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.
replyNo, the domestic industry stagnates (at best) or disappears (at worst).
replyYou 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.
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 build the fab in the middle of a frickin' desert.
reply> If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff
replyFactories, tooling, supply chains, and engineering knowledge aren't fungible in the way they would need to be for your statement to be true.
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.
replyDoes that mean CXMT is one inch away from also eating into the DDR5 market?
reply> If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff, just at much higher cost.
reply"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.
Higher valued varieties, or just higher priced varieties, that no one wants to buy?
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