It’s bad, OK, I’m not trying to remove any blame or criticism for the situation.
That being said, what actual normal usage for a normal person (not a National Geographic 8K stereo 360 video editor or a developer compiling Firefox daily) needs a lot, say more than 16GB, of RAM?
Again I’m not trying to find a way to accept a bad situation, only to see which actual usages are in trouble because honestly I don’t see any.
Hosting an accurate AI locally typically takes 24GB of VRAM. Not having sufficient VRAM makes you reliant on remote models as a paid service. You pay many more times for tokens what you could pay for RAM just once for limitless tokens.
Same, that’s not a normal usage. Spending a lot of time on Lemmy/Reddit/HackerNews tech community might lead to believe running a local model is normal but very few people do. When they do it’s typically on GPUs or Mac precisely for their unified memory architecture… but it’s not a normal setup even for gamers. Also typically it’s to tinker locally and learn from than actually productivity. I’m repeating here, I’m not saying it’s not an interesting use case for some, just not what most people do.
There are some games that require a lot of RAM, especially if recording while playing or something.
The fact that you wrote “some” perfectly illustrates my point, it’s not normal. It doesn’t mean those usages aren’t important, just not typical.
It just means I wasn’t sure my example (4x games) was completely right
Did a quick search and “Most games required more than 16GB RAM ONLY if the game was played at 4k or 8k resolution. Usually between 16-25GB RAM” https://laptopstudy.com/ram-usage-games/ so I would argue that’s not a typical usage.
Sure they say it so that you buy memory now and don’t wait until the price becomes lower
I bet it’s not going to be that indefinite, a year tops before CXMT ramps up RAM production https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-cxmt-makes-breakthrough-advanced-memory-chips-information-reports-2026-08-31/
Assuming they end up making it for export. The article makes it sound like other Chinese companies are already interested so they may be the primary customers
Initially sure, but same thing happened with solar and EVs too. Eventually they hit the export phase, and then everybody gets to enjoy the treats.
Uhm excuse me that’s overcapacity. Europe has to ban CXMT products.
They will once daddy tells them to.
On one hand it is an opportunity for CXMT to gain more market share. On the other when demand drops they will be left with excess capacity and that might discourage them from expanding.
People always find uses for computing power, and I expect running local AI models will only be getting more popular going forward. So, don’t really see demand collapsing.
Go china go, you can do it! CXMT will rock you!
Company that has a vested interest in keeping prices high says prices will remain high. Yeah, I’m not going to trust that source.
You should though.
Not only do they have an interest, they are also in control of that price. And any other supplier is exactly in the same boat. When supply is lower than demand, prices go up, it’s economics 101.
Except both CXMT is ramping up and at the same time datacenters buildouts are slowing. Supply is going up and demand is dropping. It’s economics 101.
I hope you’re right, but I’m not holding my breath.
