'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 …

[Dwarf]

I've found a way of selling it

Easy, just sell the storage as a new way of implementing /dev/null

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've found a way of selling it

Bonus feature: now includes /dev/random

[Agamemnon]

Re: I've found a way of selling it

*hoses keyboard in tea*

Long week, kinda rough. You two just put a smile on my face. Thank You.

[Dwarf]

Re: I've found a way of selling it

I'll drink to that -- cheers and have an upvote !

[devin3782]

Kioxia are celebrating the 35th anniversary of their previous incarnations invention of NAND flash and they do with "accidentally contaminating" their fab, its somehow very convenient that this happens as flash prices fall...

[Anonymous Coward]

You accidentally spill this bottle of "aspirin" into the tank of hydrazine, and our forgetful marketing intern accidentally forgets to pickup her duffel bag of marketing cash by a park bench after lunch.

[ShadowSystems]

I'm getting too cynical...

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... =-/

[Martin-73]

Re: I'm getting too cynical...

Exposure to reality will do that to a person.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm getting too cynical...

I wrote this down years ago:

I used to think I was cynical but the world just keeps on making me feel naïve.

[Erik Beall]

Re: I'm getting too cynical...

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).

[ShadowSystems]

Re: I'm getting too cynical...

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. =-/

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Write Only Memory. What's not to love?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prior art

Signetics 25120 Fully Encoded 9046xN, Random Access, Write-Only Memory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they say there was a loss of production, but I'm pretty sure some no-name brand would pick the chips up as long as they work. For how long, they don't care about that. Coming soon to aliexpress and some others.

[Ken Moorhouse]

If this is some kind of conspiracy...

...then why not we call it NANDGate?

[Sirius Lee]

In a WD board meeting: "Have you seen the profits the CPU vendors are making from the 'shortage' of chips?"

"Yeah, who'd have thought you could make more money by selling less"

"Hey, that gives me an idea. That fab in china..."

[Anonymous Coward]

That video contained some interesting revelations

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?

:)

[phuzz]

Phew, glad I just bought a new SSD.

Except, it's a WD drive, hmmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Sloppy Crapmonster]

Look on the positive side

That means they only lost 5.64 Exbibytes (1 Gigabyte = 1000000000 Bytes), that's not so bad now.

[Whoisthis]

Did somebody p**s on their chips?