Abstract:
Musk posted on social media on October 14,
publicly praising Micron for its reasonable memory pricing, while alluding to other manufacturers' pricing as "akin to extortion," and saying that today's customers will never forget how they were treated.
Musk did not name other companies, but the global DRAM market is dominated by Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. It is not difficult to guess who the target is.
This is not the first time Musk has praised Micron.
In July this year, he thanked Micron for "setting aside production capacity for Tesla in the next few years," saying that memory prices at the time were quite crazy. He also said that Micron had locked in allocation quotas for Tesla under reasonable conditions.
Musk’s business is a large consumer of memory. xAI’s Colossus data center uses a large number of NVIDIA GPUs. Tesla’s in-vehicle systems and autonomous driving computing platforms also require a large number of memory chips, which means that fluctuations in memory prices directly affect its cost structure.
In addition, according to JPMorgan Chase’s forecast, the DRAM supply gap will be about 20% this year, 19% in 2027, and 15% in 2028. Pricing pressure will not ease in the short term.
Musk's statement that "customers will not forget" also points out a reality in the storage market.
During periods of tight supply, customers who are forced to accept high-priced long-term contracts will remember which suppliers gave them breathing room in difficult times and which ones took advantage of the situation.
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