The CEO is saying that that is the situation we are in.
Demand has increased massively over a short time. Supply cannot increase as rapidly because for big demand increases it involves building new factories and equipment which takes significant time.
The CEO says that their new stuff will start coming online in 2028 but they can't forecast when supply will catch up.
or less, as you seem to forget what this whole discussion is about.
If they dont make sure the prices dont go up, they go up.
Once theyre up, and expected to stay up for the foreseeable future, competitors see a gigantic opportunity. Suddenly, the large amount of investment necessary to the ball rolling is worth it.
Once this opportunity is taken advantage of, the original market position of the company being able to freely set whatever price they wanted is eroded forever -- and in this particular case: it opens them up to being out-competed by the new competitor(s).
In this case those will will likely be coming out of china and be state backed, so theyll likely operate at a loss for maximum damage to get as much of the market as they can get.
in 5 years, Micron is likely going to go cry for state support to socialize their upcoming losses.
and before you say "but there are other competitors already": you should be aware that theyve previously been convicted of running a cartel. And the way theyve been behaving is exactly how they were behaving back then. While unproven, it is more then just likely that theyre still price fixing (and have been for years)
the price didnt just go up for consumers, they themselves have deeply dipped into the opportunity to maximize profits.
its so hilariously outlandish that eg SK Hynix has to pay out >$450k to union employees (per employee - not in total!) because they have a contract that a percentage of profits get shared as a bonus across the company. this payout is usually not particularly high.
the consumer price barely matters for the perspective of the company evaluating wherever they can enter the market, because thats just a tiny fraction of it. And the largest piece of the market buys directly from the producer, SK Hynex, Samsung and Micron.
For consumers wanting to buy RAM sticks the difference is academic, i give you that. But for the capital that decides wherever to invest millions if not billions into getting a factory up and running - the price they can set for the b2b sales is the more important factor.
If it wasnt already proven to be basically whatever number they feel like setting... the opportunity would be a lot less obvious.
The idea that companies should have priority price controlled access to memory puts us even deeper into a situation where we can never afford local compute ever again.
I actually like Clojure more but even with GraalVM AOT it still tends to take significantly more memory than even naive Rust code (e.g. using Clone everywhere). If you’re looking willing to spend time abusing the borrow checker you can often get memory usage down to like 5% of what you’d get out of Java stuff.
If the manufacturers decided to keep the price constant that would NOT stop the price that most people pay from going up. It would just mean that the people who managed to buy from the manufacturer before the supply ran out would resell on the secondary market for a giant profit.
But you've no evidence that that "giant profit" would be more than the increase that the suppliers would apply.
Arbitrage allows the market to find an agreeable price; a middleman arbiter with a warehouse of RAM has an incentive to agree a price with a buyer because he's stuck with that inventory if he doesn't shift it, and he has costs related to financing it.
A supplier has no such incentive, they can just jack the price up and if sales drop off they run the machines at a lower rate, or sack employees. But sales aren't going to drop off, because the baseline for demand has been lifted
Once this "RAM Crisis" is over, what reason would manufacturers have to reduce prices?
Literal empty shelves. And resellers on Ebay making bank.
If there's no competition entering the market, wouldn't that be a clear sign that this is not a free market but effectively a cartel?