Keep in mind, many of these same DRAM makers were once caught up in one of the largest illegal business cartels ever discovered by the U.S. government over 25 years ago. Just a fun fact to store in your brain.
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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Oh wow, reading the wiki you linked, looks like that one exec really learned their lesson \s
On 5 April 2006, Sun Woo Lee, Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain with the US Government for his involvement in the price fixing conspiracy.[5] Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months in prison and fined US$250,000.[6] Lee was subsequently promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014
edit/update: Oh, wow so Sun Woo Lee actually really lucked out as Korea focused more on making an example of the Samsung heir apparent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jae-yong
8 months in prison sucks, I totally concede that. Yet literally the deal they made looks like they were asked "Would you take the fall and go to prison for 8 months and then get paid millions per year afterward?"
Going to jail as a poor person means you lose your job
Going to jail as a rich person apparently gets you a promotion
Interesting
Doesn't the mob and other syndicates do something like that as well? Gotta do some time and not snitch to move up in the ranks.
That means that he managed to keep the fine small enough that Samsung made significantly more money off the price fixing than they ever lost from the fine. Hasn’t changed
https://www.axios.com/google-facebook-fines-profits--134d3567-1052-4d9d-aa70-dc7c25ed4ebf.html
Cost of doing business really
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None of the fines for these things are enough. It should be, like, the company is nationalized. The leadership is sentenced to years of community service and barred from working in the industry for life.
Fucking corporate America. I was fired for having a disability, specifically and intentionally by my boss and her manager. Neither has any direct accountability - both were terminated as a result of the findings of a federal and state investigation, but the company will pay for the damages. They both failed upward, getting higher positions at other companies, while I've struggled to find employment, something already difficult due to the stigma of my age, disability, and gender, but now with word of my termination having spread through the quite small pool of people who work in my field.
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Probably only gotta do that once for things to really change
You gotta give a booster shot every once in a while to remind them.
coupled with the fact that the cartels refuse to expand production; this tells me they're realistic about the moment - it's not going to be a decade of future humongous peak RAM consumption, because otherwise they'd be blisteringly stupid (to lose out on those potential increased sales)... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-makers-have-no-plans-to-increase-production-despite-crushing-ram-shortages-modest-2026-increase-predicted-as-dram-makers-hedge-their-ai-bets
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It's related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they're cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they're buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.
As soon as the first one fails, it's all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.
Let's not forget that almost all memory is made by a cartel of 3 companies known for price fixing. They're all being as slow as possible about increasing production capacity.
Is that not for good reason though? Only for them really, but if they did ramp up production and then the bubble pops... I wish they would ramp up production, it's just easy to understand why they won't.
If there is a demand for ram, which there is in the consumer market, then it shouldn't be a risk. If DCs get cancelled, then they should have contracts in place for at least a minimum buy, which should offset cost risk. If they don't have that, then that's just shitty business. Even still, they can just as easily slow down production if needed. If the bubble pops, either they'll have inventory that the world will buy and they can throttle back prod, or they don't have inventory and they will have to throttle prod anyway since demand for DCs as a whole has to be more than just the consumer market.
Idk, it's probably just the cynic in me, but I think it's likely this is just manipulation of the prices, especially given the history of these companies doing just that.
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I hope China floods the market with cheap RAM and absolutely destroys these scumbag memory companies.
Like they did with EVs in the US?
Republicans would probably make sure that can't happen.
And you end up with the US getting hosed while the rest of us swim in cheap EVs.
The US would be the only country to suffer in this scenario. The rest of the world would be just fine with using cheaper memory while we shoot ourselves in the foot to spite them.
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It will take maybe two to three years before China could do that. The cheap Chinese RAM manufacturers are only starting their production.
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Valve: "May we buy some RAM, good sir?"
RAM Companies: "Sure. How much you willing to pay?"
Valve: "$30?"
RAM Companies: laugh "Get the fuck outta here, loser!"
So maybe try to remember that after the AI bubble burst, and there is more RAM than customers, and it's the customer that sets the price.
I'm starting to think more and more that the only way to pop the bubble is the Luigi Style.
This is crazy... But it's true.
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I know it'd be expensive, but I wonder if it'd be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They've certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
I don't know if there's a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
Manufacturing their own sticks would onlympush the problem to the price of RAM chips.
The resources it takes to start manufacturing modern RAM chips is such that THE ENTIRE FUCKING NATION OF CHINA is finally getting around to it.
I know Valve is a big company, but that's a pretty bite to chew and swallow.
My undiagnosed adhd brain: how difficult can in be
The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:
- Etch a stencil that has the pattern you want.
- Place the stencil over a piece of silicon.
- Bombard the silicon and stencil with radiation so that the chemical properties of the silicon change exactly under that stencil.
- Repeat the process with multiple other stencils, so that the resulting silicon has basically shapes of wires and logic gates that can perform different functions with the electricity running through those shapes.
In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.
Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.
The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it's working correctly.
Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.
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In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.
Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can't just bomb them into submission... Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.
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I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.
There's a reason why there's only, like, three RAM manufacturers. It's horrifically expensive to start production.
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I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.
They'd need to source the components outside of the increasingly monopolistic US-alligned group of hardware manufacturers. The only way you end run the Big Three is to go to... CHINA. And we've layered so many sanctions, tariffs, and putative measures on import of Chinese hardware that it would be a fool's errand to bother.
I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
Even if there's an AI crash, the long-term outlook for chip demand only goes up. The problem isn't with the economic demand, it's with the provisioning of capital. For the most part, you need to spend tens - if not hundreds - of billions of dollars to start producing even the middle tier of nano-computing components in modern use.
I might suggest there's another way to tackle this problem. And it's one that Valve already is heavily invested in.
Lower resolution games. Lower hardware requirements. More efficient software engines. More games focused on the mechanics and story than the raw, realistic visuals.
You can run Doom on a pregnancy test and people still buy that game. Games like "Undertale" and "Vampire Survivors" do incredibly well in part because they are so accessible to anyone with a 15-year-old rig. Rather than trying to build a PS5-killer machine, you can go the Nintendo route and build a novel interface that runs on more basic components. Then you exploit the hell out of your Disney-esque IP without worrying that Halo: Remastered Delux Ultra looks better than the next iteration of Metroid Prime.
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RE: Memory Procurement Quote
Did I stutter?
RAM Don (he/him)
Memory Racket LLC
I think legacy american market ram companies need to be blacklisted.
Once China floods the market, we need to put these fuckers out of business.
There is only one American memory company: Micron. Sk Hynix and Samsung are South Korean.
Everyone else who sells memory modules in the west gets the actual memory chips from one of those three companies. Beyond that there is only one company that makes the waifers that the chips are made from and I think its Dutch. Definitely European.
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Ah yes, the law of greed and demand.
What's to stop them from just going a generation back and using DDR4 instead of DDR5.
There is no one who can convince me that it makes any noticeable difference anyway. When I was putting together a new/used desktop I specifically looked for DDR4 for precisely that reason and I would take any bet that a performance hit would be measured in numbers too small for any user to even notice.
Constantly needing newer hardware with only fractional improvements is the biggest scam in tech. They took their lesson from Apple and Samsung.
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