Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

digitaltrees

Predatory. I hope the tech community remembers this and diversifies away from companies that behave this way

alentred

That's ... just sad.

rawling

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676382

try-working

wishful thinking from MU holders. These LTAs or SCAs are just hedges on the prices going even higher. Once spot prices start dropping, all of the agreements will be broken in a millisecond. The break up fees have already been paid! There's absolutely nothing the buyer has to do, but to simply not buy at the inflated old price and instead buy from someone else at the new, lower price. Does anyone really think that there is any agreement in the world that will keep companies paying $1000 for a product priced at $20 on the market? The larger the gap the larger the incentiv to break the agreement.

alxfrnr

"consolidated gross margin came in at 84.9 percent" They are in saas metrics territory in terms of margins, this is insane.

nok22kon

This is Capitalism working as intended - resources (RAM) are allocated to those which can extract most value from them (AI labs)

londons_explore

There is a futures market for DRAM and NAND for exactly this purpose. Why not just sell on the open market, and let traders and financiers and all their prediction models give you the best possible price?

LoganDark

Huh. It looks like Micron managed to lock in these contracts because companies are scared that prices will continue to rise. But in doing that, Micron has managed to lock themselves in a comfortably high floor price, potentially for longer than the boom is going to last. Big win for Micron.

ramon156

Micron knows the volatility that may come and secures their own seat. Makes sense. No idea why companies said yes to this.

feverzsj

That should be illegal.

cryo32

Smells like a cartel. Wonder who else is in on it?

throwaway13337

As long as I've been an adult, hardware was a commodity, and software was where the value was. Software could capture most of the value that was in the total supply chain. Now, with AI, software becomes less able to demand the margins it once did. Meanwhile, the history of low margins of hardware have created a situation where there are so few players able to demand now software-style high margins. Hardware has always been valuable but was unable to capture it's value. Those days might be over. I hope this encourages people who would build software companies to look to hardware. A lot of fun challenges there. Deeply technical, interesting ones. And now solutions will pay.

davidm-d

Isn't this the market working as intended? This agreement puts a floor on the price that Micron can sell their chips at, and a ceiling on the price that tech companies buy them. Micron wants the floor, so they can invest in more fab capacity without going bankrupt if there's a memory glut. Tech companies want a ceiling so they can keep selling their products even if there's a shortage. If there's a glut, the tech companies will just resell these chips at a loss, or take a bath on their $22 Billion of deposits. It doesn't "lock in high prices" for consumers, just the producers.

Rexxar

At some point would it be more cost efficient to replace DRAM by SRAM or some other technology and use standard cpu/gpu silicon wafers to build ram chips ?

sombragris

Thank you, AI. /s

jimmydoe

What stops Chinese from mass-producing more RAM? Or is this as hard as producing GPU?