alt Hacker NewsThis is abdicating an entire market in the hopes that your ability to manipulate it later, which has worked so far unfortunately, will hold. It is so obviously market manipulation here. Sure, prices would go up when this much server demand comes in but it is so profitable to make DDR5 that completely abandoning that market is stupid and only works if all players move in unison. It would just take one of the big three deciding to be the consumer maker to dominate the market and reap massive profits now and later when the server market cools and the other two try to come back. The fact that they are all shying away from such a ridiculously profitable sector is clear evidence of the collusion. They need jail time, again, but this time not allow those going to jail to become the CEO when they get out. They should also have fines that actually stop this behavior in the future. Fines so punitive that it actually brings into question their ability to continue as a company.
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Maybe I'm missing something but this doesn't really make sense? Right now it's more profitable to sell to datacenters because they're less price sensitive. Consumers and consumer PC manufacturers don't really care who they're buying RAM from -- they'll just buy it for the cheapest price. When it's no longer as profitable to sell to datacenters, they'll just switch to selling for consumers and will then compete against each other. Why would any RAM manufacturer choose to handicap themselves by selling to consumers today when they can earn much more selling to datacenters?
Suppose someone came to my town and started offering to hire all the programmers for, say, twice the market rate. Would I really need to assume a conspiracy to understand why they all started quitting their current jobs? Occam's Razor would suggest they're probably just deciding to accept an offer for more money.
Don't hold your breath. Trump has said he has a micron Position.
Micron is the only one to bail, and they are the smallest footprint. No one else has bailed.
Samsung recently shifted some capacity from HBM back to DDR5 modules, freeing up around 80,000 wafers/month, so DDR5 margins are currently good enough to compete with HBM for wafers, or maybe they are anticipating a turn, or both.