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by zozbot2345 hours ago |
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upvoteby AnthonyMouse5 hours ago|
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> You don't actually "lose" capacity, you just move to higher-valued special niches within the overall industry

That's not what people mean by "lose" capacity.

Suppose DRAM companies expand capacity because prices are high, then demand levels off, the price crashes, and they all go out of business except for the one in China which gets a government bailout. That's fine, right? We're not interested in making DRAM, that's a fungible commodity, we want to make iPhones or something. (They make those too anymore, but never mind that.)

What happens now if China restricts what you can buy to give an advantage to their own companies who are trying to displace you in the higher-valued special niches? Or just raises the price for you and not them? What if there's a trade war? Or a conventional war?

When you still have a domestic industry, you go to them and have a source for the commodity. If only one country becomes the sole global supplier and that country isn't even particularly friendly, that's bad.

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upvoteby zozbot2344 hours ago|
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The domestic industry is still there, only instead of mass-market DRAM it has started making higher-valued varieties of the same stuff. If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff, just at much higher cost. You can't expect more than that, since they never really were as big or as low-cost as the lowest cost suppliers can be in normal times. That's not "losing" capacity, it's just acknowledging that you can't create capacity out of thin air.
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upvoteby Espressosaurus4 hours ago|
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No, the domestic industry stagnates (at best) or disappears (at worst).

You can't just spin up a 2nm wafer fab when the latest you've been running is a 300nm process.

Compare: US shipbuilding industry to China or SK.

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upvoteby zozbot2342 minutes ago|
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We don't want to spin up wafer fabs because, historically, they had a tendency to turn into Superfund sites. That's why the more modern approach is to plop the fab in the middle of a frickin' desert.
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upvoteby youarentrightjr3 hours ago|
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> If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff

Factories, tooling, supply chains, and engineering knowledge aren't fungible in the way they would need to be for your statement to be true.

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upvoteby timschmidt2 hours ago|
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Different types of DRAM can literally be made from the same already-etched wafer. The DRAM bits themselves don't change at all. What's different between DDR4, DDR5, and HBM is the IO interface to the chip. Changing this does not require significant retooling or relearning.
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upvoteby pdhborges2 hours ago|
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Does that mean CXMT is one inch away from also eating into the DDR5 market?
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upvoteby kyralis4 hours ago|
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> If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff, just at much higher cost.

"easily" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Depending on the good and what they switch to making, this may neither be easy nor quick.

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upvoteby zelphirkalt2 hours ago|
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Higher valued varieties, or just higher priced varieties, that no one wants to buy?
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upvoteby 5 hours ago|
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