this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
206 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
77974 readers
2994 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Considering Crucial is killing consumer chip production, and is only one of three companies making consumer chips, no.
In the span of 5 to 10 years, do you think there will not be a return to consumer production?
I'd love to see someone explain to me how the current rate of AI capex will continue to grow in that time span, and how it will be financed. I don't think it's feasible.
Manufacturing capacity though doesn't seem very limited in that kind of time scale, it just needs investment and time to expand. Once it's there... if it's not used it's lost profits. AI hardware deliveries are at an all time high but sentiment has been on shaky ground on the investor side starting this year.
The three memory producers have always exploited market disruption for profits, generally cooperatively. They're really good at profiting during all disruptions which just happen with newer technology. It doesn't last.
Manufacturing will expand and the higher consumer prices will ensure some manufacturers still service that market. Price will be higher, but it's not going to get to the point where you can't buy a personal PC.
The thing is that the consumers of DRAM aren't just home users, it's businesses. Businesses all over the world literally can't absorb hundreds of dollars of extra cost. I've set standards for global computing at a business with offices in all continents except antarctica, Dell can handle giving you a global price but you can't just ship a $1000 laptop to a business in sao paolo and expect the business there to be able to afford it, the margins are not like the US or Europe.
Prices will come down much faster than people think imo. We'll see a flood of slower DDR5 from substandard processes first, but I would be amazed if in 2027 AI spend is even half of what it was this year.
The AI bubble is certainly going to burst at some point. Assuming manufacturers are ramping up production to profit off of the higher prices, the bubble will result in a glut of supply after demand collapses. So we'll likely see a year or two of depressed electronics prices.
On top of that, DDR5 is worth more than gold until DDR6 comes along and suddenly you have companies who own a significant percentage of the 2025 global production of RAM that want to purchase newer hardware. I doubt all of that RAM is going to be shredded, so we may have a thriving secondary market when that happens.
It'll suck for the next year or two, so get used to your current PC and pray that you don't have a RAM failure.
Micron is stopping Crucial, but they will still sell to companies like Corsair.
Yeah, but at what price?
Killing DIMM production.
That's of the three major companies that make RAM chips.
There are other companies that make DIMMs. They just buy chips from the RAM chip manufacturers to do it. PNY or Kingston, say.
Micron was just doing a vertically-integrated thing where they did both the chips and DIMMs.
EDIT: Looking back at the article, it does say that.