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  • Hacker News
  • What's the run-up time on a RAM fab? 5-10 years?
    by oliwarner
  • Depends. Still bottlenecked by ASML I would assume. Otherwise the current record holder TSMC manage to bring up a Fab operation and HVM in less than 18 months. Of course that requires a lot of planning before hand.
    by ksec
  • What's incredible is how much resistance there is in the U.S. to do what for other countries is the obvious strategy forward. The U.S. — after decades of seeing manufacturing being outsourced — suddenly has an incredible advantage in data centers that is producing onshore facilities that are adding hundreds of billions of dollars in annual export revenue, and instead of there being a united front to maximize that advantage, there are huge obstacles being thrown in the way of the companies, administration and the state governments leading the data center expansion campaign, with Sanders and AOC calling for a national data center moratorium.
    by ETH_start
  • this is what a country in decline looks like. When people oppose any sort of progress. Then will come acceptation or rationalization like the europeans do where they pretend they dont turn the AC to be enviromently friendly instead of just admitting they dont have the money for it
    by anothereng
  • I live two miles (as the crow flies) from the site of a new construction of a data center. It’s being built by a European company. They will be installing gas turbines for power generation. Are we far enough away so that low frequency sound won’t affect our quality of life? We are seriously considering selling our home and moving. It’s a huge gamble for us. We are also noticing homes are staying on the market much longer than previously.

    These data centers also get huge tax incentives because “jerbs”. Local politicians don’t understand after construction they don’t bring jobs or revenue to the city or county. This is where the resistance comes from.

    by le-mark
  • It's crazy how much 1at could improve QOL for their citizens and also improve and diversify their economy. Alas, they're just going to subsidize ram prices for everyone when this current cycles goes from boom to bust.
    by SecretDreams
  • Since this money belongs to Samsung and Hynix, it cannot be used for charitable activities. However, it is much better to build new cities, semiconductor factories, and power plants than to pay dividends to shareholders. The construction industry is one of the easiest ways to stimulate the economy.
    by danipark
  • Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?
    by yalogin
  • Same as AI, replacing the workforce
    by akimbostrawman
  • The expected value is "infinite".
    by cesarvarela
  • All current jobs have human input and output interfaces. If you want to sell new technology then it will be easiest to accommodate the already existing infrastructure.
    by Aerroon
  • For the optimistic case, read this piece by RethinkX:

    https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab...

    (Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)

    by DennisP
  • They can sell “employees” who don’t require salaries, onboarding, healthcare, 401k, benefits, etc and then leave after two years of being lazy and try to sue you. (This is how it will be marketed)
    by stogot
  • automating repetitive physical work doesn’t appeal to you?
    by kart23
  • The great aging of working populations:

    China: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Populati...

    Japan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Japan_po...

    South Korea: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...

    United States: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/US_Popul...

    Europe: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Europe_p...

    Also the technology carries over to defense purposes

    And then there’s the fact that tremendous investment is going into all things AI, and now hard tech

    by jameslk
  • Better spend it now, people won’t need greater than 1.5tr parameter models

    and battery powered consumer devices will be able to run those and lower sufficiently capable models by then, distributing the need for compute away from capital projects

    the glut will be enormous

    yes, immortalize this phrase just like the 640kb ram phrase, I’ll stand by it

    by yieldcrv
  • > 1.5tr parameter models

    Curious, what's this based off of?

    by busymom0
  • > “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward.”

    Not the best wording... I wonder how serious this announcement is.

    by paulmist
  • typical western main character syndrome
    by HSO
  • Top signal.
    by Mistletoe
  • Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".
    by summerlight
  • The speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says …

    the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).

    by jazzyjackson
  • It's from the president's speech. Too lazy to look up the actual text but I guess he meant "pillars", a common metaphor in East Asia. In English axis and pillar are distinct but in East Asia the line is blurry.

    For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").

    by winstonlee
  • >The most costly of the megaprojects involves a commitment by Samsung and SK Hynix of $585 billion to build new chip fabrication plants..... The government’s goal is to double South Korea’s production of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) within five years.

    "Double"

    I was wondering about that $585B number only to read they plan to Double the capacity. The two firm together is nearly 70% of the current DRAM market supply. I guess we are really going into an era where future Phone and PC will have 16GB as minimum, possibly more.

    Even if the market are back to normal, that is doubling the revenue. The current AI scale and Cloud infrastructure buildout is simply beyond what I could comprehend.

    by ksec
  • South Korea is facing a serious demographic crisis, in the not too distant future it'll be a country of mostly elderly folk. I'd be interested to know if this investment has anything to do with this, since robots may be needed in the absence of young able bodied folk.

    More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

    by aussieguy1234
  • Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?
    by dolebirchwood
  • It's just Internet hype.
    by numpad0
  • Tentacles & shoggothbots pave the way to the future!
    by m4rtink
  • Because you can use existing physical equipment with automation, until it’s ready for a full replacement
    by newsclues
  • Backward compatibility with current meatspace tooling.
    by a_wild_dandan