In the world\u2019s biggest wholesale electronics marketplace in the bustling Huaqiangbei district of the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen, memory is the new gold.<\/p>\n
On a Tuesday in January, a merchant surnamed Ye held up a list of prices that looked more appropriate for luxury goods than humble computer parts. A pair of 32-gigabyte, 6000-megahertz Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) memory sticks was priced at 6,878 yuan (US$990) \u2013 having shot up nearly fivefold since September.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my over 10 years in this industry, this is the single most aggressive price surge I have ever seen,\u201d said Ye, who builds computers for individuals and enterprises.<\/p>\n
Massive global investments in artificial intelligence are driving the spike. The so-called Big Three memory makers \u2013 Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology \u2013 are repurposing production lines to feed an insatiable appetite for the higher-margin memory chips used in AI data centres. As they make more of these high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips, supply has dropped for the more pedestrian chips used in personal computers, smartphones<\/a> and other devices.<\/p>\n As painful as the skyrocketing prices are for Ye\u2019s customers and many others, the chaos also presents a high-stakes opportunity for China\u2019s domestic memory makers \u2013 led by ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) \u2013 to claim a larger slice of the global market.<\/p>\n Memory prices have been so volatile that in Huaqiangbei, price quotes now carry expiration dates measured in hours. An engineer surnamed Li, working at a store near Ye\u2019s, said he had simply given up on drafting written quotes for clients, as prices change two or three times a day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the world\u2019s biggest wholesale electronics marketplace in the bustling Huaqiangbei district of the southern Chinese metropolis of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[139441,6184,5560,139443,1877,114,133350,1657,139442,46169,110076,139440,139444,85,46,28429,349,71979],"class_list":["post-266612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-advanced-micro-fabrication-equipment","tag-bank-of-america","tag-beijing","tag-biwin-storage","tag-bloomberg","tag-business","tag-changxin-memory-technologies","tag-china","tag-cmsemicon","tag-counterpoint-research","tag-dram","tag-gigadevice-semiconductor","tag-huaqiangbei","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-micron-technology","tag-samsung-electronics","tag-sk-hynix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}