What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work, especially in a market like memory.

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Matl 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What’s the proposed regulation that would help here? Price controls? They don’t work.

The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.

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Aurornis 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s a global phenomenon. The latency concerns for data centers are minimal, so they could be built anywhere.

If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.

This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.

If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.

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JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, imagine doing that for oil. American and EU companies that “hoard” oil get punished. The net effect would be everyone else gets to buy more and prices remain exactly the same.

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testing22321 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The old race to the bottom.

	▲	Aurornis 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s the old supply and demand in a global market. It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.

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m4rtink 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not saying this is the solution, but strategic reserves of important commodities exist.

Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?

So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.

	▲	alex43578 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Good news, you get the DDR2 that has been languishing in a salt cave for the last 20 years. Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical. I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
	▲	sib 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A strategic reserve of a commodity that (historically) depreciates at ~50% per year is a terrible trade for occasionally avoiding demand-driven price spikes.

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win311fwg 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So, in practice, if, say, the agriculture industry buys up the supply of seeds (they already effectively do) and we see it start driving significant inflation for food (a common concern), the agriculture industry would be restricted from buying seeds?

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Matl 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, because we can't apply specific regulation for specific industries where it makes sense, we have to write them as if we were LLMs so they can be proven to 'not work'.

	▲	win311fwg 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We can, but that isn't how the proposed regulation is written.

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Danox 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The market will take care of itself. The Chinese are going use this to ramp up and build more memory, and some companies out there will take it in-house, In short, they won’t be caught with their pants down again.

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mghackerlady 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The only thing the US could feasibly implement is forcing micron to allocate a certain amount of its production for consumer use

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alex43578 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Why? Why is consumer use vs corporate use a higher and better priority meriting such an intrusive regulation?

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angoragoats 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Because extreme corporate use, that is, what is happening now where a majority of supply is locked up ahead of time via B2B back-room deals, is anti-consumer. Unregulated, it is easy to see how this could lead to a perpetual "rent everything" dystopian environment for consumers.

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alex43578 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Every use of DRAM is a corporate use, with the best consumer-friendly examples like Apple’s efforts to hold down prices (until today) being thanks to “back room deals”. Nobody’s buying some DRAM to build a memory stick in their garage.

Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.

	▲	angoragoats 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You ignored the part where I mentioned "extreme" and "locked up." To be fair I wasn't necessarily clear what those meant. I'm specifically referring to the deal(s) that OpenAI signed which reserved an outsized chunk of the memory supply, for what is apparently speculative future hardware that hasn't been built yet, or at least to build hardware that no consumer or business will ever be able to physically purchase. Hopefully you'll agree that there's a difference between even a large buyer like Apple reserving a large chunk of DRAM supply to put in their products that they sell to consumers, and the anti-competitive behavior by OpenAI that I describe above.

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angoragoats 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Barring any single company from negotiating to buy more than a certain percentage of a given existing market of goods would be a start. Companies would still be free to build their own factories/fabs if they didn't like it.

That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.

	▲	Danox 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One or two companies will come out of this, designing and engineering memory and partnering with someone else to do the fab of that memory no different than making processor chips in Arizona.