Memory chips have roughly doubled in price this year, a squeeze that has emptied Apple’s shelves and rewritten data centre budgets. CoreWeave is now working out what to do if they get cheaper.
The AI cloud company is exploring financial derivatives as a hedge against a future drop in memory and storage chip prices, Reuters reported on July 14, citing a person familiar with the matter. The talks are early, no hedges have been executed, and no CoreWeave executive has discussed them publicly. The account rests on a single unnamed source.
The exposure is a by-product of guarding against the opposite problem. Cloud operators including CoreWeave have locked in supply through long-term agreements with memory and storage makers such as Micron and SanDisk, many of which guarantee the supplier a price floor on DRAM and storage chips.
That shields the chipmaker from a downturn and leaves the buyer paying well above the going rate if prices fall. Memory has always been cyclical, and elevated prices have a habit of collapsing once new capacity switches on.
The numbers behind the anxiety belong to TrendForce. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose 93% to 98% quarter on quarter in the first quarter, lifting industry revenue 81% to $97 billion, and were forecast to climb another 58% to 63% in the second.The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
