by roadbuster 4 hours ago
> It's buying up 40% of all RAM production with the intention to have most of it idle in warehouses
They have no incentive to purchase a rapidly-depreciating asset and then immediately shelve it, none
They might have to warehouse inventory until they can spin-up module-manufacturing capacity, but that's just getting their ducks in a row
The incentive suggested in the article is to block other competitors from scaling training, which is immensely RAM hungry. Amongst other things. Even Nvidia could feel the pressure, since their GPUs need RAM. It could be a good bargaining chip for them, who knows.
I'm not saying it's true, but it is suspicious at the very least. The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab + PCB assembly to turn them into usable RAM modules. Why does OpenAI want to become a RAM manufacturer, but of only the process post-wafer.
> They have no incentive to purchase a rapidly-depreciating asset and then immediately shelve it, none
It screws up the price for their competitors. That's an incentive. Particularly with so many "AI datacenter" buildouts on the horizon.