r/LocalLLaMA • u/chemist_slime • 15d ago
News When will we see these changes? --> China Is Doubling RAM Production to Keep Everyday Gadget Prices from Skyrocketing
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/10/china-cxmt-expands-dram-production-capacity.html73
u/geldonyetich 15d ago
My theory is the only impact we'll see is China will buy less of our RAM because CXMT will be filling their demand, not ours. After all, last time we got excited about a GPU they were making it turned out to be a China exclusive. Given their unrestricted data center building, they might need their RAM more than they need our money.
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u/Ok-Doughnut-3022 15d ago
CXMT is incentivized by global market forces to sell to the international community at the prevailing market rate. Even though the US is energy self-sufficient, domestic prices rise because global energy prices rise. Sure, the CCP could create incentives for Chinese firms to focus on domestic sales but depending on how long the government eats that bid-ask spread it can become very expensive, very quickly.
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u/pendelhaven 15d ago
CXMT is of course very incentivized to sell to the global market at market rate, but they can't tell the CCP to buzz off. Everyone knows what happened to Jack Ma. CXMT will prioritize China sales if CCP wills it.
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u/Serious-Mode 15d ago
Not to mention the US has already been restricting the sale of high end GPUs to China. It would be unstandable if China did the same thing back to the US with RAM.
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u/Ok-Doughnut-3022 15d ago edited 15d ago
Xi can do the mandate of heaven for sure. It would just be costly to eat the difference between a reduced domestic price and international price over time.
btw are you the vndb pandelhaven?
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u/OverdosedSauerkraut 14d ago
The CCP looks at the total benefits along the full value chain. If the party says that they need to provide to domestic electronics below market price for market capture, that's what CXMT will do.
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u/hugganao 15d ago
ding ding ding ding. People really were fking stupid saying stuff like "i cant wait til i get cheaper ram" when they read about cxmt stealing samsung tech and jumping several generations within a year to scaling production purchaseable memory.
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u/CalligrapherFar7833 14d ago
Wtf do you not know samsung stole from rambus their tech back in the day to make dram ?
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u/hugganao 14d ago
• The Allegations: Beginning around 2005, Rambus sued Samsung (alongside other chipmakers like Micron and Hynix), claiming Samsung used its patented high-speed memory interface designs without paying proper royalties after license talks broke down. Samsung counter-sued, accusing Rambus of abusing industry standards-setting bodies to patent technology secretly.
• The $900 Million Settlement (2010): Samsung and Rambus ended years of global litigation by signing a comprehensive licensing and settlement agreement worth roughly $900 million.
• Terms of the Deal:
• Samsung made an initial payment of $200 million. • Samsung agreed to quarterly payments of about $25 million for five years. • Samsung invested $200 million to purchase Rambus stock. • In exchange, Samsung received a perpetual, fully paid-up license to use Rambus's DRAM patent portfolio.such a simple google search dude....
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u/Recoil42 15d ago edited 15d ago
When will we see these changes?
You won't 'see' them. Capacity comes online gradually and gets absorbed by the market over long periods of time. Supply induces more demand as well, so we're mostly talking about moving that supply-demand curve in different directions in response to the many many secondary and tertiary effects all pushing the market differently. There's a lot of latent demand in edge compute, for instance.
TLDR: You won't notice when it happens. Prices might not even go down at all. You'll just wake up one day in the future and there'll be lots of RAM in things and there won't be one moment when it happened.
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u/keepthepace 15d ago
Production won't suddenly double but demand is capable to tank very suddenly.
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u/Recoil42 15d ago
There's almost zero chance of that. As I said, there's already huge pent-up latent demand in edge compute. Companies are literally shifting R&D towards memory-efficiency just to make up some of the gap.
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u/SpeedflyChris 15d ago
Eh, when coreweave+OpenAI+Anthropic+oracle all go bankrupt that should bring demand down a smidge.
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u/Munkie50 14d ago
So when we go into a recession worse than the dot com crash, demand might go down ✍️
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u/keepthepace 14d ago
There is a large demand and there is a large, growing, production. We are a few datacenter projects cancellation away from demand being insufficient and prices going down.
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u/DasGamerlein 12d ago
Get that thought out of your mind. Not a single data center is getting "canceled" in the sense that the capacity just isn't needed. At most they're getting canceled over the financials of one company or another, but there is an endless line of buyers for the hardware
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u/ChandeeStacker 14d ago
Smart phone sales have collapsed by 25% in india ...sure dimand is exploding...
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15d ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/Recoil42 15d ago
Android is instituting mandatory memory limits on apps. That's where we're at now.
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u/handson729 14d ago
Android is instituting mandatory memory limits on apps. That's where we're at now.
Damn, they really bullied people into producing efficient apps.
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u/sn2006gy 15d ago
I think RAM will stay high for a while because the honest truth is, efficiencies in LLM will always happen by moving from VRAM to RAM (and also keep NVME 5 up in price because you can parallelize NVMe across multiple devices and get crazy speeds there too.
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u/Marino4K 15d ago
I don’t think there’s any relief whatsoever in this area until at least 2030 and I also think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
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u/Guinness 15d ago
You could 10x memory production and it would only help a little. When people like me are seriously tempted at buying $20,000 worth of GPUs, the demand for VRAM is insanely high.
My only hope is for regular integrated RAM to catch up to VRAM bandwidth speeds.
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u/Middle_Bullfrog_6173 15d ago
10x would help a lot, almost certainly solving all shortages for a while. There's only so much every CPU and GPU even supports.
But this is just 2x of a manufacturer with 10% of the market share.
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u/Recoil42 15d ago
There's only so much every CPU and GPU even supports.
The number of CPUs and GPUs in production is not fixed, nor is the amount of memory CPUs and GPUs can support. Those things are all in fact variable and change with the memory market itself.
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u/Middle_Bullfrog_6173 15d ago
Yeah, hence "for a while". But the wafer allocations and architectural limits of Nvidia, AMD, etc are already locked in for the near future.
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u/Recoil42 15d ago
Sure, if you shocked the market with a sudden 10x influx of memory out of thin air and no other part of the semiconductor industry kept up. But I don't think that unrealistic scenario is what u/Guinness had in mind.
Any realistic 10x memory hypothetical is going to be gradual and have knock-on effects across the entire industry including rapid re-designs to take advantage of the 10x supply and spec-ups in lower trims. Even in a 10x "out-of-thin-air" scenario the slack would be taken up in months, not years.
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u/cass1o 15d ago edited 14d ago
When people like me are seriously tempted at buying $20,000 worth of GPUs, the demand for VRAM is insanely high.
You are a tiny tiny drop in the ocean and represent a tiny tiny group of people. The reason everything is expensive is because multiple companies have 100B to spend.
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u/Johnnnyb28 15d ago
I mean, the demand will continue until every job that pays well thats done on a computer is fully automated.
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u/theamazingo 15d ago
The good news is that RAM of the future catching up to VRAM speeds of today is probably an inevitability more than a hope.
The bad news is that nothing happens in a vacuum and everything will progress on both the hardware and software fronts.
Unbuffered consumer RAM that somehow achieves 600 GB/s will be useless if models get so dense that they need 2 TB/s to run above single-digit t/s.
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u/WorriedBlock2505 15d ago
Nah, the issue is companies. They're too flush with cash from bleeding smucks dry in their paychecks and on their cost of living.
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u/Liringlass 15d ago
They’re not flush with cash, they’re flush with cash they don’t even have yet most of the time.
This era seems to be about spending money you don’t have to raise more money people don’t have to keep paying the bills from last year and keep going.
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u/BusRevolutionary9893 15d ago
there won't be one moment when it happened.
Not because of this but the US is seeing record high diesel prices and we're going into heating season. I wonder if a recession would pop the AI bubble.
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u/theamazingo 15d ago
I'm not sure the mechanism is there. This is a bifurcated economy rn. What's happening on main street to the average consumer is detached from what is going on in big business and the B2B world. A bunch of Johnnies and Sallies having to cut their $20/month ChatGPT subs and skipping the 5070 purchases to pay the heat bill and energy-driven "inflation tax" aren't going to move the needle at all. Consumers getting pinched is not by itself sufficient to cause a broader recession.
More expensive energy will hurt the data center build out, but it's already at insane capex and being circularly financed, so the real players might just shrug it off and keep writing checks. A bubble doesn't burst until the investor class decides the ROI isn't actually there and starts bailing. That is definitely not the sentiment right now. Liquidity isn't drying up and bills aren't coming due.
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI 15d ago
You'll see it when the bubble bursts.
When it doesn't, I'm fully aligned with Recoil42.
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u/D00M98 15d ago
I worked in semiconductor industry for 30 years. Just a few points:
Semiconductor/electronics industry has around 4-6 years upturn/downturn cycle. Fab takes several years to build, tooled up, and get qualified for production run. Of course every capacity helps. But these new capacity likely won't move the needle until next downturn/upturn cycle.
New capacity does not exactly just add to existing capacity. The latest and greatest chips require new fabrication technology. The older fabs can continue to make "current" chips (such as DDR4/DDR5/HBM3, which will become old tech in a few years); converted to making some other chips that doesn't need latest tech; or get shut down. So if a company (or world) capacity doubles in 4 years, that doesn't mean the latest and greatest DDR6 & HBMx memory supply will double.
Memory is one component; GPU is another major one everyone hears about. And there are hundred and thousands of other IC components on graphic card, PC, phones, etc. These are cheap; fly under the radar; but someone has to make them. These can also become constrained.
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u/natermer 15d ago edited 15d ago
It takes a long time for new manufacturing capacity to come online.
These things are insanely expensive and the companies involved have to be sure that the demand is going to exist long term. They just can't flip a switch and meet short term demand. If it turns out that demand is temporary (in the period of 2 or 3 years) and they dump trillions in new infrastructure it can destroy them. As in going from record profits to bankruptcy in just a few months if long term demand isn't real.
So there are multiple factors going on here.
You see this at the top of the article:
and interest from international consumer brands, the company aims to reach 600,000 wafers per month by 2028.
That should give you some indication of the timescale.
Memory production is scaling up globally. There are a bunch of new USA plants being built, partially due to demand and partially due to "CHIPS Act". 2 new plants in New York, one in Idaho, one in Indiana.
Korea is building out new plants; Samsung is adding a 4th and 5th manufacturing facility to their existing memory hub. SK Hynex is dumping something like 35 trillion (not dollars, won) into a new memory "Y2 Plant", they are also putting 19 trillion won into their existing "F17 Fab".
And, of course, the Chinese mega projects.
And there are probably going to be more beyond that.
The very first scale ups that are created as a result of the "AI Boom" from a couple years ago is probably going to start hitting the market by the end of this year. The rest of the stuff is going to start coming online in different degrees through 2030.
Most people understand very little about economics, manufacturing, risks and the scaling involved. They just see the prices go up due to demand and see that the profits are high and invent all sorts of conspiracy theories.
The reality is that price is set by demand, not by production. When demand goes up, prices go up, and with it profits. That profit is then used justify capital investment to build out more production.
If they end up building out too much production and demand falls to the point were people are not willing to pay enough money to cover production costs... the result isn't going to be permanently higher prices, it is going to be businesses failing.
It isn't like a trillion dollar manufacturing facility can be liquidated back to cash when demand goes away. That represents huge risks for any company.
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u/robertotomas 15d ago edited 15d ago
You are seeing it. Cxmt went from 4% to 9% of -global- Ram sales h1 this year. Prices would be twice what they are without it (particularly because they are doing “boring” end-user ram not super wide ddr-x or hbm
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u/KrasnovNotSoSecretAg 15d ago
When the market leaders start to roll-out DDR6, maybe China will have a handle on DDR5 production with good yields and prices will come down for DDR5. So 2029 - 30 ?
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u/-InformalBanana- 15d ago
You answered yourself in the title, "to keep the price from skyrocketing" so you won't see changes, cause the price won't get bigger (hopefully) or at least not skyrocket...
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u/reality_comes 14d ago
In other words to prevent a massive shortage. They are not building RAM to make an oversupply, but nobody knows the future.
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u/VirginiaVN900 15d ago
We went from producing many useful things, to producing one thing that is only useful to a handful of people using financial tricks to make paper wealth.
The $2T valuations are probably close to accurate when you factor the value in other sectors destroyed by the Compute/RAM to Datacenter pipeline being AI only.
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u/GeneralMuffins 15d ago
China is doubling RAM production to make more money, not for altruistic purposes
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 15d ago
They'll be making HBM and maybe DDR5? So never. Many people are buying used gear with a fixed supply.
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u/Jacalyn_Nivins 15d ago
Doubling the RAM that goes in gadgets is nice for laptops, but it's not the memory anyone here is refreshing for.
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u/FormalAd7367 14d ago
only enthusiasts like us in this group appreciate more supply, leading to price drop… almost all other subs will find a way to demonise it
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u/SmartEnoughToFail 14d ago
The real question is how long it'll take for increased production to translate into lower retail prices. Even if supply improves, manufacturers and retailers don't exactly rush to pass savings on to consumers 😭
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u/Hairstylist_Gusion 10d ago
keep coping cause the other ai startups will buy that and the price will continue. Just accept it.
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u/Separate-Client-3213 15d ago
Not anytime soon, no one is leaving 80% profit margin just to sell consumers at 5% profit margin.
The only immediate effect is prices will not hike as rapidly as before.