Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tanj's avatar

Roughly 15bn 2GB DRAM chips shipped in 2023, and on track for 16bn this year.

HBM chips are 1.2 cm2 or a bit less than 2x the size of DDR or LPDDR chips (typically .65 to .7 cm2).

Let's say the shipments of H100-equivalent this year come to 4M, each with 128GB average HBM and 512GB average ancillary DRAM. Around 256M HBM and 1024M commodity DRAM chips. If we reckon the average yield loss of HBM in assembly (the loss at wafer level will be very low) at 30% then we come to under1.9 billion LPDDR-equivalents of manufacturing needed at the wafer level for the AI market. About 14% of production capacity this year, of which 6% is the actual HBM and the rest will be LPDDR and DDR with the LPDDR share rising sharply later this year.

There may have been a compensating fall in other markets, servers and mobile have both been flat to down IIRC. There seems no basis for saying there is a 30% capacity shock to the DRAM market. There has been a severe shortage in HBM, but that is due mostly to downstream assembly capacity needs.

Expand full comment
Jack's avatar

Any thoughts on WDC or other memory companies? Seeing a lot of reports of pricing leverage on the NAND side too. Not the type of company I’m looking to invest in, but I’m mildly curious as a fellow MU call holder

Expand full comment
17 more comments...

No posts