If the OpenAI Hodling Company buys and warehouses 40% of global memory production or 900,000 memory wafers (i.e. not yet turned into DDR5/DDR6 DIMMs) per month at price X in October 2025, leading to supply shortages and tripling of price, they have the option of later un-holding the warehoused memory wafers for a profit.
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain..
What's the economic value per warehoused and insured cubic inch of 900,000 memory wafers? Grok response:
> As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs.
→ Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.
> To save the situation, a consortium of US banks provided a $1.1 billion line of credit to the brothers which allowed them to pay Bache which, in turn, survived the ordeal.
It seems once you amass a certain amount of wealth, you just get automatically bailed out from your mistakes
Seems that in the end it didn't work out well for them:
> The Hunts lost over a billion dollars through this incident, but the family fortunes survived. They pledged most of their assets, including their stake in Placid Oil, as collateral for the rescue loan package they obtained. However, the value of their assets (mainly holdings in oil, sugar, and real estate) declined steadily during the 1980s, and their estimated net wealth declined from $5 billion in 1980 to less than $1 billion in 1988.
The article goes on to say that they had $5B net wealth around the time of the incident. It's not that unreasonable to get a loan of 20% of your wealth in a hurry, especially if said loan immediately benefits the lenders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142100#46143535
What's the economic value per warehoused and insured cubic inch of 900,000 memory wafers? Grok response:> As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs. → Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.