I don't think you get how specialised these facilities are. They can't convert from one process to another, for the same reason they can't just build a new one on the new process. The physical building is not even slightly the bottleneck. If they can afford a new process they can afford a new building for it.
There's a story where a fab company tried to open a fab in America but the chips kept coming out broken, and they tried everything and the only thing that worked was disassembling the whole factory and rebuilding it in the exact floor layout of their Taiwanese one.
Sometimes they do salvage one or more machines as both processes use the same one. But that had better be worth shutting down the old process, financially.
This production is constrained by the machines in the facility. The ddr5 production line does not magically produce more silicon by staffing it with more workers.
A high-end chip fabrication line is a very highly-tuned system. It's not a case of just buying the right machines and slapping them together, even doing a copy and paste does not guarantee the right results. You need to spend a lot of time adjusting the process variables and troubleshooting issues to bring things under control, and then keep monitoring them to maintain that control because things will drift over time or further issues will occur. You also need to bring a whole new set of people up to speed with how the fab works, and they also need to learn the quirks of that specific one as they go. These fabs are already optimized for near 100% utilization of the machinery in them, so more people doesn't mean more capacity.
Is it just about the factories though? I thought a big part of the current shortage was there literally not being enough silicon wafers to meet demand so much of that supply being redirected towards HBM led to a shortage of DDR4/DDR5 production.
[−]InsidiousWombat · 2026-11-15 Sun 11:42 UTC ·
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The other things that use the wafers aren't 1000% more expensive.
On RAM side it's purely "the factories that turn wafers into RAM", and big part of the problem is that HBM just yields less bits per wafer (the number I've heard is between extra size and lower yield, about half) so more of the capacity moved to making HBM also lowers total bit count made
China are keeping their pricing high too for now. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) chips are entering the market but they don't seem to be reducing prices. Additionally I expect China will serve their domestic market preferentially. Hopefully that still drives prices down long term.
[−]TacticalCoder · 2026-11-15 Sun 11:53 UTC ·
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> Additionally I expect China will serve their domestic market preferentially.
Something China literally never did though? They seem to love flooding the world with what they produce.
Memory is different because it's largely not a consumer market, but instead an input to other products and those products are not sold to consumers but to enterprise customers. I'm guessing there are plenty of domestic enterprise customers to buy the memory produced.
those upgrades ARE ACTUAL UPGRADES, and if exiting ddr4 helps on producing more ddr5, why not?
(and the cheap chinese makers can produce plenty of those ddr4 chips, so it's NOT that "monopoly destroying the market" scenario)
you can just sell the production line and re-purpose human workers for ddr5?
There's a story where a fab company tried to open a fab in America but the chips kept coming out broken, and they tried everything and the only thing that worked was disassembling the whole factory and rebuilding it in the exact floor layout of their Taiwanese one.
Sometimes they do salvage one or more machines as both processes use the same one. But that had better be worth shutting down the old process, financially.
On RAM side it's purely "the factories that turn wafers into RAM", and big part of the problem is that HBM just yields less bits per wafer (the number I've heard is between extra size and lower yield, about half) so more of the capacity moved to making HBM also lowers total bit count made
Something China literally never did though? They seem to love flooding the world with what they produce.