by arjie 4 hours ago
It's not really that different from Apple reserving wafer starts on TSMC's next node and so on. It's just that this kind of capacity requirement has rarely shown up in DRAM before. Vendors prefer this kind of capacity reservation over a more variable finished product requirement. It allows them to know that they can build at the bottleneck rather than having to start up more capacity and then having that lie idle while everything downstream in DRAM packaging and DIMM production can't actually consume anything.
Did Apple reserve 40% of the supply and cause a massive shortage. If not, then I don't see how its the same.
I don't buy it. It's easier to make this argument for companies that are building their own hardware, since they know it can be immediately used. OpenAI's move is tantamount to hoarding for the sake of strangling competition. There was plenty of supply to allow for their plans without this move (especially since they will probably go bankrupt at this rate).
How exactly could they 'hoard' this? There's no place in the world to store that much undiced wafer. It will all go bad.
In what time will packaged wafers go bad? What is this based on?
Granting this premise is true (I have no idea), that makes it even worse. They would deliberately be hoarding 40% of the global supply not to lock in for future growth but simply to make sure no one else gets to have it. It’s figuratively setting chips on fire.