> Manufacturers choosing not to scale with demand or not being able to scale with demand
replyIn a vacuum, that would make sense.
But looking at how the industry works, the number of defunct companies, and how the whole industry got concentrated on the conservative companies, you start to understand that the reason they still exist is mainly because they don't ride fad waves.
It's not like chip manufacturing is a spot instance on AWS that you spin up and down when needed; these are multi-year, multi-billion dollar investments that require long-term demand studies. The AI approach of requesting a whole fab of demand for the next 5 years with a letter from Jason Hwang that says "trust it, bro" does not bring as much confidence as it appears.
Why aren't boring, old process ASICs isolated from this mess?
replyThere’s a lot of other boring chips on a server motherboard beyond the RAM and CPU that share older processes with everyone else making silicon. Stuff like power management ICs needed to bring up power to a chip in the right order, which were an annoyance even before COVID and AI.
replyThe whole supply chain is so focused on RAM/GPUs that it's affecting everything. I've seen random sensors 3x in price because the company making them has shifted their manufacturing focus.
replyWhen did chip demand skyrocket?
replyHow long does it take to ramp up capacity?