#dram Community Insights & Market Sentiment

Same rows of machines, same production line. In the first nine months of last year, it lost more than five billion. In the same nine months this year, it made a net profit of 131 billion. In just one year.

ChangXin Technology released its earnings forecast on the evening of October 16. Net profit is expected to be between 131 billion and 132.5 billion, compared with a loss of 5.28 billion in the same period last year. A turnaround of more than 130 billion.

Revenue is even more staggering. It’s forecast at 265 billion to 270 billion for the first nine months, versus just 32 billion in the same period last year. That’s an eightfold increase.

The money is being scraped off memory chips. The company put it plainly in its announcement: demand for AI computing power is growing too fast, global DRAM supply can’t keep up, prices have surged, and capacity utilization is running near its limit. It’s not that they suddenly got better at making chips. The same wafer can sell for three times as much this year. That’s all there is to it.

The last time memory prices went this crazy was five years ago.

It was April. A project called Chia launched, letting people mine using hard-drive storage. High-capacity mechanical hard drives became mining rigs overnight. The price of an 8 TB drive doubled, popular models more than tripled, and SSDs followed with a 50% jump. Taiwan’s ADATA revealed that its SSD sales in April were five times higher than the month before. Chia’s president later said in an interview, “We pretty much wrecked the short-term supply chain.” Absolutely wild. Prices went through the roof.

Then, in May, the crackdown came. Mining farms were shut down. Hard-drive prices crashed first, dropping 2,000 yuan in three days. Secondhand drives flooded Xianyu, and all that was left was a mess. End of story.

I’ve been going through the comments these past few days, and quite a few people think this latest memory-price surge means miners are back. But miners haven’t even made it through the door this time. They’re nowhere in the queue. Mining rigs run on ASICs and electricity; AI training clusters need HBM and DDR5. Two different production lines, not a single component in common. They’re both called computing power, but the books are completely separate.

Does this wave of money have anything to do with crypto? Not one bit.

If you ask me, price increases have never been about supply and demand curves. You have to look at whose demand is allowed to exist. Five years ago, mining demand was labeled something that needed to be stamped out. No matter how strong hard-drive makers’ orders were, it was a short-lived boom; once the wind stopped, prices collapsed. This year, AI demand is written into data-center plans around the world. The same capacity can now sustain higher prices. Whether demand is considered legitimate matters more than how great it is.

That’s a hard truth for crypto. It really stings. Miners are now competing on energy efficiency and electricity prices, still hanging on after the halving. In any case, not a cent of this memory boom’s money is going to mining rigs.

Projects offering on-chain storage sell the right to rent storage space; ChangXin sells memory chips. Between them lie packaging, modules, and layer upon layer of distribution. The price hikes don’t pass through, there’s no trace of them in token prices, and the money is all going elsewhere.

Anyone who paid an extra 200 yuan for an 8 TB hard drive on Xianyu five years ago might get a brief sense of déjà vu when they open a shopping site and look at memory prices today. This time, there won’t be a flood of secondhand HBM. Nobody’s going to stockpile that stuff at home.

There’s no clear consensus in the industry on how long this surge can last. Nobody can give a definite answer. Some people look at capacity coming online the year after next and think things should ease up in the second half of next year. Others say demand for AI training hasn’t peaked yet, and the shortage could last until the year after next. ChangXin’s announcement only says supply can’t meet demand and prices have surged. It gives no timeline at all.

If you want to understand how money like this flows across industries, follow me. I’ll break it down piece by piece.

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#存储芯片 #AI算力 #DRAM #比特币矿工

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