Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.

The global market is anarchy in the literal sense and no one is bound by a higher authority. Coercion and cartels are part of a free market.

Economic efficiency actually requires a lot of rules and regulations to achieve the free market playground we like to imagine.

Countries decided the extent to which they’d like to engage in free trade together. It is a knob that we’d hope our leaders would turn strategically. (Regardless of whether or not we think our leaders actually are doing a good job of it…).

For the most part, free and open trade is beneficial to the Western world order. But I think it's quite straightforward to imagine conditions under which it is not, many of which are currently in effect.

US control of EUV technology is probably the most obvious present one, but limitations on nuclear proliferation are an obvious case where there is no free market. Even selling civilian nuclear technology is controlled.

You may think of it analogously to Free Speech. The dream is complete and total expression. The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter. Consequently, certain kinds of expression are not permitted - notably defamation. Think of it as more a North Star navigation ideal constrained by the trade winds (I suppose the Westerlies would be more relevant, but I couldn't resist the pun).

If you want a couple of reads, I enjoyed A Splendid Exchange about the history of trade, which I followed by the resurgent-though-once-dismissed Zeihan's Disunited Nations (which is more a hypothesis book than a history book).

We have been slowly moving towards centralized computing again since 2010s

With governments backing this trend of AI with military funds it is only natural for the others to follow and making computing even more centralized.

By 2020s, Nvidia announce the plan to become more b2b only and then at some point a cloud only company, not even selling the assets.

I don't mean you won't have your smartphone, but it is a dumb terminal compared to the capacities you'll have and maybe need daily.

I paid almost every month since gpt4 came out but mine lapsed when Gemini was released and I haven't even thought of logging in.

The subscribers are exactly the users who would migrate to Gemini. Then your left with the prospect of this giant free chatgpt user base setting money fire.

Wouldn't be shocking at all looking back 10 years from now that maybe the path that Altman stays fired would have been the better path.

Between Google, other labs and China the risk of commoditization is climbing and so why would investors continue to throw money at them? Kind of the same problem people are starting to bring up regarding Nvidia order book no? Do SoftBank and Oracle have $500B in cash to go through, or does it count on new investors coming in to not implode?

Edit: From the Stargate page on Wikipedia it seems indeed there is a big uncertainty regarding financing:

> On August 7, 2025, Bloomberg reported that the project had not started and no funds were raised to meet the project's initial $500 billion budget. Market uncertainty, American trade policy, and AI hardware valuations caused the delay according to a Bloomberg News report

Quite lazily done and just not pleasant to read.

Also consider:

Warehouses of small, high-value items that are fungible and untraceable.

That will create multiple huge targets for a big heist. And they'd best have good eyes on their security people too.

Sounds like something big enough for organized crime to target.

Does it? It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now. Trump managed to unite almost the entire world.

Is the goal also to hurt South Korean businesses and all businesses in the world, just to "pwn China" basically?

All industrialized countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy. It's a pre-condition of industrialization. A nation cannot industrialize without large scale state policy. And once industrialized, all nations maintain large-scale state industrial policy. Are you saying there never has or can be a "free and global" market? Or just when china does it?

> You may think of it analogously to Free Speech.

It's nothing like free speech as free speech is a constitutional right granted within a nation.

> The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter.

That's rich coming from someone peddling zeihan. I've always wondered what kind of morons actually believe his nonsense. Now I know.

did AI write this?

Should be, as in, new legislation should criminalize it? What's the generalized principle? Or should be, as in existing law should cover it? And if so, what law / how?

That is not "totally normal".

> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses

Much more likely this is just a detail of the contract so that OpenAI can guarantee allocation. I would be surprised if the actual wafers entered OpenAI hands before being fully packaged.

This is completely wrong. China and Russia are very much working against it.

The globalized free market wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so 90s-era understandings of how things are "supposed" to be will need to be revised.

but it's not a short term deal. funny enough, there's a cohort of bonds that never even made one payment. They are called first payment default bonds. There is a cheekier nickname for them, but it escapes me at the moment.

Admittedly, Europe was being slow to reconfigure until finally forced to do so this year but they've jumped on board now too.

And in typical historical fashion, everybody with less little influence/independence to project their own sphere are now cautiously but attentively jockeying to accumulate the best deals they can gather among those they do.

The world is far from united, even if many do happen to share opinion about the administration.

China did not let US companies establish completely foreigner subsidiaries, yet the US granted it MFN status.

However, the US had protective tariffs since ever too.

Not to mention the controls on migration and remote work (which is a very significant drag on economic growth, as it prevents more efficient allocation of labor).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics)

I think the event is big enough to stop them and send them behind bars.

> Samsung

I think that Samsung -and other manufacturers- have been intentionally limiting their production capacities so as not to devalue the prices of their chips (for SSD at least) so may be they are an interested part. This, combined with the madness we are seeing, is abuse^2 . I think they should also end up behind bars.

Left-wingers are only globalist in the most literal sense of "well, I'd like it if we got rid of these migration barriers". "Internationalist" would be a better term for them.

Globalist Nationalism is an ideology of contradictions. It purports that, no really, you're the real master race and everyone else's just a stooge that'll get taken out the moment we can get rid of these pesky liberals with their freedoms. They need shittons of spatial partitioning to make that work.

Trump's America First in practice relies on a near-sided and overly simplistic understanding of the world (Win-lose, whatever is benefitting others must be a hinderance to the USA). Hence fighting the tariff wars against allies (Canada, Eu). Hence destroying Nato' credibility that was carefully built for 70 years. Hence ceasing to be Ukraine's ally (but continuing to be a trade partner, that sells weapons as long as Europe is paying). Hence helping Putin. Hence instigating problems with Taiwan if that means that TSMC will move some manufacturing to the USA.

It's a really miopic view, but at least on their part the behavior is intentional (consequences, on the other hand, are surprise for them).

Mmmh.

The characters and plots are obviously all exaggerations and fabrications of reality but there are many interesting themes in his novels.

Of course, reading him like he is Edward Gibbon would be pretty foolish but The End of the World is just the Beginning is a great book.

Didn't they announce some kind of AI-silicon recently? Wouldn't it be for that?

They have no incentive to purchase a rapidly-depreciating asset and then immediately shelve it, none

They might have to warehouse inventory until they can spin-up module-manufacturing capacity, but that's just getting their ducks in a row

And? Why should they be obligated to pay for all the middleman steps from fab down to module? That includes: wafer-level test, module-level test (DC, AC, parametric), packaging, post-packaging test, and module fabrication. There's nothing illegal or sketchy about saying, "give me the wafers, I'll take care of everything else myself."

> not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet

DRAM manufacturers design and fabricate chips to sell into a standardized, commodity market. There's no secret evolutionary step which occurs after the wafers are etched which turns chips into something which adheres to DDR4,5,6,7,8,9

> It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM

Who cares?

It would require half of one distribution center of a major retailer.

Also, as an aside, yes, most of the American West was largely lucked into. America was lucky that France and Spain were dirt broke, that Britain was distracted by continental conflicts with France and Russia, and that native societies had been decimated by disease and a subsequent collapse in governance. That's not to say that there wasn't smart, farsighted leadership in American government, but it was a weak power.

Nevertheless, unless you’re not storing them in a clean room of appropriate class (or in a vacuum pack), assume 18 months for undiced wafers.

In terms of size, I would think that stored in cassettes or carriers a vacuum sealed, it shouldn’t be too much. A 25 wafer pack is about half meter cube? A 40ft shipping container is about 68m^3. So one container can store about 140 packs of 25 wafers each. That’s 3500 wafers. They’re talking about 900k wafers. That’s about 260 containers. Call it 300 with extra space and stuff. Not exactly hard to provision.

I'd love to hear your examples of this happening. For $22K you can get a BYD Dolphin Surf in Europe. And that's a pretty small car. What are you paying $60K for in the US that's the same size?

Maybe let's try a different match up. The BYD Atto 3 seems to start around 40K in Europe. It's smaller than a Model Y, and people say it is slightly lower in market position, but close enough. The Model Y starts at around 40K as well.

Are the comparisons between expensive US cars (remember the average is just above 50K, and plenty of perfectly good cars like a Honda Civic can be had for half that) and Chinese cars in China?

It even seems to skirt around notions of illegal vertical integration. For example in this address from 1998, a former FTC commissioner describes several types of illegal "vertical alliances", all of which rely on both the upstream supplier and the downstream consumer being aligned in anticompetitive intent, which (if the article is to be believed) they couldn't have been here because there are two suppliers who were unaware of each other's deals.

Is it really not illegal to just buy up a huge chunk of a critical input for an industry and stockpile it for the purpose of locking out competitors? Seems hard to imagine that some robber baron of the 19th century didn't already do this.

There is a certain level of crazy that crowds can find when people identify something as a fundamental industrial product critical to national security and simultaneously someone is calling for companies buying a lot of it [0] to be made illegal. If something is critically important to industry then companies should be encouraged to dump as much money as they like in the sector. Otherwise industry will suffer.

[0] And OpenAI is probably going to turn out to be closely associated with US national security too.

It screws up the price for their competitors. That's an incentive. Particularly with so many "AI datacenter" buildouts on the horizon.

There's also the question of if OpenAI operated In good Faith (from a search: "Another sign of bad faith is withholding crucial information..."), and- of course- the South Korean government can step in as well. In fact- as a worldwide issue- any sufficiently large State(or group of States) can take issue with it.

OpenAI will have issues if they find themselves unable to buy power equipment (Schnider, Eaton). Or, perhaps anybody associated with OpenAI management or funding is arrested the second they step foot in Europe. This is already a nightmare of an International Incident.

From the article

> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!

I guess we'll have to see if they in fact just keep "unfinished" RAM in warehouses like the article says and not roll them out into datacenters for a legitimate use as they are finished.

It is the malicious purpose and the clear harm to most of America that ought to provide motivation to enforce any law this is at odds with.

Pretending computing is a luxury in 2025 is nonsense as is ignoring the obviously manipulative purpose that is so clear.

I'm not saying it's true, but it is suspicious at the very least. The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab + PCB assembly to turn them into usable RAM modules. Why does OpenAI want to become a RAM manufacturer, but of only the process post-wafer.

Do you think that's fine, or do you think that implication is wrong and OpenAI does actually plan to deploy 40% of the world's DRAM supply?

That also meets the specifications of a clean room, and is actively maintained as one?

If OpenAI bought 40% of the annual capacity of finished memory, with the goal of using it in their server farms ASAP, that's one thing.

But unfinished wafers that still need to be protected to finish the manufacturing process, that OpenAI itself does not have any capability to do?

That to me looks like a preemptive strike against competitors, which also affects any other industry that requires RAM, in an attempt to develop a monopolistic position.

I can't see how this isn't a massive national security issue for any country that needs devices requiring RAM for new systems and maintenance of existing ones (pretty much all of them...) to manage critical infrastructure, national defence, public and social services, and so on.

Cyclical companies are easily burned by investing in infrastructure right at the peak. It happens all the time with little mining companies, and I think DRAM manufacturers are sort of the mining companies of tech.

So it's really just tariffs and taxes making it that expensive elsewhere.

They tried it and lost their shirts. When you hoard a critical input, that input doesn't just disappear. You spend huge amounts of money pushing the price up, and then the market price turns against you as people finally figure out that the hoarding was just a stunt, that you don't really have a higher-valued use for the stuff you hoarded, and all of it is going to be right back on the market sooner or later.

If what we've heard about no acceptable pre-training runs from them in the last two years trying to increase the memory for training by two orders of magnitude is just a rehash of what got them from gpt2 to gpt3.

The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0].

Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system.

The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary!

tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system.

[0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on.

[1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...

You have no evidence of that. Even at face value, the idea of "cornering the market" on a depreciating asset with no long-term value isn't a war strategy, it's flushing money down the toilet. Moreover, there's a credible argument OpenAI wanted to secure capacity in an essential part of their upstream supply chain to ensure stable prices for themselves. That's not "cornering the market," either, it's securing stability for their own growth.

Apple used to buy-up almost all leading-edge semiconductor process capacity from TSMC. It wasn't to resell capacity to everyone else, it was to secure capacity for themselves (particularly for new product launches). Nvidia has been doing the same since the CUDA bubble took off (they have, in effect, two entire fabs worth of leading-edge production just for their GPUs/accelerators). Have they been "cornering" the deep sub-micron foundry market?

The wafers are processed. That means Samsung/Hynix have taken the raw ("blank") wafers, then run them through their DRAM lithography process, etching hundreds of DRAM dies ("chips") onto the wafer.

You could attach test probes to individual chips on the wafer and you'd have a working DRAM chip. In fact, that's how testing is performed: you connect to each die one at a time with a "probe card" which supplies power & ground, plus an electrical interface for functional testing.

If OpenAI takes possession of the processed wafers and wants finished RAM modules, they need to do a few things: test each die (expensive), saw the wafer into individual chips (cheap), package them (moderately expensive), test them again (medium expense), and then assemble the final module (inexpensive). Modern semiconductor test facilities cost billions of dollars and take years to build, so they'd need to immediately outsource that work (typically done in Southeast Asia)

OpenAI likely doesn't want to do any of this. They probably just want to make sure they're in control of their own destiny with regard to DRAM, then decided the best place to accomplish that was by cutting deals directly with the DRAM semiconductor producers. This will allow them to take the wafers to the existing supply chain, then contract them to turn the wafers into finished modules.

Am I crazy for wanting this to be in Full ECC RAM modules suitable for composition into many device factors with hope that we'll finally go to reliable memory for all markets as a result?

I'm not saying it justifies the price difference, but there are changes between the cars.

OpenAI's entire business strategy thus far can be summarized as "flushing money down the toilet", so that isn't actually as unlikely as you're making it sound.

and here's a followup from the same commissioner https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/speeches/vertical-issue...

To be fair, @dmix explicitly mentioned the $20k price was for other countries

So no, they are the Euro spec car.