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Google and Amazon have tied up all their capital (and then some) in data centre investments, they don’t have more money to spend on fabrication. Plus they have a lot of experience running data centres, and zero experience running fabs.

by AnthonyMouse12 minutes ago|

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Google has a $4T market cap, Amazon >$2.5T. How hard would it be for them to raise $50B by selling new shares?

by flyinglizard1 hours ago|

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Even if they hold the same opinion as Micron’s CEO, spinning up such a fab to reasonable yields would take a couple of years.

It’s a known dilemma in farming. Your crops are losing, so you decide to switch them to crops that are profitable, but so do your six neighbors and by the time the new crops start producing, you have flooded the market and everyone’s losing again.

by AnthonyMouse1 hours ago|

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Which is a huge problem for a farmer who redirected 100% of their capital to a new crop that turns out to be unprofitable. Whereas if you do that with 5% of your capital and it doesn't work out, you shrug and hardly notice. But if it does work out, that 5% is now worth 20%.

by cyberax28 minutes ago|

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> A large DRAM fab costs around $25 billion

$50B for Micron.

> Why aren't they building two of them?

They don't have in-house expertise to do that.

by AnthonyMouse18 minutes ago|

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> $50B for Micron.

$50B for Micron to build two fabs on the same site, i.e. they're still $25B each.

> They don't have in-house expertise to do that.

This is a questionable assertion to begin with. The skillset for designing logic and fabricating it are closely related enough that companies -- including AMD -- have traditionally done both, and companies like Intel and Samsung still do.

But more than that, what if they don't? You're not going to reassign your existing staff who are already doing necessary work anyway, you're going to hire new people.