Memory-maker Micron has found a way to keep prices for its products sky-high for another five years, by signing 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.”
Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.
If the Chinese government is doing this to spread hardware backdoors in all the RAM (technically quite difficult to do without detection, btw, and people will be looking) then it will be in their interests to lower the price of Chinese RAM to well below Western RAM, so the world buys as much as possible.
I think it’s more likely to be similar to their photovoltaic cell, battery, and industry policy in general: economically dominate the world’s markets and give China all the advantages that the previous industrial centres of the world had.
The ability to deprive rival nations of valuable resources, or help allied nations by guaranteeing their supply, is incredibly useful, which is why most nations do so if they are able to.
The US gets backdoors in many electronic systems by simply asking, and in some cases creating laws to do so. Why would China not do the same instead of owning shares in the companies? It’s probably more that they want the Party to financially share in the wealth created by those companies, as well as more directly control their corporate actions.