I read an article yesterday that Samsung’s memory division wasn’t even willing to let Samsung’s own cell phone division lock in any long-term memory buying agreement with them, which the cell phone division hsd been trying to do. Too much money in selling HBM memory for parallel compute to datacenters.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/ai-frenzy-is-driving-new-global-supply-chain-crisis-2025-12-03/

Some 6,000 miles away in California, Paul Coronado said monthly sales at his company, Caramon, which sells recycled low-end memory chips pulled from decommissioned data-center servers, have surged since September. Almost all its products are now bought by Hong Kong-based intermediaries who resell them to Chinese clients, he said.

“We were doing about $500,000 a month,” he said. “Now it’s $800,000 to $900,000.”

I threw away a bunch of large-capacity DDR4 DIMMs last year, figured that they’d be useless in the future. Kind of wish I hadn’t, now. Reusing old DIMMs is probably the only source of supply that can be ramped up in the near term.

In October, SK Hynix said all its chips are sold out for 2026, while Samsung said it had secured customers for its HBM chips to be produced next year. Both firms are expanding capacity to meet AI demand, but new factories for conventional chips won’t come online until 2027 or 2028.

Two or three years until manufacturing capacity will be ramped up.