You cant just “fund a startup trying to make ram”. Chip fabrication is probably the most difficult and capital intensive production process there is. What manufacturing more ram looks like is investing tens of billions of real money (not the you give us stock we let you use our GPU deals the AI companies have been doing) and then waiting 5-10 years before the fab you funded starts to make chips, and hope prices are still high by then.
That’s why the existing manufactures are slow to scale up, they arent sure that the current spike in demand will still be there by the time their scaling up increases production.
Yes, but also cartel behavior.
Those same 3 manufacturers have been found guilty of it in the past, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they were fixing prices again now.
See this video by Gamers Nexus.
Of all companies, though, Microsoft is one of the few who could easily afford to sink a few billion into starting in-house chip production.
And even if they only ever produce chips for their own products, they’ll still probably come out ahead in the long run, because of all the money they’ll save on not paying inflated prices for others’ chips to use in Microsoft hardware.
That ‘in the long run’ part is the problem, though. Corps can never see beyond the next quarterly earnings report. An investment that will take years to pay off … that’s just out of the question.
You cant just “fund a startup trying to make ram”. Chip fabrication is probably the most difficult and capital intensive production process there is. What manufacturing more ram looks like is investing tens of billions of real money (not the you give us stock we let you use our GPU deals the AI companies have been doing) and then waiting 5-10 years before the fab you funded starts to make chips, and hope prices are still high by then.
That’s why the existing manufactures are slow to scale up, they arent sure that the current spike in demand will still be there by the time their scaling up increases production.
If only there was something like a chip act that the government could have provided that capital….
Yes, but also cartel behavior. Those same 3 manufacturers have been found guilty of it in the past, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they were fixing prices again now. See this video by Gamers Nexus.
Of all companies, though, Microsoft is one of the few who could easily afford to sink a few billion into starting in-house chip production.
And even if they only ever produce chips for their own products, they’ll still probably come out ahead in the long run, because of all the money they’ll save on not paying inflated prices for others’ chips to use in Microsoft hardware.
That ‘in the long run’ part is the problem, though. Corps can never see beyond the next quarterly earnings report. An investment that will take years to pay off … that’s just out of the question.