Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

The same Micron that plead guilty to price fixing of memory 20 years ago.

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2004/02/27/memory-makers-hit-by-price-fixing-claims/1070959

They're like a movie actor who was in obscurity for decades and is suddenly popular. Is it being a traitor when everyone is offering larger and larger amounts for your time?

If you applied for two jobs, both said they wanted to hire you and started budding higher and higher so you'd work for them, are you a traitor to the customers who ultimately pay your inflated salary?

I don't blame Micron. I blame the people who invested billions into AI which allowed this to happen.

gross margin for Micron

Gross indeed. Fucking greedy scumbags

Traitors would mean they were ever on your side. Welcome to capitalism, bud. They've always been on the side of maximum profit, like all other corporations.

It’s all slave labour RAM, one way or another.

could have a chip that looks for a certain sequence of bytes then changes some other bytes as a result... it would probably introduce massive latency though...

Padme: “…and then they’ll drop, right?”

Simple supply and demand problem

The big 3 are known for being a price fixing cartel.

Any individual company could make more money by scaling up production. But they don't because they already know the other 2 won't.

So in your analogy the actors have all agreed to only work 10 hours a week and it's nearly impossible to become an actor without having tens of billions to start

Interesting analysis. I was thinking the same, their customers might not make it.

About this point:

They might not have had much of a choice in making the deal, though. Micron has been extracting the absolute maximum they can out of this situation. Make a deal or get nothing. Their clients will remember, though, and flag them as an unreliable supplier.

Are the other two any better? If not Micron might get away with it. It doesn't strike me as a very competitive market.

If the Chinese government is doing this to spread hardware backdoors in all the RAM (technically quite difficult to do without detection, btw, and people will be looking) then it will be in their interests to lower the price of Chinese RAM to well below Western RAM, so the world buys as much as possible.

I think it's more likely to be similar to their photovoltaic cell, battery, and industry policy in general: economically dominate the world's markets and give China all the advantages that the previous industrial centres of the world had.

The ability to deprive rival nations of valuable resources, or help allied nations by guaranteeing their supply, is incredibly useful, which is why most nations do so if they are able to.

The US gets backdoors in many electronic systems by simply asking, and in some cases creating laws to do so. Why would China not do the same instead of owning shares in the companies? It's probably more that they want the Party to financially share in the wealth created by those companies, as well as more directly control their corporate actions.