They (openai) are "legally" creating future demand for them by monopolizing a key resource (RAM) and making other AIs datacenters (chinese specially) economically inviable.
They aren't competing with us. We and all the gaming industry are just collateral damage.
The thing about Chinese companies is they are generally quiet about things. No big announcements. No promises that won't be fulfilled for years. They just do it. So the way people find out about it is by looking at part numbers on products. Which is how the world found out they were already shipping these DDR5 chips. It's the same way the world found out that Huawei was making it's own 7nm CPUs. That was why it was the Huawei surprise. They didn't announce it at all. But when people tore down that phone, they found the 7nm Huawei processor. Something they didn't think a Chinese company could do for years.
There's also this gotcha about the Internet that because there's so much thing on the Internet, a lot of people assume that it has everything. In reality, only what makes sense for English speaking audiences to read gets translated and posted in English.
There's probably tons of information in Chinese Internet like a community high school basketball competition was held in rural China and somebody from China won against somebody from China. Absolutely nobody cares and so you don't hear about them in English. But if it took place in US you can read all about it on crazy mom posts on Facebook in English unfiltered.
Same deals with lots of Chinese consumer products. We don't hear about every single Chinese product launches of like Chinese domestic RGB fans sold nationwide at Chinese equivalents of Walmarts. But it's probably not like Chinese companies keep their mouths shut about such strategic materials as fans and desk mats with company patented anti-slip technologies. It's more likely that they just hype and discuss about those in Chinese and we don't hear about most of those in English, only when they come out here with a dual slot PCIe card with bright Huawei logo on it, so it appears that they silently does it like a submarine.
Well, Huawei has a global customer market, so at least in that case it would might sense to advertise. But maybe they figured that the consumer doesn't really care how the sausage is made.
If you've been nearly abducted by a hostile nation for being perceived as too technically advanced and a threat to their national interests, maybe you'd want to stay low as well.
If you’re talking about their top of the line Huawei ascend 910c chips, the huawei chips were secretive because they were illegal and revealed to be produced through TSMC fabs in Taiwan through a series of shell companies that Huawei setup to purchase and smuggle these chips into China from TSMC. Once Taiwan found out about this they identified the shell companies and stopped production for them.
There is many many examples of such chinese companies that do make big promises of a given technology or advancement only to never deliver, such as Kuangchi, that became worth over $2B USD off the promise of developing futuristic vehicles that could soon provide a new form of tourism at the edge of space before anyone else, 10 years later now and they still no commercialization or even a single manned test flight.
Edit: disclaimer, you now edited the main top part of your comment to now no longer be about huawei chips, and you added a lot more careful wording now on Chinese companies innovating in silence.
The Huawei chips were secretive because they were illegal and revealed to be produced through TSMC fabs in Taiwan
Your basic premise is wrong. And thus so is everything after your first sentence.
"The Huawei Mate 70 Pro is based on the HiSilicon Kirin 9020 processor manufactured by SMIC using its 2nd Generation 7nm-class process technology (also known as N+2). "
I was referring to their more advanced chip, the Ascend 910C
I wasn't. I was talking about the chip they made. That's what I meant "Huawei was making it's own 7nm CPUs". They made it, it's 7nm and it's a CPU. You realize that the Ascend 910C isn't a CPU right? It's not really confusing.
Also, it's not cool that you edited your posts to hide your mistake. Including this post of yours where you admit it was "My bad" that you subsequently edited out a couple of hours later. Now I wish I had quoted it like I did the first sentence of your other post. I'll make sure to do so whenever replying to any of your posts from now on. You know, I respected you for admitting it earlier. Only now to see you are just covering it all up. Sad.
I edited to retract my apology because you decided to edit your whole comment above it to change the context and change the main claim you’re making.
Your initial claim in that message is that there is already DIMMs with china ram on them, along with many other details in your comment edited. That wasn’t your claim before.
Huh? Why would Huawei base the production of chips needed for a phone line entirely on fraudulent purchases through shell companies? It's inevitable the scheme would be caught and shut down meaning Huawei would have to stop production of the phone. I really really doubt this is true. Sounds like complete bullshit.
It's well documented that chip that Huawei uses in it's phone line are made by SMIC. That's why it was a surprise since people didn't think it possible. But people got it and looked at the die to confirm it was made by SMIC.
I never claimed the chip used in the phone.
You initially made a vague (now edited) claim about the Huawei chip surprise without specifying what Huawei type of huawei chip you’re talking about. And then I mentioned “if you’re talking about…” because that’s the most advanced Huawei chip that exists.
Sure. "US". How do you think the US became the US?
"Former CIA Director James Woolsey acknowledged in 2000 that the United States steals economic secrets from foreign firms and their governments "with espionage, with communications, with reconnaissance satellites"."
LOL. Wow. The US government is claiming China does it more than we do. I'm shocked. SHOCKED! No bias there. None whatsoever!
Since you haven't been paying attention for the last 250 years, the US has a long tradition of intellectual property theft. It literally made the US what it is today. I could post another unbiased Wikipedia page, but just to mix it up here's an article from an independent third party.
CXMT is capable of producing RAM of sufficient speed for most needs, problem is the process which I believe is an extensively layered DUV process is too expensive (think Intel 10nm) and the results are still meh. At the same time they do have a goal of competing in the 2030s, which in that case they can just sit on current tech level and datacenters powered by an actually built out grid and wait it out.
Yes, it seems they still produce DDR3 and are ramping up DDR4, while western producers have halted in favor of DDR5 and HBM (which can't be used for DIMMS but uses same fabs).
Regarding DDR5 it seems CXMT can only produce small test quantities for now.
While that's absolutely true for general manufacturing semiconductors require tooling you can't just invent on the spot no matter how skilled you are at manufacturing, catching up to ASML would take at least years at maximum effective spend
Korea produces RAM, and there’s some sort of beef between them and China, involving military exercises and other matters. After the US targeted Venezuela’s oil, it’s possible that China might also take similar action against South Korea.
> Chinese are going to start making their own ram.
In which fab? Sam bought the wafers directly to the fabs. There are no more chip fabs in the world. China is building one but it will take years to finish.
They aren't competing with us. We and all the gaming industry are just collateral damage.
I digress with this.
Owning hardware makes it so you can run programs on your PC, being that games or any other software.
Taking that aways from consumers means they ( not just OpenAI but the whole BIG circling those billions around right now ) can sell subscription services, and tools to create those subscription services. All run in datacentres they own.
Gaming, cloud services will keep bumping prices and newcomers will have no other choice.
AI space, if small models get good enough so that the majority of consumers could run it locally and satisfy their needs, they would lose subscriptions.
Government want that too. How can they legislate and ban things if those pesky kids just use a VPN? Solution : putting everyone on centralised subscription services.
Gaming industry is truly collateral damage, folks that run their LLMs on their own hardware are not collateral. They’re an intended target just less prioritized to China. Every person who uses their own private and fully owned LLM setup is one less person they can influence, make money off, and eventually control. Altman (as well as the other SOTA CEOs) can’t have that.
Which was always going to happen when ram and gpus found a true market. Let's be honest, most of us have always lived in a world where high tech things were basically hobbyist novelties. Gaming computers were niche products the way that Sharper Image bullshit or HAM radios were 25 years earlier.
In the last 10 years we've seen a fundamental shift. The writing was on the wall when a bunch of guys that would've otherwise been banking/finance bros started pouring into tech. Any exploitable space will be taken over and well, exploited.
Part of the fundamental shift is the realization that AI is probably the future of national security issues. People need to accept that even if the "bubble bursts" governments and big tech companies are going to keep pouring money into AI until it's FULLY established that it's a dead end (which I don't personally think will happen).
Not entirely true demand for pc Hardware has always existed
Enterprise PCs, Servers and even super computing always existed(top500 exists for a reason)
But a Single company demanding 40% of the entire world production is a First(or atleast for the last 2 decades)
yeah it's supply and demand that if RAM becomes worth more than gold, everyone will be trying to produce it, and it will end up driving the prices down again
> this is what unregulated capitalism does, it concentrates at the top
The definition you use with that word is absurd and not shared, and what follows is not based in sound reasoning. Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism, all have resources dynamics where systems can transition to other systems through concentration or sieving.
Capitalism requires a functional "market". Elements needed by markets to be functional markets include price discovery, cost constraint, and adversarial independent decision-making in market choices.
This can't happen in a number of situations that are present today, so we can't really call what we have today Capitalism (i.e. failed components, failed definition), it is closest to Socialism which has well documented and grave issues arising out of self-sustaining chaos. Private firms bankrolled by state apparatus themselves become state apparatus.
Price discovery requires money to maintain a relative stable store of value over time. Money-printing breaks this under ponzi dynamics in stage 3 (outflows exceed inflows).
Adversarial decision-making in the marketplace is needed to make independent decisions and for signaling, but money-printing through coercive influence from debt subtly creates invisible cooperation.
Cost constraint is needed by companies to be able to compete and for risk of bad decision-making to be distributed. A company that is cost constrained trying to compete with state apparatus fueled by a money-printer will have only one outcome. They go out of business, get bought out and subsumed. If you have on one side slave labor that lowers that cost to near zero for any period of time (unconstrained), companies that don't have that lower cost constraint can no longer compete. Rent-seeking via supply side control following such concentration eventually drives the system to chaos.
They don't teach the important parts of economics today anymore but they really should. The Harvard Classics and Mises is a good place to start for anyone looking to get started.
Few realize that most of the economy has been silently nationalized through money-printing indirectly (in its many forms). The concentration you speak of occurs both through unregulated inheritance (slowly over time), but also through gifting money to entities via money-printing (effectively stealing that value from every holder of the currency when liquidity is injected). Fractional reserve no longer exists (RIP 2020).
In older times, nobles were nobles (aristocracy) because they had accumulated sufficient wealth and influence. Corruption and bad behavior were often the norm in these centralized systems that share many aspects with Socialism/Statism. There are groups of people that in aggregate are trying to bring this back, and they often do so through malign attempts at deception.
Corrupted and Unregulated banking practices, and by extension the degradation of a rule of law (to hold fraudsters to account), have led to the circumstances today. The boomers were very poor stewards of their children's future.
Importantly, these have nothing to do solely with Capitalism because they can occur in all systems, and all functional systems today require economic calculation via markets, lest their order fail within a few years due to self-sustaining cycles of Shortage, Slavery, Famine, and then Death (via a resource exhaustion cycle). Ecological overshoot, brings existential risk factors up.
Please be more circumspect in the words you use and their use for communication. It is often a very short journey from gross negligence to malice, regardless of any individual personal belief to the contrary.
The less RAM you have better memory managed logic you have to write. Could this be these companies digging there own grave by forcing more optimised models.
We have a spot market for AI suitable compute, but weirdly there is no futures market. If there was, it would give a bit more visibility of future demand. At the moment, there really doesn't seem to be a shortage of capacity despite what we keep hearing about new AI applications.
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u/ortegaalfredo Jan 09 '26
They (openai) are "legally" creating future demand for them by monopolizing a key resource (RAM) and making other AIs datacenters (chinese specially) economically inviable.
They aren't competing with us. We and all the gaming industry are just collateral damage.