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  • Hacker News
  • Check out how Micron’s Annual Report outlines a different perspective on supply and demand: https://chat.pageindex.ai/share/chat/cmr0fwtyt00000ai1rtdrqv...
    by cccaaai
  • Honestly, the knock on effects of this cartel behavior should concern all countries, and be remediated with expediency.

    From consumer electronics to the data-center, the rising real mfg costs and lack of supply is putting huge pressure on pricing, and may just drive anyone who cant negotiate with these suppliers out of business.

    Once the dominoes start, I fail to see how things recover in less than 3-5 years, not counting all the businesses wiped out in the meanwhile.

    by the_solenoid
  • How do we know it's cartel behavior, not just free market competition?
    by microgpt
  • This is probably the one moment in time there really doesn't need to be any price fixing / collusion.

    If demand for your product has temporarily spiked so high you can have 80% margins, then its not like your competitor has any reason to price compete.

    Particularly in an industry where spinning up new capacity is a multi-year $10s of billions investment.

    by steveBK123
  • Anyone know what will lawfirms cut if they win from the lawsuit?

    How many millions are we talking.

    by mattfrommars
  • I also feel like there should be FTC or other antitrust actions against OpenAI and other hyperscalers, with nvidia being complicit, if they are cornering the market that badly on consumer RAM, SSD and other components, especially if these volume purchases are for projected datacenter that haven't even broken ground (or have been paid for) for many months.

    Furthermore, I think there should be a tax on algorithmic inefficiency, in that if a LLM, frontier or not, consumes more than a certain amount of KWH per token, it should be taxed such as to put emphasis on models than can run locally, on a normal PC

    by caycep
  • What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?

    They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

    by mrtksn
  • regime change in South Korea. President Lee Jae Myung isn't exactly popular among Washington circles
    by zuzululu
  • memory is a commodity is laughable. Then software engineering is even more a commodity, the amount of engineering going into making memory chips the vast majority of people don't understand. There are a lot of software engineers getting this field after leetcoding and copy from hellointerview. Claude can write you an app in 30 minutes. Try build a lpddr5 dram chip in 30 minutes. Manufacturing know how itself is a specialty and barrier to entry.
    by russli1993
  • Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA are all U.S. companies. ASML supplies lithography, but hundreds of other tools come from these companies.
    by craigjb
  • US is the vast majority of their market - Apple, hyper-scalers, AI labs
    by dist-epoch
  • > What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?

    They would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?

    by bilekas
  • Then Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Kia would go bye-bye in the United States. I think the current memory fiasco will be their last big payday, so they should enjoy it while they can. There will be many companies that will rethink how they approach memory going into the future.
    by Danox
  • >It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

    Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies.

    And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.

    by ksec
  • Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices.

    The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.

    If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.

    by mywittyname
  • Everybody in our industry loves fat margins. But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.
    by glimshe
  • >But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.

    Yeah that's how law works. Everyone likes money, but that doesn't mean it's fine to steal money. Yes, even from maligned entities like "big tech" or "private equity"

    by gruez
  • A fat margin is fine. What’s not fine is saying you don’t have any and you don’t plan to make any more.
    by Danox
  • There's "fat margins" and then there's the kind of margins that tech industry shareholders expect.

    OpenAI's original corporate agreements capped its returns at 100x, which is seen as too paltry for its current holders, so they scrapped those to prepare for an IPO [0]

    That is, in a word, insane.

    [0] https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-develo...

    by lenerdenator
  • Maybe software people can get around this issue by not making every app a electron bloat? This is now more than doable now you got AI right? And it will save your job
    by russli1993
  • And replace all your apps with some horrible Tcl/Tk and .NET interface?

    Nobody ever made good native widgets.

    by dheera
  • Antitrust and anticompetitive behavior continue to evolve. Back when the Sherman Act was passed, we were talking about backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms. One of the more important ways of recent years is where all or most competitors in a market use the same software that outputs the same value as to what they should charge. This is effective collusion even if it isn't explicit. The goal of such software is to raise prices. You raise prices by effectively or actually colluding with other market participants.

    The posterchild for this is RealPage [1]. But you're going to see this pop up in every aspect of life, such as gas prices [2] and meat processing [3].

    The whole thing is kind of depressing because this is what "innovation" is now: fancy ways to collude on prices.

    [1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

    [2]: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-col...

    [3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-a...

    by jmyeet
  • It used to be possible to bust up a company based (more or less) simply on their having too much of the market.

    Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades.

    Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.

    by topgrain2
  • HBM is also DRAM. I also think it's kind of a weak argument to say that them discontinuing ddr3 (which while in use still today in industrial/embedded was on the way out for consumers 10 years ago) and ddr4 which last had consumer CPUs for it 3 years ago is meaningful. What we need now is ddr5. Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing. It's possible price fixing is in play, but discontinuing products people objectively don't use as much anymore isn't it.
    by Neywiny
  • It's easy to see why your argument is wrong with a simple hypothetical: what if they were still making DDR4 today? Would people still buy it?

    The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.

    So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.

    by bogwog
  • Embedded devices absolutely need DDR3 and DDR4
    by cududa
  • I was hoping it was a typo, and they actually meant 4 and 5... I didn't even know people made products that still use ddr3.
    by nubinetwork
  • > objectively don't use as much anymore

    Consumers use these every single day in embedded devices without knowing it.

    I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the embedded DDR3/DDR4 market greatly exceeds the number of consumer desktop computing devices in terms of "devices with memory" (not in sheer IC count or nominal size though.)

    The level of design effort and PCB expense to go from DDR3 to DDR5 is enormous.

    by 15155
  • Dropping DDR-4 is anything but meaningful. It'll easily last 10 more years, machines from this gen are still much more affordable and quite powerful. In fact for most dev and gaming workflows the difference between the DDR-4 and DDR-5 generation of hardware is more or less negligible. I am exaggerating a bit -- but really, not too much.

    Of course it might be a ploy to sheep-herd consumers and companies towards the expensive DDR-5. I would not put that below the ring of RAM producers.

    by pdimitar
  • Switching off DDR3 manufacturing I can understand, but DDR4 machines are still quite relevant and usable… Ryzen 5000 series boxes for example don’t feel meaningfully weaker than they did when new. My 5950X tower certainly doesn’t, and it’d really be nice to be able to upgrade its RAM should I need to because it will continue to be useful for quite some time.

    AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.

    by cosmic_cheese