have got to be looking at APUs that do the same going forward. They don't benefit from the price of their complement being high. They sold off their logic fabs at a point when they were half dead and had fallen behind, but you don't have to be TSMC to make DRAM. A large DRAM fab costs around $25 billion, i.e. 2.5% of their market cap. Why aren't they building two of them? Best case supply is still tight when it opens and they have a huge win, worst case the market has crashed by then but they still have a productive asset worth several billion dollars and paid for with cash from the time when it was highly available to them. And since they have internal demand, the amount the price would have to crash before the investment is a net loss is significantly more than it is for other companies.

Likewise Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. who have even more capital. What are these companies doing? They have the option to spend an amount of money they can easily afford to write off if it goes south, to get a huge win if supply continues to be tight.


Replies

mr_toad • yesterday at 8:06 PM

Google and Amazon have tied up all their capital (and then some) in data centre investments, they don’t have more money to spend on fabrication. Plus they have a lot of experience running data centres, and zero experience running fabs.

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flyinglizard • yesterday at 7:33 PM

Even if they hold the same opinion as Micron’s CEO, spinning up such a fab to reasonable yields would take a couple of years.

It’s a known dilemma in farming. Your crops are losing, so you decide to switch them to crops that are profitable, but so do your six neighbors and by the time the new crops start producing, you have flooded the market and everyone’s losing again.

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cyberax • yesterday at 8:31 PM

> A large DRAM fab costs around $25 billion

$50B for Micron.

> Why aren't they building two of them?

They don't have in-house expertise to do that.

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