RetroFed
Possibly the beginning of the collapse of the tech market - driven entirely by greedy memory manufacturers
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sanitation
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I’m not sure what you mean by the collapse of the tech marker?
If nobody can afford the products any more, the manufacturers will go bankrupt. If businesses can’t afford new hardware, they’ll be forced to cut back on investment. Then you have a nice little death spiral going. I really don’t understand why the EU don’t take any anti trust enforcement action on this. They’re asleep at the wheel, as per standard procedure.
Is that supported by the article? Right now, data centers are still buying the products. It’s not that no one can afford them.
To be fair, who is collapsing will not be SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung. The companies that get shafted are those where people buy their ramsticks and NAND storage from: Sandisk, G.Skill, Corsair and many others. Those had to take up debt to have enough cash on hand to buy products to sell because of the soaring prices, and if the amount of cash they have to ask for to cover the price of doing business is higher that what costumers are willing to pay, they get stuck with unsellable product and a bunch of loans.
That makes a lot of sense to me, but there’s no evidence that those companies are in significant distress yet and not really the same thing as the collapse of the entire tech sector
As i said, they already had to take up loans to even have product to sell - just so that their own manufacturing doesn’t simply stop. Those weren’t small loans - 3 Taiwanese DRAM producers alone had to take up 880 million dollars in loans. Selling Ramsticks itself is a pretty low-margin business; If they cannot sell the products they took the loans for at least at the cost + interest, they are pretty fucked, since reducing the price will not help them in their situation. This situation will repeat in the storage sector, and if those two sectors get wiped, it will have a domino effect on every business in the DIY-PC market, because at that point no company that sells PC parts will make sales anymore. No need to buy processors, mainboards, cooling, cases and so on if you don’t have the funds to buy such essentials as ram and storage.
That’s not what that article says, though. It says this:
That’s spread out across at least 6 companies, not 3, and it’s not an 880 million loan, it’s a combination of loans and stock. That’s a lot of money, but it’s not an indication of distress. Corporations take “not small” loans frequently. To some degree, it’s bad business NOT to have liabilities.
None of these are traded in the US, so it’s a little out of my wheelhouse to look up their proxy statements/10Ks, or whatever the equivalent is on the Taiwanese exchange, so I have no idea what the covenants are for any of these loans (e.g. if they’re secured by assets) and I’m totally open to it if someone has hard evidence that these corporations are in any immediate danger of being unable to cover their loans, but I don’t see it in the article OP linked or the one you did.
I think there’s a lot of wishful thinking going around the AI bubble. We all wanna see it pop. But the unfortunate truth is that sometimes it takes a really long time for a bubble to finally pop.
I wasn’t talking about the RAM manufacturers, but all the ones that use RAM in they’re products. They’re already seeing huge downturns in sales and it’ll only get worse.
Got a fair few games that would run at 144FPS on a raspberry pi, though some might be annoying to run x64 on ARM, not impossible. Have got a few that would run natively.
If they keep asking for higher prices I’ll just drop my specs.
AAA gaming is mostly dead to me anyway. I’m getting into retro handhelds.