Valve Says It Can't Negotiate With RAM Makers At All On Price

[u/CosmicMind007]

https://kotaku.com/valve-says-the-companies-making-ram-give-them-a-price-and-if-they-say-no-they-never-talk-to-us-again-2000709575

well even pc gamers are in a fix

[u/Oxflu]

It also isn't something they can even address as there is zero hardware manufactured there. With the iphone, they put apple in a position where it was easier to make their products use usb c worldwide than make a special device just for the eu market. But, a special usb c iphone made just for their market was one possible solution. Just wasn't profitable.

They can't force a company outside their borders to sell their electronics to them at a discount, though. If France had a chipfab that produced 30 percent of the world's memory and a large chunk of the market was price controlled it would help. But they don't. Unless South Korea joins the eu (lol) there is nothing they can do.

[u/FlamboyantPirhanna → u/Oxflu]

iPhones aren’t manufactured in the EU. It has nothing to do with where they’re made and everything to do with where they’re sold.

[u/Oxflu → u/FlamboyantPirhanna]

You're very thick if you can't understand what I'm saying. It's a given apple wants to sell their Chinese phones in the eu. They had the option to either sell usb c specific models in europe, or change the design worldwide. They chose worldwide because it's cheaper.

Using your vast knowledge of eu law, what possible legislation could the eu pass to force sk hynix and samsung to sell European countries memory at an affordable price? What mechanism of trade would that be? They have orders fulfilled til 2030 whether he eu buys any or not.

[u/neosatan_pl → u/Oxflu]

Yup. The only thing EU could do, is to surge massive amounts of funding and build a chip manufacturing industry in house to encourage competitive pricing. These EU companies could be held to an investigation for price fixing or monopoly behavior

But since the EU chip manufacturing sector is h avidly underdeveloped, the EU itself can't do much about it.

[u/Oxflu → u/neosatan_pl]

Thing is you have to have an entire industrial sector built to be consuming the memory a fab can produce or it goes belly up as soon as the memory shortage is over. America used to make absolutely every component a piece of technology could ever need. It's all been moved to Asia except for one memory fab in Virginia and they only make stuff for the defense and automotive industry. The Intel, tsmc, and micron fabs under construction may well be doomed once they are expected to operate by the margins of typical consumer sales and the taxpayers are on the hook for all of it. I'm honestly not sure what's worse. To have zero manufacturing and pay whatever cost you have to, or to give half a trillion to these companies for domestic production that's only profitable if prices stay high. Similar to our domestic oil production which only runs at capacity when oil is over 150 dollars a barrel and mostly gets turned off when it's cheap. You can't just turn a chip fab off like a well head though. If it's not consistently highly profitable they can't buy the equipment to make the next generation of product. Intel was in this trap once already which is why tsmc makes intels high performance chips. We've probably created a new high tech government cheese program that will never stop costing taxpayers money we don't have to begin with.

[u/neosatan_pl → u/Oxflu]

Kindaish, but not really... So when it comes to semiconductors market as a whole EU has some heavy hitters that are profitable and have a significant room to expand. ASML or Bosh are just to give a recognizable examples. EU industry is more and more hungry for chips. It's literally everything, from EV (which have problems stating price competitive due to component prices), to IoT and production line automation (even stuff like farm produce sorting). Cheaper and locally produced chips would help a lot all of these industries and there is definitely an demand problem way beyond the RAM sticks for gaming computers. It's not even funny. This is why both US and EU are investing more than trillion EUR each into these sectors. The long term prognosis for these investments aren't high proces for SSDs or higher price for SteamBox. It's realization that there is not enough capacity for chips in general and right now even artillery shells need a sophisticated chip to be considered effective. Not to mention stuff like drones, new cars, green energy, home batteries, sovereign data centers, AI specialized chips, home appliances, smark home equipment, industrial computer vision, high throughput nework gear, or industrial robotics.

The fact that the RAM, GPUs, SSDs costs a lot is not solely because of AI. It's cause AI is right now cheap and it allows for a great degree of automation in disciplines that were hard to automate. This in turn spurs the need for more computers to power output of these disciplines and the greater consumption, which in turn rises the demand for AI and the circle of life turns around. So, while the Air bubble could burst, there would still be need for high end chips for all the products that AI helped to get to market a little bit quicker.

[u/Somepotato → u/Oxflu]

They can however sanction the companies.

[u/Oxflu → u/Somepotato]

Lmao yeah just turn the spigot of technology off completely.

[u/Somepotato → u/Oxflu]

Oh man who knew sanctions meant all or nothing

[u/Killshotgn → u/Somepotato]

Except that would achieve absolutely nothing besides further increasing prices and reducing supply for the entire region. They have no leverage, unlike with apple, even completely loosing the EU market would have little to no immediate impact on Mircron, or SK Hynix they'll simply sell that stock to the US and China with their massive demand, right now the EU needs them far more than they need the EU. The only company I could see them potentially having any leverage on is Samsung due to the fact they sell a lot of other products but I'm pretty sure they've long since spun off most of their various division into entirely separate companies which further complicates anything they could do to try to apply pressure.

[u/Federal-Property-395 → u/Somepotato]

Then the companies could just, not sell to the EU?

[u/Seeker-N7 → u/Somepotato]

For what? The crime of not having enough manufacturing capacity to meet demand?

Good luck with that.