ASUS has come out to set the record straight: no, it will not be entering the memory manufacturing business, nor does it have any intentions of doing so in the foreseeable future.
After rumours began cropping up that the Taiwanese PC brand was planning on manufacturing its own memory, in an effort to alleviate the ongoing memory shortage, Taiwanese state media outlet, CNA, got the answer straight from the horse’s mouth.
The original rumour is believed to have originated from the Iran-based publication, SakhtAfzar, which we previously reported on. The problem was that the source provided no proof or sources beyond its claim that it had obtained the information through “proprietary and reliable reports”. To be fair, the site has post some legitimate leaks in the past, some of of which were the specifications of the AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs.
ASUS does make many a component, but memory manufacturing isn’t one of them. At current, the company manufactures motherboards, GPUs, keyboards, laptops, and so on and so forth. Memory manufacturing, as indicated by experts, is a whole different animal. Investing in memory wafer fabs or setting up its own memory production line for a brief period – in this case, to address the aforementioned memory chips shortage – makes little sense.
Pulling off such a feat would mean setting up production lines would take a minimum of two years, at least, by Tom’s Hardware’s count, and that is assuming that the company already has an existing memory IP and lot of experience in manufacturing DRAM. Which it absolutely doesn’t.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, CNA)
