back to article China's make-your-own DRAM ambitions growing all the time

The People's Republic of China is getting heavily into the DRAM foundry business, giving it its own semi-conductor manufacturing fabs and raising the prospect of NAND flash being the next technology to move inside the Great Wall. A bunch of Chinese investors, led by Summitview Capital, have bought Integrated Silicon Solution ( …

  1. Mark 85

    Follow the money on what the pols will scream about.

    If China, with its enormous and growing domestic market, establishes itself as a DRAM, NAND and disk drive exporter, damaging US businesses, then US ideas about the sacrosanct nature of free trade might get revisited.

    Right-wing politicians in the future might start to sound the alarm about DRAM dumping by Beijing. They might even complain about the US selling off its family silicon.

    They probably won't say diddly squat as long as their backers can be investors in China's tech. If the Chinese toss out the investors, they yes.. the pols will start screaming. If there weren't US investors making profit, this sort of thing would have been declared illegal and Lenovo, for example, wouldn't have been allowed to buy the IBM PC division.

  2. Swarthy

    Another DRAM fab (or 2) is not a bad thing; it would minimize the risk of another event of a fab blowing up and raising RAM prices to hair-raising levels.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another industry destroyed

    Since China targets & subsidizes industrious in violation of WTO rules, and other countries are slow to react (e.g. Solar Industry), this will simply be another industry destroyed.

  4. Vector
    Thumb Up

    Day late...

    Cool! They'll be just in time for MR-RAM and other solid-state memory technologies to start to take over.

    Way to stay ahead of the power curve China!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fantastic!

    Give it a few years and the price of both RAM and SSDs will go through the floor. So will quality, but that's why God invented RAID...

  6. btrower

    Sort of old news...

    I would say the Chinese economic takeover of the West is something of a fait accompli. The writing was on the wall when dollar stores opened all over and shortly thereafter just about everything you could buy said 'Made In China'. We didn't mind because, 'hey, inexpensive products'. For a while there we were importing things at prices below the cost of assembling the raw materials locally.

    Here in Canada, we sold away our industrial infrastructure shortly after NAFTA (free trade, yay!) rendered our industrial economy no longer viable.

    I think that free trade was inevitable, but it took a very evil form as our government and others threw wide the doors and let unregulated capitalist firms do as they wish. They did and now we know that their wishes and our wishes, contrary to what we have been told, do not coincide. We really should have had a plan for the post free-trade environment. A lot of jobless people took a pretty big hit because they were not paying attention on election day. It does not, BTW, look as though they took any lesson from that. Bill C51 is fixing to put the last stone in place for our shiny new police state -- you know, so we can harmonize tyranny with the existing US and UK police states.

    Be careful what you allow your corporations to wish for.

    Which will be the first (former) first-world nation to attempt to turn back and remake their industrial base? I would like it to be Canada and I would like us to be leveraging what we have in terms of an educated population and empty plants to build 3D printers and general purpose robots from raw materials on up. With high-quality 3D printers and a generation of capable general purpose robots Canada would only have to worry about energy supply and military attack. We have the oil sands for the energy and enough materials to build a hell of a huge robot army.

    The only way back is for a country with enough natural wealth and an educated population like Canada to invest in stuff that can side-step the economies of scale or to specialize in guaranteed export value things like processed food where we have the scale and did I mention robots?

    We (Canada) are in a heck of a bind. We are sandwiched in between the enormous economic and military powers of the United States and Russia and dependent for manufactured goods from the gigantic Chinese industrial powerhouse.

    Side note: I do not think that our measures of economic wealth value China's position properly and I think it has been a long time since they have. The U.S. dollar is holding relative value together for the time being but it is only a matter of time before there is an adjustment. It is increasingly looking like that is going to be a very short sharp shock.

    Tangential geopolitical note: Am I the only one that noticed there is more than $50 TRILLION (with a 'T') dollars worth of petrochemicals underneath the sand in the Middle East. Somebody should send troops in to secure that before ... never mind.

    1. Queasy Rider

      Re: Sort of old news...

      I blame Richard Nixon and his business (read Republican) backers for our long slow slide relative to China. But I'm sure Fox News will find a way to blame it on Obama and the Democrats.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    OH! .... ME! ME!

    "...five provinces are competing for the location suffocation privilege."

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