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We often associate Taiwan with chips, Taiwanese chips.
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It's their thing, right? But Taiwan's strength is actually only in logic chips. In the industry's other big sector, memory and DRAM memory in particular, Taiwan is second tier, hardly a player.
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It's not that the Taiwanese haven't tried
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to break into DRAM before. In fact, they spent billions trying for two decades. They just keep losing at it over and over again.
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In this video, we look at Vanguard
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Ti, Acer, Taiwan Memory Corporation and Taiwan's DRAM failure. In prior videos, I discussed Taiwan's early successes in semiconductors. In the 1970s, a Taiwanese government funded research institute called ITRI paid a few million dollars to acquire a 7.5 micron CMOS process from RCA. In May 1976, Taiwan sent 35 to 40 individuals to RCA's plant for six to 12 months to learn this process node. Then ITRI transferred its acquired technology and facilities to the private sector, founding two companies that became incredible success stories. The first, umc, pioneered Taiwan's semiconductor industry and later spun off its leading fabless designer, MediaTek. They remain the world's fourth largest foundry by revenue. The second company is of course TSMC. They need no further preamble. Both well complemented Taiwan's electronics and contract OEM industries, providing custom logic chips or ASICs, to accelerate their growth. With these twin successes under their belt, the Taiwanese government then turned to the question of dram. Now DRAM is a famously ferocious industry with economic dynamics nothing like logic. Used in large quantities for computers, PCs and consumer devices, DRAM is a commodity infamous for its volatility.
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In the early days, you often had
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four good years and one bad year a cycle. The space was also crowded with global players. You had the Japanese, the South Korean memory giants and of course the Americans with IBM and Micron technology. Success in the field required incredible R and D executed and flawlessly scaled every two or three years. I before covered the extensive work done to squeeze ever more capacitors into the same real estate. Failure means falling out of the race. Was it wise to compete in such a crowded R and D intensive and high stakes field? ASICS and other logic chips were less competitive and better fit Taiwan's business landscape of small to medium sized enterprises.
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Taiwan had even recently suffered its own
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painful failures in DRAM. In 1984, the Taiwanese government raised $16 million of funding from banks and private investors, including the PC giant Acer Group, to start Kwazal Taiwan company in Hsinchu. Quazelle had been founded by a Chinese American entrepreneur with experience at Both Burroughs and Xerox.
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They sought to do R and D
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from the ground up. But as early as 1985, the company started to suffer Leadership issues in house. Fabrication began in January 1986, only to run headlong into a brutal DRAM downturn. With prices falling from three to four dollars to just one dollar, Quazel ended up running out of money by mid-1986. Two other memory firms, Mosul and Vitellik, also failed to make ground in the industry either. They eventually merged and will appear again later in this video. So anyway, the DRAM sector just seemed like a cursed land for the Taiwanese. But then, in 1988, a year after TSMC's founding, there was a severe DRAM shortage.
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This global shortage had several causes.
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On the demand side, there was a major surge in sales of PC clones. PCs were shifting from older 8bit CPUs to newer 16and 32bit CPUs, which needed more memory. And there was weirdness on the supply side. Several American producers had exited the market after the aforementioned brutal downturn of 1986. The Japanese were also transitioning their fabs
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from 256k to 1 megabit drams and
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had not yet fully ramped.
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The US press called it the Great DRAM Shortage.
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Prices in the third quarter of 1988 surged to previously unseen heights. Computer, PC and consumer device manufacturers in both Taiwan and the United States found it hard to get enough memory to ship product. The shortage underlined memory's importance to Taiwan's PC companies and electronics ecosystem. They consumed increasingly more memory, but depended on unreliable allocations given to them by the Japanese or Americans. During the shortage, Jim Dykes, TSMC's first CEO, recalled being pressured by Taiwan's PC makers to produce DRAMs as well as ASICs. Dikes refused, fully believing the approach of staying only in logic chips. Though later on, TSMC did produce a few drams for customers. They also offered embedded memories like Edrams, special memories that sit right alongside the logic transistors. They still offer these embedded memories today, though different ones like STT mram. The first out with a DRAM venture was Dan Shi of Acer Group, then Taiwan's leading PC company. Sometime in late 1988, Shi formulated the bold idea to start an internal DRAM memory fab inside Acer Group, gambling that future internal demand would be immense and any leftover supply can also be sold to other Taiwanese companies. To shortcut time to market, SH would license the DRAM process node from Texas Instruments. SH recalled in an oral history for the computer History Museum that he talked to Sharp, NEC and others too. But only Ti, a former customer, was interested. The 1988 DRAM shortage also led ITRI's Vice President, Dr. Shi Shin Tai to lobby for ITRI to do DRAM 2. Dr. Shi is a legend in Taiwanese semiconductor history. One of the original engineers sent to the RCA factory in the 1970s, no relation to Stan Shi. In a 2011 oral history for the Computer History Museum, he noted his thinking about this. It happened in 1988 and 1989. We were short of memories globally. Therefore enterprises called ETRI for hell. This could not be done in a single day. It requires a long term R and D investment. Because our computer industry had been growing, people came to realize that components had begun to influence the future. That's when Stan Shi began his investment in ASM. It was probably in the 1990s. ITRI had started thinking about this in the 80s. In 1989, ITRI kicked off the Sub Micron Memory Production Technology Development project, or just the Sub Micron project. At about the same time, Acer cemented its collaboration with TI, investing $185 million to start a DRAM joint venture called TI Acer. It is important to know that this decision was extensively debated even as the Taiwanese were making it. Yes, the DRAM market was competitive, but
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proponents had points to make too. The PC market was both growing and using more memory. In 1990, Microsoft released the Windows 3.0 operating system, which featured a visual GUI with clickable applications. A big commercial success, Windows 3.0 forced all PC vendors to upgrade their memory specs. And regarding the competition issue, the aforementioned devastating 1986 dram downturn washed out several
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big players, particularly in the United States like Intel.
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And with the 1985 Plaza Accord revaluing the Japanese yen upwards, the Taiwanese and Koreans enjoyed a currency advantage. I should also mention that Samsung, Hyundai and the Koreans had not yet become the giants they were going to be. It seemed possible then to take them on. Even so, it was still going to be hard. Morris Deng recounted in his memoirs that the Sub Micron project had a staggeringly ambitious to research and develop DRAM chips that can compete at the leading edge against the Japanese, Koreans and Americans in five years. And then there was the issue of who will design the memory. TSMC customers brought their own designs, which let TSMC entirely focus on the manufacturing. But memory makers must design their memory
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and it is a critical part of their success.
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Neither ITRI nor TI Acer owned memory design IP or had experience in memory design. ITRI would be starting from scratch and TI Acer was essentially borrowing TI's technology via license both this went against Morris principle of owning the core technology. He mused in his memoirs whether TSMC's success as a spin off had been too easy, adding that the tragic outcome was almost inevitable. TI Acer's build greatly strained Acer Group's financials in the early 1990s. The PC market had crashed, causing the company to turn a $22 million loss in 1991 and then layoffs. Builders finally started production in July 1991, with the two partners sharing the DRAM output.
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The Sub Micron project leaned heavily on
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the efforts and knowledge of two Chinese
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returnees from the United States.
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They were Dr. Chi Ren Lu, who had worked on memory processes at Bell Labs and his younger brother Cao Chen Nicky Lu, who had worked at IBM. The elder Lu agreed to join the project, but his younger brother wanted to
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start a company which is today the
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publicly traded E Tron Technology.
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So E Tron participated as a contractor,
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contributing some critical designs despite challenges in procuring talented Taiwanese designers. The Submicron project set up an 8 inch wafer fab in Hsinchu and per ITRI's own milestone webpage, produced an advanced 16 megabit DRAM product in 1993.
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Though Morris Chang in his memoirs noted
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that the actually saleable product was a 4 megabit dram produced by E Tron, the aforementioned Nicky Lu's outfit. In 1994, 4 megabit was behind the leading edge, but still good enough to sell for some profit. That same year TSMC went public on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the stock price soaring 10 times its offering price and making many OG TSMC project members very rich. The news motivated the Sub Micron project team to push for a spin off. This spinoff, privatization was done differently than how it was done with TSMC or umc. UMC had been done as a straight transfer. TSMC was set up as a joint venture with a foreign company, Philips. The Sub Micron project, on the other hand, was privatized via an auction. Despite his misgivings about the project and memory in general, Morris Deng put together a group with his right hand man FC Zeng and raised investor money to win that auction and start Vanguard International Semiconductor. Vanguard began in late 1994 with 330 employees transferred to the company from ITRI along with two product designs, the aforementioned 4 megabit DRAM product ready for sale
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and the 16 megabit design still in development.
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Vanguard and Ti Acer led the way, but they were not alone. A bunch of private DRAM startups followed too. They were backed with funding from Taiwan's diversified business groups which were then flush with cash, and licensed IP from the Japanese memory makers who were fading and saw licensing as an easy way to make a few dollars. The first of these arrangements was Nanya Technology Corporation, established in March 1995, backed with money from the Formosa plastics conglomerate and a technology license from the Japanese firm Oki Electric. Pilot DRAM Production began in 1996. The second was PowerChip Semiconductor, founded in Hsinchu in 1994 by Frank Huang and others. They licensed a DRAM process node from Mitsubishi and started production in 1996. The third was promos that kicked off 1996 as a joint venture between the aforementioned Taiwanese legacy firm Mosul Vitellik and Siemens Semiconductor in Germany, which contributed the IP for 64 megabit dram. This dram gold rush was augmented by established Taiwanese companies also going into the field. The largest of these me too fast follower DRAM makers was Winbon. Winbond Semiconductor was founded back in 1987 and they have an interesting founding story. Their founder and assets came from itri, but their money came from a Taiwanese wire, cable and metal conglomerate called Walsing Lihwa. Winbon started off providing logic chips for wired telephones, consumer electronics and computers before diversifying into nor flash non volatile memory in 1995. That is and remains a pretty good business for them. In late December 1995 they announced a partnership with Toshiba to go make drams. Their 16 megabit dram fab located outside of Taipei cost about $1.2 billion and would produce 30,000 wafers a month. In addition to Winbon there is Macronics, a Taiwanese company founded in 1988 by former ITRI researchers. Originally they also started off in non volatile memories, mask ROMs and ePros. Then they too got into DRAM, but only embedded types, the stuff that sits alongside logic transistors. We have to mention the vintage OGs like UMC and Mozovatellic. Yes, separate from promos, also producing some amount of drams for the love of the game. Even Datong, the ancient electronics company known more for rice cookers and fans declared plans to build a DRAM fab, though
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thankfully they never went through with it.
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It was a gold rush and that was the danger. In a prior video I discussed the beer game and how it takes time for semiconductor end user demand signals to filter down to producers like Samsung or tsmc and then it takes time for those companies to go to their suppliers and ramp up production in response. Unfortunately, the time it takes for these signals to travel up or down the supply chain can cause a painful bullwhip effect. The DRAM cycle of the mid-1990s illustrates this well. In 1994, the PC DRAM industry enjoyed a massive supercycle in anticipation of of the forthcoming Windows 95 operating system and has higher RAM requirements of 4 to 8 megabytes. Such times often snooker memory makers into thinking that things are different this time. So they go build a bunch of expensive factories, and I mean really expensive. A memory fab in the 1990s cost something like a billion dollars. In 1994, total DRAM production in Taiwan was worth about $600 million, good for 2.5% market share of the $24 billion world market. In 1995, new 8 inch wafer fabs brought online by Vanguard and Ti Acer more than doubled that production to $1.25 billion. Morris Dang's memoir related how Vanguard International began operations in January 1995 with optimism and energy. Their 4 megabit DRAM product still sold at a good price of $12 to $15 per chip, with cash costs of about $5 or $6 per chip. The world DRAM market surged to $40 billion in 1995, making $2 billion of profits each month. In August 1995, Vanguard broke even. Its CEO Bob Evans celebrated with employee bonuses of a full month's pay and it was a good time. Unfortunately, it would not last. In late December 1995, Evans phoned Morris in alarm, telling him that 4 megabit dram prices were crashing. DRAM makers all thought that the Windows 95 and Internet boom had changed things forever. So they built and built and they ended up building too much. Nine new dram fabs in Taiwan came into production in 1995 and 1996, including Powerchip and Nanez factories. Worldwide, the number of fabs leapt from 73 in 1995 to 170 in 1996. The majority of a chip's nominal accounting cost is depreciation, that is sunk cost. The actual cash cost is quite low. If those are covered, memory makers have little incentive to cut back on production, even if producing will cause prices to crash even more. All this new capacity coming online rolled down 4 megabit prices from $12 to 750 to 340. Then when prices hit 230 in the third quarter 1996, Vanguard could not even cover its cash costs. The only pathway out was to move up to 16 megabit. But that product was not yet ready. What is worse, new DRAM capacity was still coming online. A lagging effect of decisions made years ago plus an unwillingness to yield market share. In 1997, five more fabs entered the market, throwing off the demand supply curve once again. By 1998, the value of the whole market had cratered to under $15 billion, down over 60% from the sweet summer days of 1995. Classic bullwhip effect. Great for buyers, but hard for memory makers. The great dram crash of 1996 Smashed dram makers all over. The Koreans suffered a double blow from the high debt inflicted upon them during the go go 1990s, that is the Asian financial crisis. After a very long and drawn out process, the Korean government would eventually merge together Hyundai and Gold Star semiconductor divisions to create Hynix over in Taiwan. In 1997, TI Acer lost $58 million. PowerChip suffered a pre tax loss of 31 million, both very high numbers in corporate Taiwan. And with Samsung and Hynix refusing to give up even an inch of market share, there was only so much money the Taiwanese can afford to burn at Vanguard. Bob Evans left midway through 1996 and FC Zeng from TSMC took over. Zeng fought fires at Vanguard for the next few years, switching production capacity away from commodity DRAM to sell specialized high speed DRAM and RAM for graphics cards. The Taiwanese suffered additional damage because they did not own their technology. Licensing someone else's DRAM IP means paying them a percentage, cutting into precious margins. It also leaves them high and dry if the foreign partner pulls out or cannot deliver. Nanya experienced this when Oki failed to move on to the next DRAM generation. The backwardness would have killed them had they not signed a technology sharing deal with IBM in 1998. Also in 1998, Texas Instruments announced that it would sell its money losing DRAM business to Micron, end its various memory joint ventures and cut 3,500 jobs. As part of that retreat, TI sold its stake in the TI Acer joint venture to Acer. In March 1998, Acer took on the task of turning its DRAM business around while also trying to find a new technology partner. In mid 1999, Acer sold a 33% stake in the money losing TIA Acer division to TSMC. A few months later, TSMC bought the whole thing and turned its factory into Fab 7. Can see today that Fab 7 looks quite distinctly different than its peers. That's because they didn't design or build it. This purchase, along that of another Foundry Challenger called Worldwide Semiconductor help boost TSMC's wafer capacity ahead of rival UMC, one of their major turning points. Really a similar fate eventually befell Vanguard. After Tsang returned to tsmc. Morris convinced his VP of Operations Rick Tai to join Vanguard as its leader. Tsai is an operations master and managed a new technology transfer from Mitsubishi. The Vanguard still lost $155 million in 1998, a corporate record for losses in Taiwan and was deploying technology behind the leading edge. Analysts started asking questions about how long TSMC can keep subsidizing its floppy haired little brother. Rick Tai eventually privately told Zhang that memory had no future and suggested that Vanguard pivot to Logic Foundry. Morris agreed and in January 2000 told the staff for whatever reason, TSMC did not initially fully absorb Vanguard, probably due to the financial losses and node differences. But they did establish a comprehensive alliance transferring process node technology and even referring business to them. Vanguard's conversion into Logic Foundry was completed in 2004 and to this day the two companies remain separate but allied. Vanguard even recently licensed TSMC's Powergan Technologies as the giant moves to free up more capacity for AI. Ditching DRAM can be argued to be the proper financial decision. But Dr. Zhi Yuanlu and others later reflected in the recent Chip Odyssey documentary that Vanguard should have held on a little bit longer. Zhang himself has said that the way it ended was sad. Vanguard and Ti Acer were the two major exits during this period of time. Taiwan's other DRAM makers, Nanya Powerchip Promos Winbon and Moso Vitellic continued on. The end of the 1990s saw the Asian financial crisis, the Twin.com and telecom bubbles and then 911 by 2001 the global economy remained sluggish. Weak demand for high tech goods caused Taiwan's economy to abruptly fall into what was called its most severe economic recession since the first oil crisis. And then there was mainland China. Both Taiwan and the mainland ascended to the WTO together. But China's cheaper labor costs and sheer size put pressure on Taiwan's economic model. Foreign and Taiwan based investors far preferred to invest in the mainland. This capital in labor flight was a concern. The Taiwanese government then led by Chen Sui Bian of the DPP party sought policies to expand Taiwan's economic strengths, add new ones and keep capital and people inside Taiwan. Thus came the 2 trillion and Twin Star Policy, a six year initiative that was part of a larger 2.65 trillion NTD 2008 challenge to upscale Taiwan's economy and reignite growth. The private public policy dispersed government policy support in the form of tax incentives and special budget funds to projects in two heavyweight technology TFT LCD displays and DRAMs. The goal was for these two heavyweight sectors together generate 2 trillion NTD of value, or about $60 billion USD by 2006. The 2stars part of the initiative's name refers to two rising star digital content and biotechnology, and some funds were put into that as well. The 2 trillion policy triggered a new wave of DRAM company formation and fab construction. In November 2003, Nanya announced that it would partner with Infineon Siemen Semiconductor spinoff technology for a new joint venture called Inoterra.
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Inoterra would build a cutting edge 12
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inch wafer fab in the area of Taoyuan. The fab cost 2.2 billion euro and would churn out 20,000 to 50,000 wafers per month upon its completion in 2006. To get the wafers, they license Infineon's trench capacitor drams. Three years later, Infineon spun out its DRAM division into a standalone company called Kimanda, a financial move to get DRAM volatility off their books. This cut off Kimanda from any future support from its siblings, making it vulnerable to a downturn. Other Taiwanese companies, Promos, powerchip and Winbon all surged to build new fabs in response to the policy, oftentimes taking out billions of NTD bank debt in order to do it. 2006 only threw gas onto the fire. It was yet another boom year for dram. Yes, the DRAM cycle cycling again. After years of working off inventory and capacity, including another downturn in 2005, things finally turned in 2006. In February 2006, Microsoft showed off their next flagship OS, the despicable Windows Vista. The electronics industry expected this overstuffed graphics heavy chonker to drive another DRAM super cycle, just like with Windows 95 and 3.0. At the same time, PC demand in China unexpectedly soared as China became the world's second largest PC market, which in turn led to unexpected demand in drams that is said to have caught memory makers off guard. The memory industry was also absorbing the rise of flash memory and the switchover from DDR2. Popular portable music players like the Apple ipod use lots of flash memory, so Samsung switched over some of their DRAM capacity to fulfill that demand. Meanwhile, the switchover from older DDR2 to faster DDR3 technology did not go as
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well as first thought.
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Demand for the older stuff surged just as the FAB started moving to the new so anyway, the DRAM shortage whipped everything into a fervor. In December 2006, PowerChip announced an ambitious joint venture with Japan's Ilpita Memory. Ilpita was then Japan's DRAM national champion. Formed out of the merger of nec, Hitachi and Mitsubishi's DRAM divisions, this big Taiwanese Japanese joint venture was named Rexchip and had the goal of building a massive 450 billion NTD, or $14 billion USD fab complex in Taichung. At the time, it was called the single biggest FDI project in Taiwanese history. But while the 2 trillion policy did manage to stimulate companies to build more big FAB projects in Taiwan, none of those companies got close to matching Samsung or even Hynix's size. In total, Taiwanese firms altogether produced less than 15% of the global market, and again, most of them simply struck deals with foreigners to import their ip, perhaps believing that they can focus on manufacturing only. As I said earlier, this limited their technology options in terms of product and thinned their margins. Yet more concerning was the fact that the Taiwanese government, explicitly identifying DRAM as a nationally important technology field, created an implicit government guarantee. Companies moved ahead with their plans, thinking that the government would bail them out if they failed. A moral hazard anyway, the DRAM cycle turned again in 2007. Prices crashed some 30% and all the DRAM vendors started taking heavy losses. That was before the global financial crisis in 2008. The prices of certain products like a standard DDR2.1 gigabit DRAM sank to as low as 75 cents in March 2009, leading people to say that it was cheaper than water. Samsung reported its first financial loss since 2000. Hynix lost money for five straight quarters. Elpida and Micron lost over 70 billion NTD in 2008 alone. Europe's last serious dram maker, Cumanda, found itself in serious crisis after an attempted rescue by the German government fell through. They filed for bankruptcy with their assets sold off piecemeal. But it were the Taiwanese who took an outsized proportion of the financial losses. Je Ho Lee, in his thesis the Chicken Game, notes the DRAM industry as a whole took losses of $10 billion between Q1 2007 and third quarter 2008. Taiwanese DRAM firms took 42% of those losses despite only having between 13 to 15% of world market share. And unlike Samsung Electronics, which can lean on profits from selling end user products or cash inflows from its various chaebol siblings, the Taiwanese funded their builds with Short term bank debt, a disastrous move. By early 2009, it seemed possible that the entire industry could go under, putting thousands out of work and maybe even triggering a bank crisis. Frank Huang, co founder of PowerChip Semiconductor, said in a press conference. How to help Taiwan's DRAM industry survive is of major importance to Taiwan's computer sector and even the overall high tech sector. If Taiwan's DRAM industry collapses, Huang warned, then its PC makers would be at the mercy of Samsung and be next to fall. In December 2008, government officials met with leaders at Elpida and then a week later, Micron. They then announced coordination efforts with banks to defer loan payments and take some pressure off the DRAM companies. Then in March 2009, the Taiwanese government, now led by Ma Ying Zhou of the Kuomindan Party, put forth its long term proposal, Taiwan Memory Company, or tmc. The TMC proposal would roll up Taiwan's medium sized DRAM makers into a single government backed company. The mooted merger candidates were Inoterra, Nanya, powerchip, Promos, Recchip and Winbon. The company would be funded with a billion dollars from the government, acquire Elpida's core DRAM technology and build enough capacity to take on Samsung or Hynix. On the surface, the plan seemed good and several semiconductor analysts publicly urged the companies to join in. But after the plan was announced, it received criticism from both industry and the public. The public asked whether the Taiwanese government was throwing taxpayer money after bad money. None of these Taiwanese DRAM companies looked capable of taking on Samsung or Hynix, which combined had 60% of the market. Will TMC be a zombie company that falls apart anyway? And most critically, Taiwan's various DRAM companies did not want to participate. It seems like they more expected handouts and government money, that is Bailouts to help them tide over the current situation. In April 2009, the DRAM decline somewhat reversed itself with Commanda's collapse, Elpida and Powerchip taking supply off the market and buyers filling inventories. Prices rose. The market recovery, precarious as it was, nevertheless took away much of the TMC project's urgency. And underneath the hood, the Taiwanese DRAM firms were also quite technically different. Notably, you had two major technology families. First, those aligned with Elpida, PowerChip and Ricschip, and those in the Micron camp, Nanya and Inoterra. Inoterra notably was then switching over to Micron's stacked capacitor technology after Kimanda's failure. Kimanda used trench capacitors and Inoterra did not seem excited to switch again. This complex brew of alliances, deals, technology sharing contracts and so on made a fast consolidation impractical. Integration efforts were likely to take years and and be quite messy. Thusly, Nanya, Powerchip and the like refused to join TMC. The government rejiggered the plan, turning Taiwan Memory Co. Into Taiwan Innovation Memory Co. Armed with 150 million USD, it would acquire and develop technologies so that Taiwanese firms can retain access to DRAM technology. But by then, Taiwan's Legislative Yuan had turned against the project and voted it down, seeing it as a fruitless giveaway to a very risky, very cyclical industry. With this, Taiwan's DRAM industry was left to the free market. In the wake of this monkey poop debacle, Promos, rexchip and powerchip delisted their stocks. Promos and powerchip shifted to new business models. Promos sold their FAB and became a fabless designer. Powerchip spun off its fabs to create psmc, a logic foundry. Their specialty is the display driver ic, a class of tricky chips that turn digital signals into images on the screen that basically saved their butts. Elpida Memory collapsed despite three years of support from the Japanese government, filing for bankruptcy in 2012 and being acquired by Micron for $2.5 billion. With that, Micron got Ilpita's stake in the Rexchip JV and later bought the rest from Powerchip. Micron then purchased Inoterra in 2016, completing a massive memory consolidation. Today, Micron is one of Taiwan's biggest foreign employers with 15,000 employees. While Micron has fabs in Singapore, US, Japan, China and India, the majority of its DRAM is made in Taiwan. Winbahn and Macronix both went back to making flash memory along with some Logic ICs and custom memory products. The two of them remain a dominant player in Nor Flash. Winbon still makes a little specialty of dram. The only major Taiwanese player to survive while remaining in DRAM was Nanya Technology, which only made it through thanks to money from the Formosa plastics conglomerate. Narnia has continued churning along as a second tier DRAM supplier behind the Big 3 and CXMT. They recently started construction on a brand new 10nm class fab in New Taipei City, Fab 5A. It even has an EUV machine for them. That is fortunate timing considering the current AI fueled DRAM shortage. Their 2026 revenues year to date are up something like 600% year over year. Once upon a time, the Dram industry involved 20 to 30 companies. Today that has consolidated to three to five, with only three of them really mattering. Taiwan's dram failure doesn't get a lot of ink because people tend to focus on the logic stuff. But it's a big deal and I think, as this makes clear, a very, very different market. Alright everyone, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel, sign up for the Patreon and I'll see you guys next time.