Hyperscalers are screwed, data center mania couldn’t even be completed during this massive spending spree, all while the people seemingly sitting on the sidelines are working on getting these things baked into the OS and chipsets in a way consumers wouldn’t notice
The fundamental issue is that for these systems bigger is essentially always better (if affordable). So if we can squash something like Kimi K3 down to run on a 'normal' system, that just incentivizes devs to increase the model size until once again we're at the limit of what can be run.
How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.
I think this is the future - at least it will be for on-device models. Apple, for instance, will "bake silicon" once a year for their current model, and use that chip in all their devices.
Your example also counters your point: A lot of people do not care about 4k, and even less do care about 8k or above. We reached a point where most people are completely happy with the quality they get.
> Your example also counters your point: A lot of people do not care about 4k, and even less do care about 8k or above. We reached a point where most people are completely happy with the quality they get.
And when (not if) we get to the 4k (or 8k) equivalent of LLMs, they'll just be baked into hardware and we'll have near instant responses while running locally.
There is no future where OpenAI, Anthropic, etc survive with their current business model; at some point we will hit a point where training a new model is done only every 5 years or so, and in that scenario we aren't going to be running models of pricey server GPUs with latencies measured in seconds and full responses measured in minutes.
We'll be running locally with sub-millisecond latencies and responses measured in milliseconds. There is no way for any big company to compete with the current business plan of selling inference or subscriptions.
2K, 4K, and 8K+ TVs have been around forever, and although 4K has become the norm, it's widely accepted that there isn't much benefit for most people above 1080p
Don't forget that it's only an assumption that scaling more results in better models. There may be a ceiling to that. If that is hit and the best performing possible model can run in little VRAM, your argument here doesn't hold anymore.
In a way it is actually the same thing that makes us accept AI as working in the first place. It only needs to be good enough for human perception. The same is probably true for compute.
I'd argue we've already hit the ceiling. Can you truly tell the different between SOTA models from 9 months ago and those from today? There are some improvements but they're mostly marginal.
Plus there is a chance the actual scaling that matters is beyond our reach. Think instead of TB models, PB or ZB models. We don't even have that kind of information. Humanity in its entire history hasn't generated 1ZB of information.
> Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.
And yet when we hit 4k, that's were people just stopped buying higher res. 8K is still useful, but only when the screen is so large that it doesn't fit in the room :-/
Once I start a conversation about Postgres query plans, maybe 95% of the knowledge will be almost certainly not needed, and for an inference provider there will be many more concurrent queries with reasonably large overlap. Maybe future architectures will be able to take advantage of this so not all parameters are needed in memory for almost all instances.
If we are talking about all knowledge, then I agree that the compression ratio is very impressive already.
Mixture of Experts is already used by pretty much all modern LLMs to address exactly this phenomenon.
Hopefully, future models can be trained to be even more aware of external knowledge, accessible through web search / RAG / whatever it will be then, and might not need to internalize much knowledge at all.
So far, frontier capability keeps getting shrunk to fit consumer level hardware. The lag time being over a year, though, precludes this from being called SOTA by the time it arrives.
There must be a limit, I agree, but there have been no signs of approaching it yet. The most recent cohort of small models have shown the biggest leap in capability so far.
> How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.
Sure, it might be very near using the current approach, but... it might also be might be very far off because we are using the wrong approach.
I mean, look at the max amount of intelligence you can get out of a human brain powered by two bananas...
All the terms are squishy, but being sloppy about it, I think there's intelligence that needs to be in the model, and knowledge that could live in a database. Right now, models are memorizing a lot of stuff they don't need to. We know how to index lots of information on (comparatively slow) SSDs or across a network.
See Karpathy's "Cognitive Core" idea. (I don't have a good link)
Are you thinking of fundamental architectural changes (like the Transformer)? Or incremental (like MoE or GQA)? Are there specific neolabs or techs you are following that lead you to this prediction?
Indeed it seems quite possible we are one architecture breakthrough away from existing chip stock driving us all the way to ASI.
Nobody has done AFAIK the information theory to prove it’s not possible.
Yeah, you can directly print the SOTA AI model on the chip. I also believe this can be done on older process nodes. The most important factor would be speed. How fast can you go from new model to new chip?
SoTA AI will move well past 1TB+ memory requirements in 1 year or so.
Also, you will be able to play with much more competent models locally. They will still feel like children compared to the adults living in the SoTA region.
Shovels have always been the better out of the two investments.
There were rumours about China grabbing hold of one of ASML's machines, but with no additional information on this it's safe to assume they're still hammering out 7nm chips using DUV at piss poor yields.
EU: Perhaps we should also spend a few billion on attracting american glue manufacturers so they open a factory and a half here so we can catch up in this chip making business.
CXMT uses old Qimonda patents (even though Qimonda's tech is now outdated), and the former CEO of Qimonda is currently building a fab for an FeRAM-based alternative to DRAM in Magdeburg. It's a gamble as FeRAM still suffers from a more limited lifetime than conventional DRAM at this moment but I think there are still somewhat interesting developments happening in Europe.
EU chip industry: best I can do is supply chips that are in 99% of industrial equipment and vehicles. Also supply the only machines in the world that enable leading edge lithography processes.
No comment on the second part, but the first part is wrong. EU doesn't have a moat in process technology anymore (since 2010s). They have a bunch of legacy fabs, like 350, 180 and 130 nm but Taiwan, US, and China (and others like Israel, or Singapore) have these too. EU is severely lacking behind chip design, production and packaging capabilities for industrial, automotive, and space kind of niche applications since the heavy divestment from semiconductors after 2008 financial crisis and 2015 Euro crisis.
On top of this, once European giants like NXP (formerly Philips semiconductors), Infineon (formerly Siemens semiconductors), and ST are actively reducing their footprint in Europe and moving to India or SE Asia.
In short: No, EU has no future in those markets as designer or producer of chips.
I have nothing to say about this company's long term potential, but I'm curious to know whether this will become an enormous "tik stok" like SK Hynix became in South Korea. I've watched a short documentary about the investment mania in SK and it's really scary.
Morgan Stanley's target price for SPCX in their report is $300, with $8 being the space component, and the $292 being everything else, like what actually gets put into space. The Morgan Stanley report doesn't say SPCX is worth $8/share. Just wanted to be clear and not have a conversation based on vague implications.
If the golden stick of memory sitting on Trumps desk has its intended effect - and the US allow Apple to buy memory from CXMT then another 500% surge might happen.
Most of the price increase did occur in Q4 2025 and most prices are fairly stable since then. Maybe this is different for LPDDR, GDDR, or HBM, but I would like to see evidence for that.
Why does the US stock market keep having record years while the population doesn't seem to benefit, whereas the opposite is happening in China? Isn't that a failure of US capitalism?
The more interesting question is: why does the rest of the world not increase their production prowess? I am aware of most of the reasons, but I am getting tired of the "China is better than the rest of the world". It is more that China did a lot of things that the others either failed to do or no longer wanted to do. Case in point is Germany: from "our cars are best" to "hey, chinese cars are now better" (or, cheaper, for a comparative quality). This constant complaining is so strange. Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
It is because in the west we suffer from self inflicted obstacles that make it impossible to get out of our own way. The Chinese gov must think they are playing on easy mode.
> Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
The problem is, shareholders have bled Western companies dry in the chase for returns on investments. There is no money left in the companies to retool them to be competitive with China.
Meanwhile, the CCP just pours dollars into their companies.
Unfortunately, there is no punishment in Western societies if you run a company into the ground as long as you pay your debts on the way out.
Because the capitalist west doesn't have strategic view, beside maybe on the defense sector.
Everything else must produce profits next quarter not in the next 3 years.
It's this. Wall Street won't allow american companies to make long term decisions and long term planning that cost money in the short term, because they want all that money immediately now. Like, right now now. If an executive promised they could deliver big profits in 5 years by spending the next two investing their profits, Wall Street would fire them and put in someone who will happily spend all the profit (plus debt) to do stock buybacks and dividend disbursals.
It's even worse, the entire ideology is that industrial policy can't, by definition, be better than what the market would decide without interference. So every kind of actual strategic decision making (i.e. investing a few hundred billions in the industries of importance for the next decade(s), or at least in the infrastructure supporting it) would actually make matters worse. That is essentially what neoliberalism is all about.
This is core reason why the German industry became so irrelevant in the last 2 decades: The rail infrastructure became pseudo privatized and now is in shambles (IIRC only about 60% of trains arrive on time). The PV industry was axed by the conservatives about 15 years ago and now is completely dominated by China. Even now, as the other EU countries demand strategic investments - and again the German conservatives say this ought to happen without any new debt. "We can only spend what we have", to quote Merz. Imagine China saying this about chip production, or even Sam Altman about compute hardware...
It takes 2 years in EU to get approval to build a shed. Imagine how long it takes to get approvals for a chip factory which uses a lot of water and very toxic chemicals.
UK has been trying to get approvals for a new runway at Heathrow airport for over 20 years !!! now.
Mostly self-inflicted wounds in form of climate pledges, climate taxes and such. Because of the goal to achieve zero emissions goal and climate neutrality, we abandoned cheap energy sources such as coal and pushed our heavy industries out of Europe to China. We still need those products, so we import them from China while wondering why European industrial segment isn't growing. Even in the clean energy sector, most solar panels come from China.
Prediction - we are going to figure out SOTA AI performance without requiring 1TB of memory within a year or so.
Of course CXMT, Micron, and family will still be profitable, but maybe not 'surge 470% from IPO' profitable.
that would be perfect timing
Hyperscalers are screwed, data center mania couldn’t even be completed during this massive spending spree, all while the people seemingly sitting on the sidelines are working on getting these things baked into the OS and chipsets in a way consumers wouldn’t notice
What do you base this prediction on? It seems very unlikely, unless by SOTA you mean the current SOTA.
> What do you base this prediction on?
Their posterior. Or worse, their interest in going to the moon (HODL style, not Artemis style).
The fundamental issue is that for these systems bigger is essentially always better (if affordable). So if we can squash something like Kimi K3 down to run on a 'normal' system, that just incentivizes devs to increase the model size until once again we're at the limit of what can be run.
And by the time the models that require 1TB memory will be better.
It's like people saying mobile chips are going to be better than PC chips... until they realize PC can be made of mobile chips too if that comes true.
How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.
It’s not just about small models, that’s only one part of evolution
Some groups are baking models into silicone, Deepmind has an example, it gets 18,000 tokens/sec on Llama 3.1, not sure about parameter size
I think this is the future - at least it will be for on-device models. Apple, for instance, will "bake silicon" once a year for their current model, and use that chip in all their devices.
It doesn't matter. However much intelligence you can squeeze into 1 GB, people will always want more.
Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.
Your example also counters your point: A lot of people do not care about 4k, and even less do care about 8k or above. We reached a point where most people are completely happy with the quality they get.
Likely constrained by the fact people are mostly watching low bitrate Netflix streams.
> Your example also counters your point: A lot of people do not care about 4k, and even less do care about 8k or above. We reached a point where most people are completely happy with the quality they get.
And when (not if) we get to the 4k (or 8k) equivalent of LLMs, they'll just be baked into hardware and we'll have near instant responses while running locally.
There is no future where OpenAI, Anthropic, etc survive with their current business model; at some point we will hit a point where training a new model is done only every 5 years or so, and in that scenario we aren't going to be running models of pricey server GPUs with latencies measured in seconds and full responses measured in minutes.
We'll be running locally with sub-millisecond latencies and responses measured in milliseconds. There is no way for any big company to compete with the current business plan of selling inference or subscriptions.
Your example contradicts you.
2K, 4K, and 8K+ TVs have been around forever, and although 4K has become the norm, it's widely accepted that there isn't much benefit for most people above 1080p
Yeah, but that's based on a hard limits, the physics of the eye. The example was poorly chosen.
Don't forget that it's only an assumption that scaling more results in better models. There may be a ceiling to that. If that is hit and the best performing possible model can run in little VRAM, your argument here doesn't hold anymore.
In a way it is actually the same thing that makes us accept AI as working in the first place. It only needs to be good enough for human perception. The same is probably true for compute.
I'd argue we've already hit the ceiling. Can you truly tell the different between SOTA models from 9 months ago and those from today? There are some improvements but they're mostly marginal.
Plus there is a chance the actual scaling that matters is beyond our reach. Think instead of TB models, PB or ZB models. We don't even have that kind of information. Humanity in its entire history hasn't generated 1ZB of information.
> Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.
And yet when we hit 4k, that's were people just stopped buying higher res. 8K is still useful, but only when the screen is so large that it doesn't fit in the room :-/
There's barely any media in 8k. There's so many ppi you can squeeze before your eye can't tell the difference anymore.
Once I start a conversation about Postgres query plans, maybe 95% of the knowledge will be almost certainly not needed, and for an inference provider there will be many more concurrent queries with reasonably large overlap. Maybe future architectures will be able to take advantage of this so not all parameters are needed in memory for almost all instances.
If we are talking about all knowledge, then I agree that the compression ratio is very impressive already.
Mixture of Experts is already used by pretty much all modern LLMs to address exactly this phenomenon.
Hopefully, future models can be trained to be even more aware of external knowledge, accessible through web search / RAG / whatever it will be then, and might not need to internalize much knowledge at all.
So far, frontier capability keeps getting shrunk to fit consumer level hardware. The lag time being over a year, though, precludes this from being called SOTA by the time it arrives.
There must be a limit, I agree, but there have been no signs of approaching it yet. The most recent cohort of small models have shown the biggest leap in capability so far.
> How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.
Sure, it might be very near using the current approach, but... it might also be might be very far off because we are using the wrong approach.
I mean, look at the max amount of intelligence you can get out of a human brain powered by two bananas...
All the terms are squishy, but being sloppy about it, I think there's intelligence that needs to be in the model, and knowledge that could live in a database. Right now, models are memorizing a lot of stuff they don't need to. We know how to index lots of information on (comparatively slow) SSDs or across a network.
See Karpathy's "Cognitive Core" idea. (I don't have a good link)
Even if we do, we are going to need a lot of RAM for the billions of agents running everywhere.
Are you thinking of fundamental architectural changes (like the Transformer)? Or incremental (like MoE or GQA)? Are there specific neolabs or techs you are following that lead you to this prediction?
Indeed it seems quite possible we are one architecture breakthrough away from existing chip stock driving us all the way to ASI.
Nobody has done AFAIK the information theory to prove it’s not possible.
NOPE. The opposite will happen. CXMT will flood the market thus making 1 TB models affordable.
Yeah, you can directly print the SOTA AI model on the chip. I also believe this can be done on older process nodes. The most important factor would be speed. How fast can you go from new model to new chip?
SoTA AI will move well past 1TB+ memory requirements in 1 year or so.
Also, you will be able to play with much more competent models locally. They will still feel like children compared to the adults living in the SoTA region.
EU chip industry: best I can do is eat glue in the corner.
EU chip industry: best I can do is power electronics.
EU Chip industry : ASML, 2nd to only nvidia, 0.5T mkt cap
STMicroelectronics cries in a corner.
They sell the shovels, we need someone actually digging for gold.
Shovels have always been the better out of the two investments.
There were rumours about China grabbing hold of one of ASML's machines, but with no additional information on this it's safe to assume they're still hammering out 7nm chips using DUV at piss poor yields.
EU: we should create a law regulating the viscosity of the glue being eaten
EU: Perhaps we should also spend a few billion on attracting american glue manufacturers so they open a factory and a half here so we can catch up in this chip making business.
EU bourgeoisie invests in US tech
CXMT uses old Qimonda patents (even though Qimonda's tech is now outdated), and the former CEO of Qimonda is currently building a fab for an FeRAM-based alternative to DRAM in Magdeburg. It's a gamble as FeRAM still suffers from a more limited lifetime than conventional DRAM at this moment but I think there are still somewhat interesting developments happening in Europe.
US innovates, CN copies, EU seethes in the cuck chair.
EU chip industry: best I can do is supply chips that are in 99% of industrial equipment and vehicles. Also supply the only machines in the world that enable leading edge lithography processes.
No comment on the second part, but the first part is wrong. EU doesn't have a moat in process technology anymore (since 2010s). They have a bunch of legacy fabs, like 350, 180 and 130 nm but Taiwan, US, and China (and others like Israel, or Singapore) have these too. EU is severely lacking behind chip design, production and packaging capabilities for industrial, automotive, and space kind of niche applications since the heavy divestment from semiconductors after 2008 financial crisis and 2015 Euro crisis.
On top of this, once European giants like NXP (formerly Philips semiconductors), Infineon (formerly Siemens semiconductors), and ST are actively reducing their footprint in Europe and moving to India or SE Asia.
In short: No, EU has no future in those markets as designer or producer of chips.
Don't make me tap the sign that says "ASML".
Difference between Europe and the others is that it doesn't brag nearly as much.
Oh Jon
I have nothing to say about this company's long term potential, but I'm curious to know whether this will become an enormous "tik stok" like SK Hynix became in South Korea. I've watched a short documentary about the investment mania in SK and it's really scary.
Tesla is kind the same. Everybody bought it, because it went up so much, less because of the product. I guess every AI would do the same.
I wonder what the effects of TSLA dropping to reasonable levels (a drop of about 90%) would look like.
Morgan Stanley said that SpaceX's space activities are only worth $8 per share...
Most people here seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what a stock price means. It reflects investor expectations. Not current revenue.
Morgan Stanley's target price for SPCX in their report is $300, with $8 being the space component, and the $292 being everything else, like what actually gets put into space. The Morgan Stanley report doesn't say SPCX is worth $8/share. Just wanted to be clear and not have a conversation based on vague implications.
If the chinese government feels its critical to china's success then it will be backed like alibaba and wechat and others were
> the investment mania in SK and it's really scary.
i mean, it shouldn't be scary, because their failure is their own, and i doubt there would be collateral damage outside of those high risk investors.
It's scary for _them_, but it's an interesting case study for an outsider.
If the golden stick of memory sitting on Trumps desk has its intended effect - and the US allow Apple to buy memory from CXMT then another 500% surge might happen.
> Once an affordable component used to build devices, memory prices have more than doubled in recent months - and are still rising.
Is this accurate? It looks like they are no longer rising, at least for DDR5 memory:
https://de.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Most of the price increase did occur in Q4 2025 and most prices are fairly stable since then. Maybe this is different for LPDDR, GDDR, or HBM, but I would like to see evidence for that.
Look at DDR5-6000, it clearly is rising again since June.
is it retail or hype driven - that's the question
It's driven by the supreme leader's grand plan, like everything else there.
Seems to be working out better than leaving it up to the market
Why does the US stock market keep having record years while the population doesn't seem to benefit, whereas the opposite is happening in China? Isn't that a failure of US capitalism?
Is the latter part actually true in this decade or just "face"?
The more interesting question is: why does the rest of the world not increase their production prowess? I am aware of most of the reasons, but I am getting tired of the "China is better than the rest of the world". It is more that China did a lot of things that the others either failed to do or no longer wanted to do. Case in point is Germany: from "our cars are best" to "hey, chinese cars are now better" (or, cheaper, for a comparative quality). This constant complaining is so strange. Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
It is because in the west we suffer from self inflicted obstacles that make it impossible to get out of our own way. The Chinese gov must think they are playing on easy mode.
> Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
The problem is, shareholders have bled Western companies dry in the chase for returns on investments. There is no money left in the companies to retool them to be competitive with China.
Meanwhile, the CCP just pours dollars into their companies.
Unfortunately, there is no punishment in Western societies if you run a company into the ground as long as you pay your debts on the way out.
Because the capitalist west doesn't have strategic view, beside maybe on the defense sector. Everything else must produce profits next quarter not in the next 3 years.
It's this. Wall Street won't allow american companies to make long term decisions and long term planning that cost money in the short term, because they want all that money immediately now. Like, right now now. If an executive promised they could deliver big profits in 5 years by spending the next two investing their profits, Wall Street would fire them and put in someone who will happily spend all the profit (plus debt) to do stock buybacks and dividend disbursals.
It's even worse, the entire ideology is that industrial policy can't, by definition, be better than what the market would decide without interference. So every kind of actual strategic decision making (i.e. investing a few hundred billions in the industries of importance for the next decade(s), or at least in the infrastructure supporting it) would actually make matters worse. That is essentially what neoliberalism is all about.
This is core reason why the German industry became so irrelevant in the last 2 decades: The rail infrastructure became pseudo privatized and now is in shambles (IIRC only about 60% of trains arrive on time). The PV industry was axed by the conservatives about 15 years ago and now is completely dominated by China. Even now, as the other EU countries demand strategic investments - and again the German conservatives say this ought to happen without any new debt. "We can only spend what we have", to quote Merz. Imagine China saying this about chip production, or even Sam Altman about compute hardware...
50 years ago you could ask the same question about Europe, the USA and Japan: why are they so much more productive than everyone else?
So others did spend energy on becoming better and now you see a different picture when you look at the world.
It takes 2 years in EU to get approval to build a shed. Imagine how long it takes to get approvals for a chip factory which uses a lot of water and very toxic chemicals.
UK has been trying to get approvals for a new runway at Heathrow airport for over 20 years !!! now.
Mostly self-inflicted wounds in form of climate pledges, climate taxes and such. Because of the goal to achieve zero emissions goal and climate neutrality, we abandoned cheap energy sources such as coal and pushed our heavy industries out of Europe to China. We still need those products, so we import them from China while wondering why European industrial segment isn't growing. Even in the clean energy sector, most solar panels come from China.
Let’s see them ship some chip first
The price is similar, as they all rely on same upstream suppliers. The quality is kinda meh.
They don't have access to EUV machines from ASML though.
EUV is only required for highend ram like HBM3E, HBM4.
> 8% to 9% of the worldwide DRAM market share in 2025
how much more do they need to ship to satisfy you?
10x
Seems fair ... if they can capture (and ship) 90% of the global supply of memory they will be permitted to have a market cap of 0.1x Nvidia.