What they mean is that they bought 40% of all RAM production, they managed to do that by simultaneously making two big deals at the same time. It's buying up 40% of all RAM production with the intention to have most of it idle in warehouses that is "dirty". And in order to be able to do that, they needed to be secretive and time two big deals at the same time.
The incentive suggested in the article is to block other competitors from scaling training, which is immensely RAM hungry. Amongst other things. Even Nvidia could feel the pressure, since their GPUs need RAM. It could be a good bargaining chip for them, who knows.
I'm not saying it's true, but it is suspicious at the very least. The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab + PCB assembly to turn them into usable RAM modules. Why does OpenAI want to become a RAM manufacturer, but of only the process post-wafer.
> The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab
The wafers are processed. That means Samsung/Hynix have taken the raw ("blank") wafers, then run them through their DRAM lithography process, etching hundreds of DRAM dies ("chips") onto the wafer.
You could attach test probes to individual chips on the wafer and you'd have a working DRAM chip. In fact, that's how testing is performed: you connect to each die one at a time with a "probe card" which supplies power & ground, plus an electrical interface for functional testing.
If OpenAI takes possession of the processed wafers and wants finished RAM modules, they need to do a few things: test each die (expensive), saw the wafer into individual chips (cheap), package them (moderately expensive), test them again (medium expense), and then assemble the final module (inexpensive). Modern semiconductor test facilities cost billions of dollars and take years to build, so they'd need to immediately outsource that work (typically done in Southeast Asia)
OpenAI likely doesn't want to do any of this. They probably just want to make sure they're in control of their own destiny with regard to DRAM, then decided the best place to accomplish that was by cutting deals directly with the DRAM semiconductor producers. This will allow them to take the wafers to the existing supply chain, then contract them to turn the wafers into finished modules.
