RetroFed
Huawei is building its own DRAM fab, and it could reshape RAM prices for everyone
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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/chusskaptaan on 2026-07-26 17:06:35+00:00.
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GalacticSushiTomorrow’s headline: “EvilTechAI™ Has Signed an Agreement To Purchase Huawei’s Entire Stock Of Ram For The Next Five Years”
Either that or “US company cries to daddy Trump about “China bad!” and Trump bans Huawei ram.”
MalReynoldsIf the US wants to cut off its nose to spite its face, good, more for the rest of the world…
No, we already know that most of the production will go to Chinese datacenters.
The mandate formalizes a policy trajectory already underway. Beijing introduced a requirement in August 2025 that data centers source at least 50% of chips locally.
With the demand, that 50% requirement likely means almost all of the Chinese domestic production for quite some time. And the mandate will most likely rise to 100% as soon as Chinese domestic production can cover it.
It’ll still be embargoed.
ZikejiYes, but it’ll lighten the demand on other DRAM manufacturers, so we should still see some benefits.
Yeah, there’s already a few Chinese memory makers who have been ramping up production as fast as they can. Feels like a drop in a river though.
It will never lighten the demand because the speed they are building new data centers is always going to be faster than any DRAM manufacturer can ramp up production rate on their existing production line or building new production line. Building data centers is always easier than making DRAM chips in a fab because of the complete different level of technological sophistication.
This can only help reduce the rate which the demand sprints further and further ahead than supply, but ultimately the only thing that can stop the demand from further increasing exponentially so that DRAM supply could catch up and start to lower down the price is for the whole generative AI industry (among other things) to implode so they don’t all race against each other building new data centers anymore.
And we can already see that new consumer DDR5 RAM boards and consumer products using the Chinese CXMT DRAM chips (such as some of the recent Lenovo ThinkPad laptops) are not one cent cheaper than similar spec’ed products using non-Chinese DRAM chips, in fact some are even $100-200 more expensive, probably because the scale of supply chain is still lagging behind for them because the Chinese DRAM chips with modern specs only became available in the market relatively recently.
I’ve often wondered about this, how much trouble would you get in for that?
I suppose by the time you managed to get one to your country it wouldn’t still be cost effective after the extra middle men?
Idk like surely they don’t have sniffer dogs for RAM in packages do they?
If it was only a minor infraction with no jail time I’d seriously consider rolling the dice on it because I bet its like half the price of whatever equivalent they’ll sell you in western countries. Can’t do it with the cars but RAM seems do able for sure.
You need a motherboard, too. With secure boot permanently activated you will only be allowed to run windows, which only runs on properly registered hardware. But then again, with your motherboard, how do you run the internet verification app if your operating system doesn’t get the keys to log in?
It would still help for the same reason the strait of hormuz being closed is pushing up prices in the US despite us not actually using the oil from there. Any change in global supply has an effect on prices.
Much like other things, prices are still set globally according to global supply and demand.
Think it will have enough production volume before Ai implodes to make a difference?
CXMT and other Chinese producers already have been ramping up production, all signs still point to shortages for a year or until said theoretical Ai implosion where orders stop getting paid.
daggermoonSo, I can’t import it? Sounds difficult to enforce.
The dells, hps and lenovos of the world can’t sell it, so it’s not in retail, so typical people won’t really have access to it. Same deal with all the phone manufacturers and then basically any electronic device with NAND.
It can still provide pressure to lower price but it inhibits the effects locally quite a bit. It’s like how super cheap cars can be imported to latin american countries but if you want anything remotely similar in the US the costs to get it here make it pointless and thus no cheap cars exist here brand new (more or less.)
if they can build one production line they can also build two. Unless AI grows even further, many DRAM chips will end up in the consumer market.
AshUchihaSo ram crash incoming?
I find a crash unlikely because any reduction in AI drmand will immediately be taken by consumers. Long term the $/GB will go down but I doubt any reduction more than 50% of current prices which are up 400% from last year.
People will say “crash"like when housing “crashed” but it only meant people were paying 2x more than before the bubble instead of 4x more.
Almost with certainty, We’ve just heard from A-Data CEO that he expect RAM prices to stay high for at least another decade.
There is zero caution in the market, everybody is riding the AI wave, and when it collapses RAM and SSD prices and other hardware will too.
The question i not “if” but “when”.
UnderpantsWeevilEveryone who isn’t currently blocking the import and sale of Huawei hardware, anyway
Hey. I got an idea!!!! AI powered by car tires!
Here’s how it works…you stop selling car tires to the public, and you use the tires to boil water to run turbines and power AI.
Predictably, the tires would become very expensive for everyone. Some rubber manufacturers in other countries would see this higher price and relentless demand as a way to entry the market. Meanwhile the consumer would pay thru the nose for every tire set. Deliveries would become Uber expensive (pun intended). Suddenly, people would stop being able to afford the cost of tires so they would use public transportation which may include trams with no tires, just metal wheels. A few years pass and the car industry collapses due to having mo option for tires. Other parts of the car start becoming expensive too like paints, vinyl etc…all re-routed to power up the AI turbines.
A decade later nobody drives. We just wait for the tram and take delivery via lorry or drone drop. Blimps become a thing. Trains resurge. China looks into developing their own tires. But too late, ten new generations of kids going thru grade school have now grown up without ever riding a car or knowing what convenient and polluting it was.
Now, China has to again teach people how cool it would be to own your own car. Nobody is familiar with the concept anymore and most become skeptical. The older generation is thought to be too old to matter so our voice goes right into the wall. The kids meanwhile learn how to ask questions to AI to solve math problems….like “you’re a math expert, what is 4 times 4?"
“you’re a math expert, what is 4 times 5?"
“you’re a math expert, what is 4 times 6?"
Etc.
One day a kid stands up and asks “what’s a math expert?”. The teacher confidently replies “chatGPT”, what’s a math expert? Chatgpt already knows the answer, a math expert is how you would ask an AI a math question! Of course!
Car makers would ask car making questions but always get rerouted to trains. Heck even murderers would forget how to properly murder someone. They would as something like “I don’t like PePe over there and would like them to stop existing, is there anyway you could make them not exist anymore?”. Runners would ask “I want to be able to move faster than walking, is there a way to do that without a vehicle?”
No one would be around to help people recall how to do things. The world would be good in a few generations… that’s when chatGPT stops working altogether and no one knows where even it lives.
ShredderFeederI didn’t realize that Huawei had figured out how to install spyware on RAM…
Protectionists complain about Chinese market dominance, yet Chinese companies are the only ones entering the DRAM market in response to the dramatic increase in demand.
It is way too late to be starting a new chip fab for it to be relevant to the current market. If they are producing reliable chips 5 years from now that’ll be fast.
MyOpinionChina speed will kick in and it will be next year they will own the market.
Cxmt is already one of their most valuable companies in the stock market
inariNot likely. It doesn’t matter how much slave labor you throw at it, getting a new fabrication machine to the necessary precision to make modern chips requires a lot of time.
I mean making the machines to make chips and making a factory that uses said machines are two different things.
There are already factories in China making DDR5 and DDR4 ram now days.
Huawei would just provide the support and resources needed to scale up a new large factory.
No slave labor needed. All you need is a modern, advanced, high skill, responsive industrial base which China has.
I mean making the machines to make chips and making a factory that uses said machines are two different things.
True.
There are already factories in China making DDR5 and DDR4 ram now days.
Are they actually fabricating the silicon, or just packaging it?
No slave labor needed. All you need is a modern, advanced, high skill, responsive industrial base which China has.
Sure, like the people working at Foxconn:
https://truthout.org/articles/a-suicide-survivor-the-life-of-a-chinese-migrant-worker-at-foxconn/
They are making it from scratch. There are lots of sources but this is the first one I found. I assume they package it as well.
Foxcom assembles sub models into complete products. Still higher than slave labor level skills, but not as high as chip fabrication I admit. You need a skill base to assemble phones at a high level.
They have a domestic market to serve first. And they are fast at scaling up - but not that fast.
Give them half a decade.
Maybe they are aiming for something like Temu: ultra low quality, super cheap and ready to flood the market in 6 months
Understanding it’ll take some time for any competition to have an impact, it’s still nice to see that someone, somewhere in the world is looking at this manufactured scarcity and deciding not to exploit it.
I wouldn’t enter a cartel-protected market either if I had to finance that myself. If I had a captive bloc-sized market at home though…
China is big. There are a lot of customers there. And the government tends to plan long-term and is heavily subsidizing chip making tech for geopolitical reasons. Entering the western market is high-risk. Entering the Chinese market as a Chinese company and then also selling outside China after scaling up is low-risk.
mesaI brought up last time that if RAM prices keep going up and up, it makes more economic sense to make more factories/facilities.
Theres always those people who say that it doesn’t make sense to make new facilities, but I really dont see chip shortages to stop. With climate change being a thing and supply chain issues popping up more and more, I just dont see an end within the next 10 years. Makes more sense to bring some of that in house.
There’s a reason. US is buying all memory fab capacity to deprive other countries, including China, from having access to RAM. The RAM companies, taking advantage of this situation and colluding, are raising prices and limiting production to create false scarcity. Unfortunately this means the average American has to pay arm and a leg for even small amounts of memory and storage.
Even if you started a few years ago, you won’t get a working fab producing anything within 5 years and that is considering if it’s a 5 or 7nm chip. If you want anything as advanced as tsmc 2nm chips, you’re well within 10-15+ years.
I live in Taiwan and have friends who work at TSMC. They are NOT kidding around when it comes to security. No personal cellphones. No smart devices. My buddy couldn’t get approved for a basic pedometer.
I’m aware you probably didn’t mean it like this (or maybe did), but it kind of sounds like you’re saying they’re better of not doing anything at all. Who cares about long term goals 🤷♂️
No, I’m saying this article is literally meaningless. Nobody knows what the hell will happen in 1 year let alone 15+ years later.
Assuming TSMC or Samsung or hell, even Intel didn’t do ANY improvements or even finish the fabs they are CURRENTLY working on. Even with this rare assumption, Huawei won’t effect the market. They are simply too far behind the tech to be able to make a difference.
“YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BREAK THE MONOPOLY! NOT JOIN THEM!”
5 years from now.
mannycalaveraAnd they should rightly ban sales to the US. Check mate orange man.
I voted democrat the last 15 years, yet because im in the usa, fuck me right? go fuck yourself
Huawei is far ahead of Nvidia in AI clusters despite sanctions made against it, and 5 year behind tech stack. 50% cost/performance advantage over GB300 nvl72, (including building costs) by building outdoor siteable pods with 3 week lead times. CXMT is now most valuable company in China, but because of Huawei sanctions, they sell 64gb ddr5 modules at higher price than Samsung just to Huawei. Huawei needs its own RAM fab because it is harassed by west, and Chinese suppliers price to them with “captured customer” awareness.
I know chip and RAM fabs are incredibly difficult and expensive to build, but how is the several trillion $ out there just up for grabs for anyone that can undercut the like 4 companies that have one not enough for tons of huge companies to say “I don’t care what it costs, I don’t care what you have to do, because even if I pay 50x what it costs nvidia to make a fab, I will still be scrooging like a villain”?
For western-oriented companies, it’s a trap. All RAM makers outside China are in a single cartel. When anyone tries to undercut prices, they all lower their prices too and starve out the new competitor. Then, prices go up again.
This is why only China can solve the RAM crisis. They need their own full-scale domestic RAM production for geopolitical reasons and are therefore not disincentivized by the cartel existing.
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