“Sam Altman’s Dirty DRAM Deal”:
[T]he shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously.
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more.
[I]t sure seems like a primary goal of these deals was to deprive the market.
Normally, the DRAM market has buffers: warehouses of emergency stock, excess wafer starts, older DRAM manufacturing machinery being sold off to budget brands while the big brands upgrade their production lines…but not in 2025.
Companies had deliberately reduced how much DRAM they ordered for their safety stock over the summer of 2025 because tariffs were changing almost weekly.
Because of the hesitancy to purchase as much safety stock as usual, RAM prices were also genuinely falling over time.
Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation.