In general I agree- the concept of red tape, environmental evaluations, etc is a good thing.
But we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.
Key is to find a middle ground- that lets a fab be built in an environmentally friendly way but also rapidly.
Is this a surprise?
Semiconductor production is a national priority for China.
This 100%.
HBM has massive profit margins. It's also hard as hell to make, as it involves multiple stacked wafers. This vid is a good catchup on that and the rest of this situation.
China will HAPPILY flood the non-HBM DRAM market with memory 'only' 2x as expensive as last year. And every PC maker, automaker, gadget maker, etc will happily buy it because as Valve famously put it, "They give us a price every month or something, and they say 'you can buy that many' and it's yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again." Source interview. If China says 'we have consistent price, we have consistent supply, we can meet your needs' and the quality is decent then it doesn't matter if it's slower or DDR4 or whatever people will love them for it.
And play that ahead.
The big 3 are focused on HBM and most of their capacity is already sold through 2027
If China can scale up production of standard DDR4/5 and sell it reliably at 200% of normal price (aka, below current market rates) then there's less incentive to build fabs. So they will let China have the consumer market with their blessings. And thus China will have made themselves essential in yet another product supply chain.
This was easy to predict.
Chinese government is not stupid. They have a strategy (more so than USA does). Years ago that was to dominate global manufacturing and supply chains. They were successful. Now the goal is to reach parity with Western chipmakers and/or get ahead. It's happening.
The AI boom was like a golden gift to them. Semiconductor prices are through the roof. So if they can produce almost anything at all in quantity it will sell for inflated prices.
While the tech companies of the world jerk each other off with AI, China is building DRAM capacity. CXMT is the first and will not be the last. They will scale quickly. If they have the process perfected they will build a fab in the time it takes USA to conduct the environmental review for the consideration of allowing a permit application to build a fab. They will not build one fab they will build 5 or 10. I'm proud to be American and I love my country but I compare USA to China on the ability to execute large projects like this and China will win every time. We have too much red tape, too many lawsuits and insurance and moving parts. China executes faster and more decisively.
So give it a year or two and China will have a fleet of pretty good fabs. They will sell memory for way less than what the others do. And then just as China made themselves indispensable for manufacturing, they will make themselves indispensable for DRAM.
Never underestimate me how out of touch business management can be.
There's a saying- corporate consultants are people who charge millions to tell you what your employees and customers have been trying to tell you for free.
Yeah 100%. Ever since Elon went Republican everybody wants to hate him. I don't blame them. It's sad and IMHO short-sighted, but these days nuance doesn't seem to be a big part of popular decision making. So something like 'he's a weird guy who works his people to the bone and he has shitty politics, but he's overall doing things that are good for our society' is too much to ask from most popular discourse.
It's pretty clear that the other automakers really do not understand vehicle computing on a fundamental level. Even the supposedly connected modern cars are still using old infrastructure with tons of little can bus modules everywhere each doing one thing. And they are all supplied by the usual handful of companies like Delphi and Bosch.
If any of the automakers took a page out of Tesla's playbook, namely design your own hardware and software, and focus on flat out building a better vehicle rather than figuring out how to nickel and dime every user, they would make a killing.
This could also be solved with regulation. And probably should be solved with regulation. Basically say that automakers are prohibited from extracting any personal data from a vehicle including driving data or location data, unless a. The user explicitly opts in (and an opt-in may not be required for any other functionality), and b. Extracted data may not be sold or shared or used for any purpose other than providing services to the user (such as navigation). And that in-car screens may not be used for any sort of advertising or promotion, unless a. The user opts in (and an opt-in may not be required for any other functionality), and b. Any advertisement on the display must include a clear way to permanently disable advertisements in two clicks or button presses.
The fact is nobody wants advertisements on their car and they know that
Reddit the company or Reddit the platform? Or both?
Personally I still have a lot of love for Reddit as a community, which extends to as a platform. I'm not a big fan of the current corporate leadership, they seem to have enough sense to not piss off users completely but it also seems pretty clear they have a vision to turn Reddit into another mindless scrolling app, and the users (many of which have been with the platform for a decade or more) are useful as free moderation staff and content producers and don't have major influence on the direction of the platform or company.
Problem is, let's say Reddit 'dies'. What exactly does that look like? It's not like the site would just shut off and go dark and everybody goes home. It is now a publicly traded company worth $30 billion. Spez is accountable to the board of directors who themselves are accountable to the shareholders. And if Reddit fails, none of them are just going to sit there and do nothing while that happens. You might get very very very lucky, the board of directors might replace company leadership with someone interested in preserving what made Reddit great. I'm talking somebody who would bring back /r/all, roll back a lot of the new Reddit style stuff, etc. More likely they would say if spez isn't making them money they will find someone who will and you'll get somebody who has no understanding of the community and decides to turn the screws on monetization. Or if the company loses a lot of value it would just be bought up by a private equity firm that would ring every last dollar out of it and run it into the ground in the process.
All I'm saying is, think of wishes like that like a genie in a bottle, you make a wish and there's a good chance it will backfire.
A small blip. Not enough to trigger a sell-off, but also if it was a reason that would be the stated reason not just 'no new AI deals'.
As a user, the decline in DAU I think is representative of a series of user-unfriendly policies and changes that the users have clearly communicated dislike of but management insists on anyway.
I'm a big fan of employee owned companies and I think that should be encouraged.
At the same time, there IS a place for investors.
But all 3 factors of production (land, labor, capital) are supposed to have equal seats at the table. In recent years capital owns the table and chairs and decides when land and labor are allowed to speak, which is not what successful capitalism looks like.
If anything this shows how totally fucked equity markets are.
So they're making way more money than expected, but they haven't sold out their users fast enough so dump the stock?
I'm not claiming Twitter is great.
But this is obviously going to fail, always was obviously going to fail. It's a PR stunt, nothing more.
Twitter will sue them, they'll settle for giving up the name and some token fine, and hopefully they're on the map. Or, their hail mary long shot will pay off and they'll get to call themselves twitter in which case holy shit they're golden. That's the strategy.
It's stupid- they'll lose in court and I doubt whatever they offer is more compelling than what's already out there.