Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years
Memory-maker Micron has found a way to keep prices for its products sky-high for another five years, by signing 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.”
Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/25/micron-locks-in-historically-high-memory-prices-for-five-years/5261854Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
The same Micron that plead guilty to price fixing of memory 20 years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2004/02/27/memory-makers-hit-by-price-fixing-claims/1070959
Gross indeed. Fucking greedy scumbags
Hopefully Chinese firms recognize the gap in the market and increase their capacity.
They make whatever is most profitable as individual companies.
And China as a government, absolutely loves the idea of everyone's computer usage going thru giant corporations because the Chinese government owns part of every Chinese company and doesn't need a backdoor since they have a set of keys.
Like, why would they make something that they don't want and would sell for less profit margin overseas?
Why build for a bunch of broke consumers when there's a blank check for anything related to data centers right now?
That demand could disappear tomorrow. Personal computers will just get more expensive so prices will keep going up for when they have to switch back.
Why would you ever hope China would save us from this?
How the hell does one hide and then use a backdoor in ram?
could have a chip that looks for a certain sequence of bytes then changes some other bytes as a result... it would probably introduce massive latency though...
The gap is in consumer market not enterprise. Micron even focused entirely on enterprise customers. New or small chinese companies can't compete with that but can enter the consumer market with smaller prices, since no one seems to care for this gap because of higher revenue in enterprise market (just like you said). Why smaller prices? Otherwise why bothering with them instead of known brands.
They aren't going to "save us' because they're good people. It's a company like the others but must get in the global maket in someway and this is a good way.
Hey I recommend learning about how the different parts of a computer work what supply chain attacks are and are not realistic before potentially misinforming others. Your concerns are unfounded
We are still taking about NAND chips. Can you backdoor those? I would think you need to backdoor the controllers or smth at least.
because other governments wont. other governments have embraced comoanies buying eachother up so there is no competition. the enemy of my enemy is my friend
Yes, I want some slave labor RAM.
It’s all slave labour RAM, one way or another.
Remember they are traitors to actual customers when the bubble burtsts.
They should fail, totally, and vanish from the world.
Traitors would mean they were ever on your side. Welcome to capitalism, bud. They've always been on the side of maximum profit, like all other corporations.
They're like a movie actor who was in obscurity for decades and is suddenly popular. Is it being a traitor when everyone is offering larger and larger amounts for your time?
If you applied for two jobs, both said they wanted to hire you and started budding higher and higher so you'd work for them, are you a traitor to the customers who ultimately pay your inflated salary?
I don't blame Micron. I blame the people who invested billions into AI which allowed this to happen.
Five years is too long for the buyers. The AI bubble will burst before then and then the market price will drop as the inflated demand disappears, especially if this continues long enough for more production capacity to come online.
They might not have had much of a choice in making the deal, though. Micron has been extracting the absolute maximum they can out of this situation. Make a deal or get nothing. Their clients will remember, though, and flag them as an unreliable supplier. Once this ends—and these always end—they’ll likely have a lower market share and end up having to cut prices.
Micron is optimistic in saying the demand won’t start easing until 2028. A lot of the rest of the technology manufacturing industry is about to grind to a crawl if not a halt because it’s nearly impossible to get components. Some companies are already delaying product launches and I think a lot more are about to this summer as they realize what’s happening. If non-AI businesses start to slow, the whole economy starts to slow, the AI demand will falter and that’s when the bubble bursts. I’m thinking maybe by the end of this year, more likely next year.
When the bubble bursts I’m guessing at least a couple of the companies Micron signed SCAs with will fold and Micron won’t get anything.
Does it go something like this? Those companies who buy the NAND chips to make AI accelerators, SSDs and RAM for data centers are the Microns customers, like Nvidia. Even if they are in trouble and know that the datacenters are not being built, they can't cancel the deals because that would call the bubble into question. They will have to take any markup deal that Micron gives, them because if they don't there will be nothing for them nor Micron anyway.
Soooo if you raise the price sooo high then it lowers the price of barriers to entry. Congrats on maybe a year of monopoly before memory becomes a commodity like corn. Or AI crashes so hard that your customers refuse to come back. I feel like the later since using Micron memory for the past 30~ years.
is there any good reason to charge more? I remember a long time ago, the people who run youtube had to have new technology invented to be able to store the videos on there.
is anything like that happening with ram chips?
Shocker