Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.
replySeveral of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel.
replyIs there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product.
replyEspecially not for consumer goods.
If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.
replyI missed that this is happening, is it really? I thought it's 5X for everyone
replySupposedly OpenAI is paying 2025 prices.
replyNo one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
replyI'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.
I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find and close whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.
replyApple used to do the same thing with TSMC’s newer process nodes, and nobody really complained because people were getting superior products. I happen to like US antitrust enforcement that considers consumer benefit primarily.
replyYour attempts to insult what they are doing doesn't show they did anything wrong, but it does impeach the validity of your own argument.
replyHit dog hollers, sounds like.
replyThat's abuser logic.
replyThe funny thing is, we're mostly in violent agreement, going by your other comments. This is a weird point to disagree on... so weird, in fact, that it's easy to believe you are associated with OpenAI. Hence my follow-up comment.
replyWhat Altman did, and the way he did it, was not OK. Unless you believe that humanity's adoption of AI-based intellectual work is best served by concentrating an enormous amount of power in one company at the expense of everyone else, turning the market into a literal zero-sum game. Do you?
How much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed?
replyCan that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest?