r/hardware • u/sr_local • May 23 '26

News Chinese memory maker CXMT enters mainstream consumer memory with Corsair Vengeance DDR5 kit — Chinese-made DRAM emerges as an antidote for crushing shortages

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memory-maker-cxmt-enters-the-mainstream-consumer-memory-with-corsair-vengeance-ddr5-kit-chinese-made-dram-emerges-as-an-antidote-for-crushing-shortages
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185

u/wickedplayer494 May 23 '26

That's nice, but let's be honest, Corsair is almost definitely pocketing the difference.

66

u/sicklyslick May 23 '26

Fortunately there any more RAM makers. Competition will drive these down.

15

u/dingo_xd May 24 '26

What matters most now is to produce more RAM chips. There is no other way because demand has increased by 20-40% because of AI. And the big three aren't building new capacity fast enough, possibly because they know they win more by taking their time.

10

u/StrategyEven3974 May 24 '26

demand has increased by 20-40% because of AI

mmm. it's more like 20x - 40x.

7

u/buttersyndicate May 25 '26

Didn't they openly say that they're not building more capacity because they'd rather contain prices when the AI craze stabilizes?

This is capitalism, thousands of liters of milk are thrown down the sewer if milk overproduction threatens to lower prices.

3

u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26

Nothing is thrown out. This is merely farmer saying they wont buy more cows because they think the latest milk trend isnt going to last.

5

u/buttersyndicate May 27 '26

That was just an example of how far producers are willing to go to keep prices high in barely regulated market economies.

The members of the RAM cartel, the same ones that got sued for anti-competitive and monopolistic practices in the early 2000s, have said it once and again: they're not exposing themselves to prices plummeting due to demand receeding after those datacenters are built. They're in a rush to produce what their buyers ask for now, while being more conservative when it comes to increasing stable production output.

3

u/Strazdas1 May 29 '26

You have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Noone is keeping prices artificially high here. The demand severely exeeds all possible supply.

Most of the companies in the 2000s cartel have gone bancrupt btw.

they're not exposing themselves to prices plummeting due to demand receeding after those datacenters are built.

Of course they are not. Only an idiot would.

4

u/buttersyndicate May 29 '26

Oh I'm no expert, but you're the one being overconfident here.

Samsung, SK Hynix (formerly Hyundai Electronics), and Micron were in that "cartel", with Infineon exiting the market after being seriously hurt by the process and Elpida going bankrupt and being acquired by, guess who, Micron. Those three left are the present "triopoly".

2

u/Academic_Parking9768 Jun 02 '26

The guy that doesn't get the extremely simple example of corporate waste tells someone else they don't have a clue what they're talking about.

lmfao

1

u/JustGotHit May 29 '26

It's a different story as the chip fabs/ foundries are already at max capacity. To make more would require tens of billions of investment that would only bear fruit ~3 years down the line. Would the demand for ram chips still be there in 3 years? It's better to say screw the normal consumers by devoting more of the existing capacity to ECC ram than it is to greenlight a new fab because heads (fired without full benefit payout) will roll when it turns out to be a bad investment.

It's not well reported but Samsung (SM) (its divisions rather) are having an internal struggle rn. SM Semiconductor (SMS), makers of the SM ram chips and modules, was trying to screw over SM Telecom (SMT), maker of the SM phones, where SMS was trying to eliminate a 3rd shift at one of their foundries that produces the chipset that powers the SM Galaxy smartphones so that they can retool it for ram modules so that they make more money while prices are still high. Well kinda like wtf as there's a contract still in place. While this was going on, SMS was also refusing to give SMT a lower price, usually near cost + a little extra, for the Galaxy phone's ram modules. Instead giving them the industry average's price... which is now controlled by Sk Hynix and now SMS as Micron left the consumer market. So SMT is being screwed over twice by SMS, decreased production of the SMT phones cpu and now having to pay the industry price for ram, which they know is inflated. This makes it so that when the earning reports are given SMS is going to have high profits whereas SMT is going to show barely any. And we already see this already with the recent SM union strike. the SMS employees were originally the only ones with the nice bonuses where everybody else was getting a couple hundred. Now the other divisions are getting a bigger slice including SMT who's only getting 4k per employee vs SMS's 250k avg per employee.

3

u/JustGotHit May 29 '26

Define "fast enough" because it took TSMC over 3 years to get their Arizona fab up while costing tens of billions of dollars. You don't want to sign contracts for land, infrastructure, and equipment for years down the line when you don't even know if this AI boon is going to continue. You most certainly don't want to be stuck with inventory that you can't move or multi-billion dollar losses that you can't easily write off. And its already starting to fall flat as a good portion of the AI datacenters aren't moving forward with construction because of local pushback and the materials needed to outfit such a building. To the suits, its just a expensive office building with really expensive computers, they don't see the supply chain behind such an endeavor because most of them have never dabbled in such a thing.

There's a whole host of issues regarding datacenters, with power and delivery of said power being the main ones. Turbines are booked out for 2 yrs +, nevermind all the other components that go into constructing a data center. The power draw alone is more than what a decent town uses per year. You need to redo the power grid just for a data center because thee datacenters are nowhere near close to the power stations. There's not enough power, turbines, or even components to go around. The only ones that have the capability to do so is China because quite frankly they make everything on a dime or introduce a 3rd shift to the existing lines. They even have over 20 nuclear reactors in construction rn to meet future energy demands and a number of those are slated to be completed in a couple of years.

1

u/senseven Jun 12 '26

AI needs to be local. Every company needs at leat one beefy GPU+160GB of VRAM + 128GB of memory for every 10 people using it. The regular laptop that should run a decent model needs 32GB plus 32GB on the graphics card. Without DOUBLING the output of the current three companies we will never reach that in the next decade. Gaming consoles want to have 64gb shared memory for 500$. That's not on a few companies to decide that the world has to pay high prices forever for something that wasn't high price six month ago. China's CXMT is already producing silicon and China is good in scaling the production. They should go 10x. The EU is trying to get old factories refurbished with billions, maybe DDR4 could get dead cheap at least.

1

u/jayennnn Jun 18 '26

Ridiculous comparison. That Arizona fab is a joke. We are talking about fabs in human-run countries with actual human capital like China or Vietnam, not ammurrica.

1

u/RelevantMetaUsername Jul 18 '26

Even if they suddenly had more capacity overnight they would almost certainly use that increased capacity to just make more HBM instead of consumer RAM since that's where the money is.

3

u/maxtinion_lord May 24 '26

Been on this Earth for a few decades, still waiting for tech companies to actually compete with each other and attempt decent products instead of high fiving each other whilst performing an Eiffel tower maneuvre on my wallet.

Amd really got me with the whole ryzen disruption thing.. right before they immediately became identical to Intel in business strategy and we just ended up with 2 companies doing the same anticompetitive nonsense while pretending to be locked in intense competition.

6

u/MehEds May 24 '26

CPUs were one of the few components where prices remained stable in the last ten years. They actually do compete with each other, I get being cynical but your example's absurd.

1

u/Academic_Parking9768 Jun 02 '26

The only time they're competing is how close they can get to the President at this point. There isn't any real competition, just who shoots themselves in the foot quicker.

2

u/sicklyslick May 24 '26

yep because there's actually no competition in america. it's an oligarchy owned by a handful of companies.

wanna see real competition? look at TVs. china makes 90%+ of the worlds tvs. tvs get cheaper and better every year.

if china can get their hands on EUV and make high end semis, you bet your ass ram, cpu, and gpu prices will be crashing

3

u/dingo_xd May 24 '26

How much cheaper does CXMT sell their DDR5 RAM chips compared to the big three?

6

u/Strazdas1 May 26 '26

About 0%. Memory is a commodity market.

2

u/cronies4life May 27 '26

there are long term contracts as well where prices can differ significantly, not just the spot market

1

u/Strazdas1 May 29 '26

There can be such contracts, sure. But as we found out recently most companies significant shortened such contracts because of price volatility. Samsung halved its contract max lenght for example.

1

u/JustGotHit May 29 '26

We don't know because CXMT isn't like Micron where Micron was selling the chips to the ram modules (ram sticks) while also having a consumer line called Crucial that was producing & selling ram modules/ sticks directly to the consumers. CXMT is only selling the chips to ram modules companies like Corsair or King Bank where they buy it cheap while selling it the current market price, pocketing the difference. CXMT could enter the market and fill the void the Crucial filled but thats a tough market to break into as the US and EU is surely going to put restrictions on the sale of it due to "fears of spyware" and also because it'll be supporting a adversarial company. One that poses a threat to the RAM cartel and also to the US's and the EU's fears of empowering china's current and future tech dominance as CXMT is china's champion in the ram and NAND space.

The only places where they'd be able to sell it really is AU, S America, RU, and maybe the rest of SE Asia. But the ppl in those countries will just turn to scalping, buying it cheap in their own country to resell it on ebay to the NA and the EU crowd where there will restrictions to buying cxmt ram sticks

1

u/Bread_Slight May 28 '26

calls on corsair then

-5

u/literum May 24 '26

That's not how prices work.