What's this about?
SK Hynix's CEO expects the memory chip shortage to persist until 2030 — a four-year forecast from one of the three companies that make almost all of the world's DRAM.
Why can't they just build more fabs?
Because a memory fab costs on the order of $20 billion and takes three to five years from decision to volume output. The industry has been burned repeatedly by building into a boom that ended before the capacity arrived, so it now under-builds deliberately. AI demand made it worse in a specific way: high-bandwidth memory for accelerators uses the same production lines as ordinary DRAM and sells at a far higher margin, so capacity moved toward HBM and the consumer supply shrank. A four-year forecast is really a statement that nobody is willing to build enough to fix it.
Why is it worth noticing?
HN 63 points, 79 comments
- It is the causal explanation behind three separate stories this week: Mac prices, the Steam Deck price rise, and Cloudflare's memory-optimisation work becoming worth doing.
- "Memory is the new gold" showed up independently in the Apple thread, which is the market pricing this in.
- A supplier forecasting four more years of shortage is also a supplier telling investors margins hold — read it with that in mind.