I don't fully agree. Perhaps you're right when it comes to images as a whole, but I think individual images themselves still capture that emotional value for me.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
Yeah I mean edge of tomorrow is a great concept though and would have worked without him. Whereas a movie that’s got less going for it like MI 5 will seem bland once he’s commodified
I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run.
Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome.
If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about competing on price, maybe they become price competitive before the launch of your new fab in order to kill it, but, it will have an effect and probably before it even opens
3) A western supply chain has benefits by itself.
There's a reason some industries are not allowed to die, most notably farming- because security and external pressure are concerning.
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Realistically there's no reason not to do this. It will be long, painful and expensive. The best time was a decade ago. The next best time is now.
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
I disagree.
Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. So we can't exactly increase global manufacturing capacity overnight.
The way I see, there's 2 ways this goes:
1. AI is a fad. RAM and storage demand falls. Prices drop back to normal.
2. AI is not a fad. Over time, more and more fabs come online to meet the supply needs of the AI industry. The price comes down as manufacturing supply increases.
Or some combination of the two.
The high prices right now are because there's a demand shock. There's way more demand for RAM than anyone expected, so the RAM that is produced sells at a premium. High prices aren't because RAM costs more to manufacture than it did a couple years ago. There's just not enough to go around. In 5-10 years, manufacturing capacity will match demand and prices will drop. Just give it time.
> Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now.
And that company is in Europe, isn't it? The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market: it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.
Yes, but it's not that important. Any complex high-tech product requires suppliers from all over the world. For example, I bet the EU company depends on a lot of China companies critically.
Just like any airliner is produced by pretty much the whole world.
> The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market:
You can't just get into RAM manufacturing overnight whenever you feel like it, like you're building washing machines. You need a lot more than just ASML machines, you need the supply chain, the IP, the experienced professionals with know-how, the education system, the energy, the right regulations, etc.
The EU exited the RAM manufacturing business a long time ago when RAM prices sunk, see Qimonda, meaning it would be a long, expensive uphill battle to get back in, and currently EU has no major semiconductor manufacturing ambitions, or ambitions in commodity hardware manufacturing of any kind, so that's not gonna happen.
Of course, RAM is no longer a commodity right now, but nobody can guarantee it won't be again when the AI bubble burst and RAM prices crash, so spinning up the know-how, manufacturing facilities and supply chains from the ground up just for RAM is insanely expensive and risky and might leave you holding the bag.
> it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.
Except semiconductor manufacturing DOES require cheap labor relative to the high degrees of skills and specialization needed at that cutting edge. Unlike in Taiwan, skilled STEM grads in the EU (and even more in the US) who invest that time and effort in education and specialization, will go to better paying careers with better WLB like software or pharma, than in hardware and semi manufacturing that pays peanuts by comparison and works you to death in deadlines.
Also, profitable semi manufacturing requires cheap energy and lax environmental regulations, which EU lacks. So even more compounding reasons why you won't see too many new semi fabs opening here.
I hope we (Europe) can try some things even when they are not guaranteed to succeed and generate huge profits. Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.
The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.
>I hope we (Europe) can try some things even when they are not guaranteed to succeed and generate huge profits.
If EU hopes were cookies, I would have died of obesity 100 times over. EU is bad at learning from its own mistakes and being proactive on rapid changes on the world stage, that's why it's share of global GDP has dropped by half in 20 years. EU is always reactive and then only when it's far too late and its actions are always limp-dicked("we are monitoring the situation"). See the rise of US tech, Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, rise of Chinese EVs, etc
>Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.
We already are toast for the long run, we just ignore it via printing more money and going into more debt, while kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with the fallout. EU's biggest economies are working around the clock on how to fund the ever growing pension and welfare deficits, how to beat Russia, and how to stop people from voting right wing, not on how to claw back and on-shore cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing.
>The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.
Yeah but someone still needs to pay for that and take a risk. And EU investors don't like risking billions of their money to try out new things that are in competition with Asia on manufacturing because we cannot compete there. Labor costs too high, regulations too high, energy costs too high, environmentalism too high, we miss critical know-how. That's why nobody is investing in EU fabs and instead in other things that guarantee higher returns like services, pharma and weapons.
I think we mostly agree. Just "no RAM factories because we have more competitive advantage elswhere" is different than "no RAM factories because they are not guaranteed a profit". Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed? Less risk because we are better positioned is something else, and actually makes sense.
>I think we mostly agree. Just "no RAM factories because we have more competitive advantage elswhere" is different than "no RAM factories because they are not guaranteed a profit".
But then people shouldn't moan that the EU is absent from the RAM manufacturing industry or pretend like it's something easy they could do on a whim if the EU suddenly wanted to.
>Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed?
There will always be sick people and people killing each other.
> There will always be sick people and people killing each other.
Any given drug or weapon can still fail or not make a profit. As well it could be said that computers will still need memory for the foreseeable future. You're not keeping a coherent position in this discussion, just replying with cool soundbites.
When the internet boom happened, computers had a tiny fraction of the RAM they have today. Everything worked fine. Programmers had to make efficient programs. But we were fine with that. We just programmed in C and C++ and shipped small binaries, because what choice did we have? Nobody tried to build desktop software in javascript on top of electron. And nobody built web servers in python.
If all consumer devices only shipped with 1gb of RAM maximum, we'd get over it remarkably quickly. Just about the only times large amounts of RAM is an actual requirement is AI, some data science / simulation, and editing video in 8k. And maybe 3d modelling. Lots of programs we run today are memory hogs for no good reason - like the rust compiler, cyberpunk 2077 and google chrome. But we could make those programs much more memory efficient if we really had to. Cyberpunk wouldn't look as pretty. But nobody would really care.
The economy won't die due to expensive RAM. Programmers will just adapt, like we've always done.
no, you should say that you personally wouldn't care, but that does not generalize.
People do care, just like people prefer eating better food than just bread and milk. And after having had a taste of the good stuff, people do not want to revert - loss aversion is real.
So if consumer devices regressed back to only having 1gb of ram, they will feel the loss, and they will complain if nothing else. The world of lean, efficient software that require little ram will not return. Programmers (read:companies selling products) will not adapt, but instead, the requirements for computing will become more exclusionary to those with the means.
>Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now.
You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.
> You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.
Ah. Please check that. Which types of DRAM can be made in a DUV fab? Obviously the older ones, but are those obsolete for new computers. This really matters.
CXMT’s entire portfolio is made without EUV, and CXMT claims to have acceptable yield and performance comparable to other producers.
Keep in mind that the high bandwidths of modern RAM modules aren’t really a property of the RAM cells so much as a property of the read and write circuitry and the DDR or HBM transceivers, and those are a large part of the IP but a small part of the die. There is no such thing as “double data rate” or “high bandwidth” DRAM cells. Even DRAM cells from the 1990s could be read in microseconds. Reading and streaming your fancy AI model weights is an embarrassingly parallel problem and even 1 TB/sec does not even come close to stressing the ability of the raw cells to be read. This in contrast to, say, modern tensor processors where the actual ALUs set a hard cap on throughput and everyone works hard to come closer to the cap.
Take a look at what makes a modern computer with good RAM performance work: it’s the interconnect between the RAM and processor.
From Micron, everything up to their 1-beta node is DUV. Their 1-gamma node they debuted last year is the only EUV node they have. If you bought a Micron-based DDR5 RAM stick a year ago it would have been DUV and you could get those up to DDR5-8000. 1-gamma increases that to DDR5-9200, so if you can live with ~15% less performance DUV is good enough.
100 million DUV machine is not your limiting factor when a whole fab costs 2-3 billion and requires specialized knowhow that few people in the world have in order to get good yields and be profitable. Otherwise everyone would be making chips if all you needed was to go out and buy a 100 million DUV machine then hit the "print" button to churn out chips like it's a Bambu 3d printer.
>I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market.
Nobody spends 2-3 billion to open new fab just to make commodity low margin chips. New fabs are almost always built for the cutting edge, then once they pay off their investment costs, they slowly transition into making low margin chips as they age out of the cutting edge, but nobody builds fabs for legacy nodes that have a lot of competition and low profitability, except maybe if national security(the taxpayer) would subsidize those losses somehow.
>but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
RAM isn’t some commodity that gets mined at a fixed rate and therefore costs more when people want large amounts of it. It’s a manufactured good, made from raw materials that are available in huge quantity, that was produced and sold at a profit at 2024 prices, even accounting for the capex needed to produce it.
Two things have changed. First, demand increased quickly. Second, big buyers sort of demonstrated that they’re willing to pay current prices, at least temporarily, so maybe the demand price elasticity has changed, or at least people’s perception of it has changed.
None of prevents the price from going back down. The high prices have made it economical for new manufacturers to invest more to compete — look at CXMT. And CXMT doesn’t have EUV machines, which doesn’t appear to be a showstopper for them.
> at a profit at 2024 prices, even accounting for the capex needed to produce it
2024 prices were at a historical low, so we can't be sure that this is correct. Regardless, when production capacity is short-term constant, new RAM does get "mined" at a constant rate, a bit like bitcoin with its mining ASICs.
Your first point highlights the huge unmitigated risk. There is no guarantee that this won't all implode, triggering a huge recession. And even if no one can afford the ram after, they especially won't be able to afford the more expensive European ram.
Really the only way it could work is if the government declares it it a national security issue and will promise to subsidize it. Because in just a free market, it's most likely to flop.
It's been a headscratcher for me... The EU and the US have an issue with CCP-subsidised tech giants, but their sole reaction is banning them in some form or other? In the EU it is from public tenders, in the US it's from dealing with US companies.
This does not really help EU and US businesses to be competitive though, neither does it stop consumers going for the cheapest option...
>The EU and the US have an issue with CCP-subsidised tech giants
Except EU and US tech giants also get massive government subsidies making such accusations hypocritical. Silicon Valley has its roots in cold war defense funding.
What the US and EU don't like it that China has beaten them at their own game using their own rules, so now they need to move the goalposts on why we shouldn't buy Chinese RAM and protect western DRAM monopolies making amazing margins.
Prices are returning to normal, probably 2-3 years from now. SK Hynix is making absolutely monstrous investments in memory fabs and CMXT will be entering the market in force more and more.
The biggest problem is that the industry wants HBM, whereas consumers want DRAM. Until the need for HBM has been sufficiently satisfied, fabs will prefer being tooled for HBM because businesses can be squeezed much harder than consumers.
Then again, as consumer you don't really need DDR5 or even DDR4 so long as you aren't using an iGPU. Its all about being around CL15 timings.
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode
you're missing the picture that it's not companIES - the crisis primarily was caused by only one company OpenAI buying out wafers
but even more than that - that wafer buyout is *an excuse* used by cartel - there are several mechanisms that could have eased out most of the problem (e.g. Samsung selling old equipment) that was not done to ride the money wave
(also said "hyperscalers and AI companies" existed in spring 2025 too, yet the price was low)
the winners will not be the ones who build new fabs - but ones who'll have enough money and government subsidies/import taxes to protect such investments after cartel decides to oversupply again, flushing the price down
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
This isn't right.
RAM prices (and most components) are very finely balanced between supply and demand. A small shortfall in supply leads to a large increase in price, and a large shortfall in supply leads to very large price increases.
It takes 2 years for an existing RAM supplier to build a new clean room factory to make RAM.
All the RAM manufactures saw this shortage coming 6 months ago.
If you follow the news, the existing manufactures are investing heavily. Here's Hynix annoucements:
FWIW I agree with you. The US should provide stable, consistent policy & funding so companies understand the regulatory environment and do long-term planning.
Which is a good idea for when we don't have a dementia patient in charge of our country.
I don't think anything other then a major implosion of the AI companies is possible. It is just not physically possible to go any other way due to he ridiculous amount of funny money they have invested to this dead-end & the non-existent revenue these companies are getting back for it.
> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
You can't reshore domestic manufacturing without creating legions of desperate workers with no other choice but to accept minimum wage factory jobs.
Not everyone but a supplier in the Europe would be a massive benefit long after the AI driven demand dies off. It'd free them from dependence on other countries for a critical resource making chips more affordable and the supply more stable which is good because the stability of the rest of the world is already questionable and big shocks are expected in the near future.
I guess the idea would have to be to look at it in the reverse: have some domestic capacity for those usual strategic supply independence reasons, even if it operates at a loss. And hope that occasionally, one of those demand surge waves will swipe through and make the cost not quite so bad. Outlier waves like the current one might even create a net positive, but that bet would not be the primary purpose, that honor would go to hedging against getting cut off.
AI demand isn't going away. It will just move from the data center to the local machine. On device AI is much better for the customer than it being in the cloud. Expecting people to stick with a few dozen gb of hbm is going to be the 'no one needs more than 640kb' of the 2030s.
It's being delayed by ai companies from running on local consumer grade machines specifically by making the cost of entry too expensive. OpenAi buys 40% of wafers to ensure the price of memory stays high.
Hmm, never considered a targeted squeeze at consumer run models by way of slowing hardware proliferation. It "made sense" to try and box out other AI companies but I guess they also have a pretty strong vested interest in keeping VRAM low or preventing some kind of high-memory PCIe ASIC from getting cheap broad adoption.
Another thread suggested that OpenAIs primary play is to get big enough that it's too big to fail, funny to think that it's not a funding runway or algorithmic moat, just a hardware vault and the longer you can stop boats crossing it the more chance you get your fingers in all the pies.
Then use tariffs to ensure that local price matches foreign price, or have government, military, and sensitive industry buy local for security reasons. (Obviously you need to be careful with this to ensure that corruption doesn’t take hold.)
Having your own chips is a national security issue. Spreading out fabs across the world is a global resilience issue.
Imo there's never enough RAM. If everyone has more RAM available then software will find a use for this RAM. Sure, some of it is going to be wasteful, but we would almost certainly get new products that weren't feasible before. You can trade space for compute after all.
That being said, AI is not going to go away already. And AI is about as memory hungry as you can get.
there is another industry that is not economical in EU but we still do it. Food production. Because its strategic decision. Not saying that RAM is of equal importance like food, but saying that if there is a will there is a way.
Exactly. Anyone who's been in the business a long time knows that this market has crazy boom / bust cycles. This is probably the craziest boom I've ever seen, but manufacturers are rightly hesitant to spend billions building out capacity only to get caught by the bust again.
Aren’t Chinese manufacturers already expanding their capacity? Given that Samsung and SK Hynix have left that market in the pursuit of HBM4 chips, China is going to rule this market. At least that’s what analysts are saying.
In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities.
The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more locked-down design, such as soldered RAM or even SSD. My current ThinkPad already got soldered LPDDR5 RAM chips on it with no user-end RAM upgrade possible, so there's a reason to suspect they'll take more pagers from Apple's book if they can get away doing it, just like what they did when they pushed out those internally mounted unswappable batteries.
My personal guess is that the RAM price will fall down after this period of AI expansion is over and major players starts to consolidate. But it will not fall as much as we're hopping for, because the manufacturers could just reduce production to control the price.
I wouldn't say "should be", but HBM could indeed benefit the end-user somewhat, like @15155 already pointed out. And that benefit could be used as justification for soldered HBMs on future computers.
BUT... a smart consumer would also recognize the other side of the story: do we really need HBM on consumer devices? We don't serve 1000 users at the same time, a slower, cheaper device is good enough for most use cases (including the professional ones), better if it's also somewhat future-proof. After all, smart people usually have better foresight.
Problem is, the gain in performance to an user maybe negligible compare to the pain that the device purchased might never be able to be fitted to run some application.
Chinese manufacturers like CXMT face the same kinds of issues that Huawei faced in entering the EU market - the EU is clamping down on Chinese suppliers across their supply chain [0].
Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exports?
RAM isn't a critical security category like 5G base stations.
Also, I don't think you've seen true consumer rage until the opposition in the EU would start pointing out the current parties are making the smartphones, laptops, TVs and whatnot consumers wanna buy much more expensive (or more crappy). Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to be wavering for young people especially, and tech / gadgets being cheap was one of the sole rays of light left.
Youth unemployment is actually somewhat low in the EU at the moment. It's at around 15%, which is the level as back in 2008 before the great recession.
Raw unemployment numbers are pretty meaningless alone. Governmenments have ways of counting unemployment to get a desired number like for example only counting those registered as seeking work through the government agency. Like If you're doing some school or training, BAM, you're not counted as unemployed, if you've been unemployed for too long, then you're counted as "long term state welfare" and not as unemployed, if you refuse shitty hard labor jobs from the unemployment office, then you're cut off from unemployment and you're not counted as unemployed, and other such tricks.
Plus, even taking a low unemployment numbers at face value, the job quality has fallen a lot, with a lot of people still technically employed but not in great jobs, but in shitty jobs they do for survival, like fast food delivery.
The reality is that mass layoffs and SME bankruptcies are a current occurrence in many EU countries.
> Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to be wavering for young people especially, and tech / gadgets being cheap was one of the sole rays of light left.
RAM is pretty different to Huawei 5G base stations.
Australia for example is a large and growing market for Chinese electric cars. China is the biggest export market for Australian raw materials so it doesn't just put random trade barriers up.
There's actually a free trade agreement between Australia and China.
Or China could stop antagonizing blocs like the EU through actions like solidifying ties with Russia [0][1][2], imposing rare earth export restrictions on the EU [3], and undermining EU institutions [4].
Ahh, it is always China antagonizing others, isn't it?
There's nothing wrong EU coming to absurd lengths in all directions that are leading to destruction of its economy and society only to please the narrative of few degraded groups of individuals. Yet, it is others that are the cause. Nice, easy story telling.
All governments in the world turned to be on the dark side. But some are reaching new heights.
And Asia is mostly peaceful right now while war has returned to Europe on a scale not seen in 50 years. Those crazy Chinese, eh? Massive failure of their foreign policy establishment. Total inability to engage with Russia.
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
It should. And it should enact the political reforms they would make large capital projects like fabs possible. The current confederacy is proving just as much a stepping stone for Europe as it was for America. I’m not saying a full united Europe should emerge. But a system of vetoes is barely a system at all.
Thats assembly, couple lanes of PCB Reflow ovens. They have been at this since mid nineties, always offering lifetime ram warranty too. Ram and SSD pretty commonly seen in retail.
Europe needs to focus on energy and fixing their supply chain first. And the deregulation push keeps getting delayed. Just the other day the main person behind it in Germany got sacked because of internal power struggles, in part because of the Greens (part of the coalition).
For context, the German manufacturing sector is losing something like 15k jobs PER MONTH.
Brain fart. I mean CDU. I guess they behave like Greens so much I got them confused. Also, not "sacked" but not renewed, but it's kind of the same thing in practice.
Idea: Take the money that Germany promised to Intel if they build a state of the art fab. Instead, ask SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron to build a DRAM fab in Germany.
It may seem that these are very similar processes, but this is only if you do not take into account the bribes from Intel to specific officials and their relatives who make decisions about subsidizing Intel.
SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron don't treat good people well enough to give them taxpayer money.
> but this is only if you do not take into account the bribes from Intel to specific officials and their relatives who make decisions about subsidizing Intel.
Bribes? Sheesh, HN has gone insane.
Brandolini's Law is out of control here. You are making a bold fucking claim. From the tone of your post, it seems pointless to ask if you have any evidence. From and outsider's view, I would say the German political system is much less corrupted by lobbyists compared to the United States. Do you say the same about the CHIPS Act in the United States?
> I would say the German political system is much less corrupted by lobbyists compared to the United States.
I highly doubt it. I'm certainly no expert on Germany, but has Germany's bureaucratic machine spent decades destroying its own energy sector to buy energy from Russia, funding the war machine of Putin's totalitarian dictatorship?
And not just by buying these resources, but by OVERPAYING for them many times over. I just opened a chart of the prices at which Germany bought natural gas from Russia before the war with Ukraine, and it's wild, it is several times more expensive than Germany is now paying for gas delivered from the other side of the globe on tiny ships. It was a direct subsidizing of this war.
And then you look at these high-ranking (and not so high-ranking) bureaucrats who made all these decisions... And literally all of their families got richer during the time these decisions were made, by tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions. There's zero accountability, zero media coverage, and it's all being hushed up to such an extent that I can't think of any other explanation other than EVERYONE was taking the money. We are literally talking about the level of existence of a centralized totalitarian machine for the forceful silencing of anyone who tries to talk about this topic.
So do I say the same about the CHIPS Act in the US? Probably. But the level of corruption seen in Germany – pervasive, bloody, destructive – is simply unimaginable in the US.
> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM ... This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it
How?
Most foundries across Asia and the US are being given subsidizes that outstrip those that the EU is providing, with the only mega-foundry project in Europe was canceled by Intel last year [0].
Additionally, much of the backend work like OSAT and packaging is done in ASEAN (especially Malaysia), Taiwan, China, and India. As much of the work for memory chips is largely backend work (OSAT and packaging), this is a field the EU simply cannot compete in given that it has FTAs with the US, Japan, South Korea, India, and Vietnam so any EU attempt would be crushed well before imitating the process.
Furthermore, much of the IP in the memory space is owned by Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and American champions who are largely investing either domestically or in Asia, as was seen with MUFG's announcement earlier today to create a dedicated end-to-end semiconductor fund specifically to unify Japan, Taiwan, and India into a single fab-to-fabless ecosystem [1]. SoftBank announced something similar to unify the US, Japan, Malaysia, and India into a similar end-to-end ecosystem as well a couple weeks ago [2]. Meanwhile, South Korea is trying to further shore up their domestic capacity [3] via subsidies and industrial policy.
When Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese technology and capital partners are uninterested in investing in building European capacity, American technology and capital partners have pulled out of similar initiatives in Europe, and the EU working to ban Chinese players [4] what can the EU even do?
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Edit: can't reply
> Why are you overlooking European semiconductor champions
Because they don't have the IP for the flash memory supply chain. And whatever capacity and IP they have in chip design, front-end fab, or back-end fab is domiciled in the US, ASEAN, and India.
> STMicroelectronics
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for IoT and embedded applications.
> Infineon
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for automotive applications.
> NXP
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for embedded applications.
> All of them are skilled enough to build and operate a DRAM fab in Europe. A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.
They don't have the IP. Much of the IP for the memory space is owned by Japanese, American, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese companies.
Additionally, most Asian funds own both the IP and capital (often with government backing), making European attempts futile.
Essentially, the EU would have to start from scratch and decades behind countries with whom the EU already has FTAs with that have expanded capacity well before the EU and thus would be able to crush any incipient European competitor.
Why are you overlooking European semiconductor champions? STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, and NXP Semiconductors. All of them are skilled enough to build and operate a DRAM fab in Europe. A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.
> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, chip factories do pollute... a lot.
Countries like South Korea or Taiwan have adapted all their legislations and tax, environmental regulations to allow such factories to operate easily. The EU and EU countries will never do that... better outsource pollution and claim they care about the planet...
I am a CAD engineer and software developer who has worked in manufacturing a lot in the UK in various industries - products as big as superyachts and as small as peristaltic pumps. I think if the UK and EU are to try and defend their weakening and shrinking manufacturing sectors (these industries have been disappearing for my entire adult life) then it is possible but difficult...In 10 to 20 years it will be impossible.
The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.
We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!
This is going on for decades and I wonder what the actual business model for the EU economy is in the future. With all factories soon gone, will Europe rely on agriculture, tourism and some services only? Back to a "developing country" economy?
Even the most excellent education system takes several yeas to educate a high-schooler to a level of a junior engineer. Then several more years are needed for the best of them to become senior engineers, with the knowledge and experience that a university alone cannot provide.
So, we're looking at a decade-long project at least, even if everything goes as planned, and crazy fast, in the technical and administrative departments.
All the more reason to start now I guess. Putting it off isn't going to get them that knowledge and experience any sooner. If something happens over the next 10 years that eliminates our need for memory chips things will probably be either too messed up or too wonderful for anyone to cry over the years they needlessly spent trying to secure a domestic source of RAM.
> Doesn’t the EU have an excellent education system?
Excellent universities, overall. But results from primary and secondary schools are nose diving at a more than alarming rate in several EU countries. Literacy rates are falling, math grades are falling. There's IMO only so much time before universities begin to be affected as well.
> Doesn’t the EU have an excellent education system?
Well, the EU has not manufactured a whole lot of chips in the last 30 years, where do you get the people with the professional experience to teach new engineers... Oh you mean you have to import the teachers from South Asia too? /s and it takes what, 5 years at the minimum to train an engineer? France and UK used to produce entire home computers... in the 80's...
Come on, STM, Nordic, Infineon, NXP are all European. There is a bunch of chip-making installations in Dresden, Germany (Global Foundries, Bosch, etc), and there's Intel Fab 34 in Ireland. BTW TSMC is planning to open a production facility in Europe in 2027.
This is not comparable to Taiwan or the Shenzen area, but it's definitely not nothing. Some local expertise exists, even though it may be not the most cutting-edge.
ASML, which is based in the Netherlands, produces chip-making machines which TSMC and everyone else use to produce said chips. I think they got some expertise too :)
tbh u can basically do this now lol... no flag needed.
if u want it to sound more real u just gotta tell the bot to write that way. like literally just ask it to throw in some typos or forget to capitalize stuff. or use slang and kinda ramble instead of being all robotic and organized.
It costs money. Getting an ID here costs about 5% of minimum wage if you order it online + travel (you still have to travel there for the photos and pickup). It costs even more if you apply in person.
You could buy 19 gallons of milk for that money (80 liters).
The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans.
That may explains the news sites with thousands of cookies and tracking bullshit, but it doesn't explain small brick and mortar stores blocking traffic
Why wouldn't it? It exposes them to unknown risks because they're not lawyers while providing negligible returns since they are not geared towards a European audience.
>"[...] But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
The paradox of tolerance is not about censoring others. If anything, censorship lands on the side of the intolerant of this paradox.
Something to consider is that input tokens have a cost too. They are typically processed much faster than output tokens. If you have long conversations then input tokens will end up being a significant part of the cost.
It is in the specific case that you don't have biometric or PIN login set up on the device and you use a password manager that doesn't require authentication. In that case, the only factor is "something you have". Otherwise, it is still a multi-factor authentication because the device itself still represents "something you have", and your device unlock represents "something you know" or "something you are".
The "app" is probably a web page written in JS. Rarely its a native app in either Kotlin or Swift but then you have to maintain 2 different apps in 2 different languages with 2 different OSes for the devs. So unless the app really specifically requires something special, its just a web page. Even (and especially) your banking app.
I would stop using bank requiring phone app to do banking, simple as that, both my main EU accounts use sms verification codes and extra password, which is fine with me. If they will require an app, they will lose customer.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
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