Thats how you know you are dealing with a cartel.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Yeah, kinda shows there's zero competition in the market.
I know it'd be expensive, but I wonder if it'd be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They've certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
I don't know if there's a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram.
There's a reason why there's only, like, three RAM manufacturers. It's horrifically expensive to start production.
Chips. Where are they made? Right now its in Taiwan. Wafers for these chips are the most expensive part and that requires special factories and incredibly expensive engineers.
Valve cant just make chipa, they have to make it in quantities to satisfy demand while justifying upstart costs.
Yeah, you have to make much more than you need and sell the excess to keep per unit costs down. At that point you're a chip manufacturer. I'm not sure even valve could afford the startup costs involved.
In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.
Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can't just bomb them into submission... Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.
And China also can't really invade because all the facilities that make the silicon are rigged to self destruct if China puts boots on their soil, at least last I heard.
It's a lot of things. But complex tech can involve literally thousands of hardware engineers. Each with very specific skills.
The proximity of these highly skilled workers to cheap chinese labour is another reason why this is difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Would be brilliant
I mean, it would bring global tech to a standstill. It would be a significant problem. Once existing stuff broke, there would be no replacement. I know very little about chip manufacture, except that the lithography machines are fantastically complex and costly. It would probably take years to spin up new production.
This seems like a pretty solid mutually assured destruction deterrent and doesn't even involve nukes.
From what I can find, it looks like ASML has a software brick they can just drop into the update stream. As cool as physical disabling would be, a remote software trigger is simpler and leaves the machines in tact to spin back up after aggression ends
AsmL is a dutch company...
Also ,i'm not sure if HBM requires the smallest nodes
Manufacturing their own sticks would onlympush the problem to the price of RAM chips.
The resources it takes to start manufacturing modern RAM chips is such that THE ENTIRE FUCKING NATION OF CHINA is finally getting around to it.
I know Valve is a big company, but that's a pretty bite to chew and swallow.
Buying chips from CXMT and manufacturing the sticks is likely to be a solid business for someone. No idea if Valve wants to be the ones doing it, though.
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