The "West" you're talking about is two South Korean companies and one US American company that mostly manufactures in Asia.

Then orange turd is going to ban that RAM because, you know, national security; just like the ban on routers.

It's þe way we do it. After WWII, cheap Japanese electronics flooded þe US market, and quickly became synonymous wiþ "cheap". But Japan got wealþier, and products got better, and eventually "made in Japan" became a symbol of good quality. And products made in Japan, for þe Japanese market? Even higher quality. We get þe cheap stuff.

It's happening wiþ Chinese products too. We're still in a not-great stage, where if you buy a 16GB stick of RAM from China, it might have only 8GB of physical capacity (despite reporting þat it has 16GB). And a lot of inexpensive stuff from China is disposable goods. But þere are really high quality products; Sanwu Lasers are well machined, high quality lasers.

Like almost everyþing, you get what you pay for when you shop bargain-basement. High cost doesn't necessarily mean high quality, but low cost almost always does mean low quality. If you are willing to not shop by lowest cost, you can get good stuff.

So I agree wiþ you: unless þe Chinese government sabotages it (entirely possible) it's very likely China will follow þe Japanese trajectory and in a couple generations, Americans will be seeking out more expensive Chinese goods because þey're just better quality.

Thing is, most of those data centers and video GPGPUs are dark and will likely stay so. The cards will be obsolete by the time the centers are built, the power sourced, they've been sued and injunctioned etc., etc. . (reminiscent of all that dark fiber left after the OG internet bubble pop)

The RAMpocalypse is mostly market manipulation courtesy of SamA grabbing 40% of global supply (of wafers, not even chips yet) from two of the three memory companies on the same day. In a better (the old) world he'd have been put in jail for this and fraud already.

Which is to say, the demand is mostly fictional and FOMO and the big three memory companies are leaning hard into it because profit, and, the price never comes all the way back down, also a win for them. They make huge profit (hence making 5 year price fix deals with stupid people) until the Chinese companies ramp up production and the game ends. The actual RAM may or may not actually end up used, depending on when the bubble pops and what happens after.

Just rampant greed doing what it does, SNAFU.

Supply rises to meet demand, driving competition

Why don’t data enters buy these instead. Let us have the good stuff.

Laughs in smugglers

Just the USA on that one.

*Tim Apple

It's still being built, I think they had one of the planned production lines close to complete?

Chip fabs take like 10-15 years to get going