'At least' 6.5 exabytes lost after contamination hits Kioxia/WD 3D NAND fabs Production at Kioxia and Western Digital's 3D NAND fabrication facilities in Japan is being disrupted by chemical contamination, with at least 6.5 exabytes of capacity lost. The two companies operate a joint venture which has six fabs at Yokkaichi in Mie province, employing some 8,000 people, and a seventh fab at Kitakami in …
At what point will the price increases come back down to pre-shortage levels? Never, because the manufacturers have seen that the public will pay for the stuff at the higher prices, so there's no incentive to bring them back down.
"Hey Bob, how about you sabotauge your output capability to create a shortage of your stuff, I'll do the same for my stuff, then we both raise our prices as a result? We'll get rich!"
"Hey Bill, I like that idea, but here's a better one. Let's just SAY that there was sabotauge, like a chemical contamination or something, and then use that as the excuse to raise prices? We'll get richer!"
"Bob, you're a genius!"
*Sigh*
I'm getting far too cynical for my own damned good... =-/
In the US at least, we have a few whistleblower laws/avenues that would make that fairly risky to pull off without management being paranoid someone would spill the beans (whistleblowers getting a cut off successful lawsuits and the full protection of the US government).
Unless the politicians in charge of the sector in question are also firmly in the pockets of the corporations being reported, at which point the whistleblower becomes the "terrorist threat actor", "scummy hacker", or "industrial espionage agent" with a price on their head & multiple governments out gunning for their ass.
Optimists see the light at the end of the tunnel & think it's daylight, pessimists think it's a toll booth, & realists know it's the headlight of an oncomming freight train about to turn us into chunky salsa. =-/
I didn't know that the Japanese have basically adopted the phrase "clean room" wholesale as well as "AI". It makes sense to keep the tech term, but it still came a bit as a surprise. Now I want to know what the French made of it. Anyone?
:)
In one of the Tom Peters books there is an anecdote about a chip fabrication problem.
The chip processing was showing dust contamination on the wafers. So they stopped production and upgraded the clean room air filtration system.
The problem still happened. Then someone realised there was a new person working in Goods Inward. Very conscientious - he was opening the received packs of virgin wafers in order to count that they were all there.
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