r/LocalLLaMA • u/chemist_slime • 9h 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.html100
u/Recoil42 9h ago edited 7h 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 9h ago
Production won't suddenly double but demand is capable to tank very suddenly.
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u/Recoil42 8h 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/read_more_comments 7h ago
You know it's bad when windows 11 is being patched to make 8gb the new target.
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u/Recoil42 7h ago
Android is instituting mandatory memory limits on apps. That's where we're at now.
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u/sn2006gy 8h 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 5h 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/BusRevolutionary9893 7h 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/Guinness 9h 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 9h 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 9h 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 9h 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 8h 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/Johnnnyb28 8h 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/WorriedBlock2505 4h 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 1h 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/typeomanic 8h ago
what is your motivation to buy 20k of GPUs? That's an absurd amount of frontier API tokens
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI 9h ago
You'll see it when the bubble bursts.
When it doesn't, I'm fully aligned with Recoil42.
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u/Separate-Client-3213 9h 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.
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u/natermer 9h ago edited 9h 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 9h ago edited 9h 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/D00M98 7h 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/VirginiaVN900 57m 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/KrasnovNotSoSecretAg 5h 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/a_beautiful_rhind 8h 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 7h 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/-InformalBanana- 2h 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/GeneralMuffins 8h ago
China is doubling RAM production to make more money, not for altruistic purposes
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u/geldonyetich 9h 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.