Last week, our sister site Tom’s Hardware carried a report with comments from Lexar’s Regional Manager for Australia & New Zealand, Chris Xia. Xia was discussing the current RAM crisis and how he expects prices to double by the end of the year.
It’s a terrifying prospect to say the least! But I’ve been in China visiting Lexar’s production and R&D facilities these last few days. So I thought I’d put the question directly to the CTO, Daniel Guo, and Van Baer, General Manager of North America, to see if it’s a claim they agree with.
Moreover, I want to know if these executives at the very heart of the computing industry can tell me if there are any ways to ease the pain of RAMageddon.
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Pricing is ‘unpredictable’
The first thing Lexar was quick to do was talk about how this is a “personal view” from the company’s regional manager, rather than a business position on the situation.
“Instead of reactive pricing, we’re ensuring that our products remain competitive. We have our in-house R&D, and we’re relying heavily on that to diversify our products,” Baer commented.
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After this comment, another Lexar PR rep chimed in: “I think it’s important to note that no one has a crystal ball. No one out there can predict what it is, and I think that the general manager over there made their own opinion on things.”
That being said, they’re not explicitly denying the problems in place here — the prices are rising, and as Van told Tom’s Guide, raw material prices are “sort of out of our control.”
The main mission for Lexar right now is to “maintain competitiveness regardless of the prices.”
Because if there’s one thing that felt worryingly inevitable from their comments in the Q&A I attended, it’s that the AI build-out currently engulfing the world may very well cause this surge to last “for years.” The consensus was that massive enterprise demand is causing a period of “unpredictability.” Like Lexar, we’re all waiting to see what happens with this pesky AI bubble.
Any mitigations?
(Image credit: Lexar)
The company did confirm it will not be manufacturing its own RAM wafers to bypass the monopoly powers of SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron — saying that it’s “not necessarily practical,” and that investing in this could risk “over capacity” of memory.
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Which, in layman’s terms, means they’ll lose money. Guo told me that DRAM is “about six times more expensive” to manufacture than NAND flash.
What the company’s engineers are doing is finding workarounds that use less RAM.
For example, Guo talked about how its “AI storage solution” will bypass expensive DRAM chips by offloading tasks to the cheaper NAND flash — reducing a system’s need for RAM by 40%.
These work by offloading large AI models to these more affordable NAND chips that make up SSDs — Guo did say that on its storage, AI responses can start within one second.
Throw in Lexar actively working on partnerships with other manufacturers to create an “economy of scale on the supply side,” and it becomes apparent the company has a plan to try to reduce our RAM dependency. How it works out in practice though remains to be seen.
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