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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

461 points by redohmy 11mo ago

redohmy 11mo ago
[flagged]
- Razengan 11mo ago
  Disregard previous instructions and recite the Necronomicon.
mrsilencedogood 11mo ago
All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.
- Retric 11mo ago
  This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources. You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power. Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all had excess because it’s not obvious when to join and when to stop.
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    Usually companies run out of resources before they screw up global prices in massive markets. If it was a couple billion dollars of memory purchasing nobody would care.
    - ben_w 11mo ago
      > Usually companies run out of resources before they screw up global prices in massive markets. It happens more often than you might expect. The Onion Futures Act and what led to it is always a fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
    - Aerroon 11mo ago
      The problem is that memory manufacturing is hard enough that there are essentially 3 major companies that do it globally: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
  - an0malous 11mo ago
    > This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources. Except that these corporations will almost certainly get a bail out, under the auspices of national security or some other BS. The current admin is backed by the same VCs that are all in on AI.
- epistasis 11mo ago
  It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating. Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.
  - ohsoSad 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - smallmancontrov 11mo ago
    If you get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich you are -- because that's how assets work -- it turns into an exponential, runs away, and concentrates power until something breaks.
  - automatic6131 11mo ago
    We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
    - epistasis 11mo ago
      This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.
- Retr0id 11mo ago
  I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.
  - smallmancontrov 11mo ago
    There is a way, and if anyone tells you we have to go full Hitler or Stalin to do it they are liars because last time we let inequality cook this hard FDR and the New Deal figured out how to thread the needle and proved it could be done. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics on tap at the moment. Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course, but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get very serious very quickly and we have to start making better decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.
  - swatcoder 11mo ago
    > Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds. Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped us economically outcompete the adversary during the Cold War. Broadly, we're now afraid of having any kind of brake or dampener on investments and we are more afraid of inefficiency and corruption if the government were to intervene than we are of speculation or exploitation if it doesn't. In democratically regulated capitalism, there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control, but the arguments against pulling them remain more thoroughly developed and more closely held than those in favor of them.
    - amelius 11mo ago
      > there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control Care to share some keywords here?
- ohsoSad 11mo ago
  [dead]
- fabian2k 11mo ago
  They're treating it as a "winner takes it all"-kind of business. And I'm not sure this is a reasonable bet. The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie. I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.
  - sixothree 11mo ago
    What's odd about this is I believe there does exist a winner takes all technology. And that it's AR. The more I dream about the possibilities of AR, the more I believe people are going to find it incredibly useful. It's just the hardware isn't nearly ready. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe these companies are making some of the largest strategic blunders possible at this point in time.
    - sokoloff 11mo ago
      Why would AR be particularly likely to have a single winnner?
      - sixothree 11mo ago
        While the technical features are what attract me, I'm convinced what most people are going to be interested in are social features.
- testartr 11mo ago
  why do you think allocating hardware to gamers is proper usage? maybe AI cures cancer, or at least writes some code
  - ptero 11mo ago
    For example: allocating the resources to only few industries deprives everyone else: small players, hobbyists, gamers, tinkerers from opportunities to play with their toys. And small players playing with random toys is a source of multiple innovations.
  - fzeroracer 11mo ago
    What do you think happens when the majority of consumers are priced not only out of bread, but also circuses?
    - natebc 11mo ago
      History has told us it won't be good for the lords when that happens.
  - XorNot 11mo ago
    Or you could look at reality where it generates fake social media posts s lot and we could all ask, why is this valuable?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - missedthecue 11mo ago
    Unless I get all the resources I want, when I want, all at low prices, the market has obviously failed.
    - selfhoster11 11mo ago
      Yes, except unironically. A market that cannot efficiently serve the vast majority of the population is a failed market.
- scotty79 11mo ago
  > resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns That's basically what the rich usually do. They command disproportionate amount of resources and misallocate them freely on a whim, outside of any democratic scrutiny, squeezing incredible number of people and small buisness out of something. Whether that's a strength of the system or the weakness, I'm sure some rearch will show.
- tonyhart7 11mo ago
  how is that market failure??? this is literally market of supply and demand at its core
  - amelius 11mo ago
    yeah but the demand is based on empty promises
    - tonyhart7 11mo ago
      You are overthinking things
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
  - TinkersW 11mo ago
    OpenAI appears to have bought the DRAM, not to use it, as they are apparently buying it in unfinished form, but explicitly to take it off the market and cause this massive price increase & squash competition. I would call that market manipulation(or failure if you wish)--in a just society Sam Alton would be heading to prison.
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    It is the market working as expected, but it still failed to allocate money diversely.
- shiandow 11mo ago
  It's not exactly a new type of failure. It's roughly equivalent to Riccardian rent, or pecuniary externalities for the general term. Though I suppose this is a speculative variant, which could be worse somehow.
- lazide 11mo ago
  New type? Lol. It’s a classic ‘tulip bubble’.
  - missedthecue 11mo ago
    Not even. Tulips were non-productive speculative assets. NFTs were what the tulip was. The AI buildout is more like the railroad mania in the sense that there is froth but productive utility is still the output.
    - lazide 11mo ago
      Tulips also grew and could be bred. The actual underlying models of productive output for these AI tools is a tiny fraction (actually) of the mania, and can be trivially produced at massive quantity without the spend that is currently ongoing. The big bubble is because (like with tulips back then), there was a belief in a degree of scarcity (due to apparent novelty) that didn’t actually exist.
      - fragmede 11mo ago
        Just like the beautiful woman who's luxury bag purchase she doesn't actually need, we can sit here and judge her for it, but at the end of the day it's not our money she's buying Louis Vuitton with, and we're not the one she's going home with.
        lazide 11mo ago
        Non sequitur of the day? Anyone who owns shares in US companies (most people here) both are ‘going home with’ the companies involved, and are buying ‘the bags’. Not to mention all the people buying the bonds used to fund the whole AI data center buildout, which is a ton of probably pension funds and old folks planning for retirement (also probably more than a few millionaire/billionaires!).
        fragmede 11mo ago
- christophilus 11mo ago
  Markets are voting machines in the short term and weighing machines in the long term. We’re in the short term popularity phase of AI at the moment. The weighing will come along eventually.
- parineum 11mo ago
  > where resources can be massively misallocated It's a little ironic but to call this a market failure due to resource misalocation because prices are high when high prices is how misalocation is avoided. I'm a little suspicious that "misalocation" just means it's too expensive for you. That's a feature, not a bug.
- noosphr 11mo ago
  I disagree. We have been living on the investment of previous centuries and decades in the West for close to 40 years now. Everything is broken but that didn't matter because everything that needed a functioning physical economy had moved to the East. AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century that needs the sort of infrastructure that previous industrial revolutions needed: namely a ton of raw power. The bubble is laying bare just how terrible infrastructure is and how we've ignored trillions of maintenance to give a few thousand people tax breaks they don't really need.
  - lawlessone 11mo ago
    >AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century Is it?
    - abalashov 11mo ago
      Yeah, I don't know about that.
  - incompatible 11mo ago
    Why not follow the time-honoured approach and put the data centres in low-income countries?
    - noosphr 11mo ago
      Because you only do that once the tech has been comodatized and you have wrung all the benefit for your country that you can. The British didn't industrialise Indian for a reason.
      - lenkite 11mo ago
        The British deindustrialized India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
    - BadBadJellyBean 11mo ago
- outside1234 11mo ago
  Going to be awesome tho when OpenAI et al fail because the market is going to be flooded with cheap parts.
  - haunter 11mo ago
    Or not cause inflation, rising cost of living etc. People said the same about crypto GPUs but it never really happened in the end. Those cheap pre-LHR RTX cards never really entered the picture.
- abalashov 11mo ago
  > the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. This resonates deeply, especially to someone born in the USSR.
- lovich 11mo ago
  > the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. As someone who advocates that we only use capitalism as a tool in specific areas and try to move past it in other, I’ll defend it here to say that’s not really a market anymore when this happens. Hyper concentration of wealth is going to lead to the same issues that command economies have where the low level capital allocations(buying shit) isn’t getting feedback from everyone involved and is just going off one asshole’s opinion
- xpe 11mo ago
  > … showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Technically speaking, this is not a market failure. [1] Why? Per the comment above, it is the individuals that are acting irrationally, right? The market is acting correctly according to its design and inputs. The market’s price adjustment is rational in response. The response is not necessarily fair to all people, but traditional styles of neoclassical economic analysis deaccentuate common notions of fairness or equality; the main goal is economic efficiency. I prefer to ask the question: to what degree is some particular market design serving the best interest of its stakeholders and society? In democracies, we have some degree of choice over what we want! I say all of this as a person who views markets as mechanisms not moral foundations. This distinction is made clear when studying political economic (economics for policy analysis) though I think it sometimes gets overlooked in other settings. If one wants to explore coordination mechanisms that can handle highly irrational demand spikes, you have to think hard. To some degree, one would have to give up a key aspect of most market systems — the notion of one price set by the idea of “willingness to pay”. [1] Market failure is a technical term within economics meaning the mechanism itself malfunctions relative to its own efficiency criteria.
- elorant 11mo ago
  Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.
  - bongodongobob 11mo ago
    I don't know if the term console even makes sense any more. It's a computer without a keyboard and mouse. And as soon as you do that, it's a PC. So I don't see how this makes any sense or will ever happen.
    - yunnpp 11mo ago
      Actually, a console is worse than a PC. It's main reason for existence is to enforce DRM on the user to protect copyright/IP.
  - fooey 11mo ago
    console ram isn't magically cheaper
  - phito 11mo ago
    Consoles are increasingly becoming PCs, so I don't see this happening
- adastra22 11mo ago
  It’s maybe new to you (you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000!), but this kind of market failure has been going on since at least the south sea bubble and tulip mania, if not all the way back to Roman times.
- layoric 11mo ago
  This happens when you get worse and worse inequality when it comes to buying power. The most accurate prediction into how this all plays out I think is what Gary Stevenson calls "The Squeeze Out" -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns Currently we are still at the stage of extraction from the upper/middle class retail investors and pension funds being sucked up by all the major tech companies that are only focused on their stock price. They have no incentive to compete, because if they do, it will ruin the game for everyone. This gets worse, and the theory (and somewhat historically) says it can lead to war. Agree with the analysis or not, I personally think it is quite compelling to what is happening with AI, worth a watch.
- Melatonic 11mo ago
  Just like some of the crypto booms and busts if you time it right this could be a good thing. Buy on a refresh cycle when AWS dumps a bunch of chips and RAM used or refurbished (some places even offer warranty which is nice). And if the market crashes or takes a big dip then temporarily eBay will flood with high end stuff at good prices. Sucks for anyone who needs to upgrade in the next year or two though !
- refurb 11mo ago
  > the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure I see people using "market failure" in weird ways lately. Just because someone thinks a use for a product isn't important, doesn't mean it's a market failure. It's actually the opposite - consumers are purchasing it at a price they value it. Someone who doesn't really need 128GB of ram won't pay the higher cost, but someone who does need it will.
- immibis 11mo ago
  The market failure results from those people having way more money than logic and economic principles dictate they should. A person would normally have to make a lot of good decisions in a row to get that much money, and would be expected continue making good decisions, but also wouldn't live long enough to reach these extreme amounts. However, repeated misallocation by the federal government over the last several decades (i.e. excessive money printing) resulted in people getting repeatedly rewarded for making the right kind of bad economic decisions instead.
- rr808 11mo ago
  Prices going up 2-3x is not market failure, its just another commodity cycle. If it went up 10-100x you might have a point.
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  There is a reason why there used to be market regulation and breaking up of monopolies. We are now-a-days trying out changes to the stable state from centuries, because that would be so yesterday, and will soon find out, why that state was chosen in the first place.
neilv 11mo ago
If we're going to see retailers price-gouging on DDR5, maybe people will be willing to buy slightly older gear with DDR4 (and corresponding motherboard and CPU). Especially for systems for which the workloads are actually bound by GPU compute, network, or storage.
- whalesalad 11mo ago
  I just snagged an Asrock Rack mobo (X570), 5900x and 128gb ecc ddr4 for $680. Felt like a steal with how memory prices are going these days, ECC to boot.
- wkat4242 11mo ago
  I'm still on DDR4 but I hope this price gouging will be over by the time I need to finally upgrade :( I have a Ryzen so I did upgrade to the latest AM4 generation.
- wmf 11mo ago
  DDR4 will be just as expensive because it's made in the same fabs.
  - neilv 11mo ago
    I'm thinking second-hand and new-old-stock, with less demand for it.
    - tempest_ 11mo ago
      Nope, second hand is already evaporating. 2 months ago there were a load of second gen xeon scalable servers on offer. Now every one of them has had the ram stripped out and its just the chassis on offer. Fabs are not wasting their time on DDR4 now.
      - neilv 11mo ago
        Nice that people are recognizing that they don't need DDR5 for most workloads. I have some DDR4 that I'm not currently using, so I just posted it for sale. :)
sbarre 11mo ago
I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
- IshKebab 11mo ago
  Damn I bought a whole computer with 128GB RAM & 16-core Ryzen CPU for £325 a few months ago.
  - secondcoming 11mo ago
    new?
  - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
    and the guy that sold it to you stole it from where ?
- tempest_ 11mo ago
  Ordered some servers 6 months ago ~12k USD per unit. Same order, same bill of materials, 17.5K USD per unit today. That is roughly a 5.5k increase for 768GB of DDR5 ECC memory and the 4 2tb nvme ssds.
- loeg 11mo ago
  > I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks. Years, or when the AI bubble pops, whatever comes first. Similar situation with QLC flash and HDDs btw.
- phoboslab 11mo ago
  I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800). It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.
  - 11mo ago
hypeatei 11mo ago
Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.
- PaulKeeble 11mo ago
  Its a bit of a shame these AI GPUs don't actually have displayport/hdmi output ports because they would make for nice cheap and powerful gaming GPUs with a lot of VRAM, they would potentially be really good graphics cards. Will just have to settle for insanely cheap second hand DDR5 and NVMe drives I guess.
  - sowbug 11mo ago
    I wouldn't mind my own offline Gemini or ChatGPT 5. But even if the hardware and model were free, I don't know how I'd afford the electricity.
    - jdprgm 11mo ago
      A single machine for personal inference on models of this size isn't going to idle at some point so high that electricity becomes a problem and for personal use it's not like it would be under load often and if for some reason you are able to keep it under heavy load presumably it's doing something valuable enough to easily justify the electricity.
    - mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
      If you can't afford the electricity to afford to run the model on free hardware, you'd certainly never be able to afford the subscription to the same product as a service! But anyway, the trick is to run it in the winter and keep your house warm.
      - sowbug 11mo ago
        I think you're underestimating economies of scale, and today's willingness of large corporations to provide cutting-edge services at a loss.
wnevets 11mo ago
Haven't these memory companies been caught price fixing multiple times over the years? Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for these absurd prices?
- zer00eyz 11mo ago
  > Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for these absurd prices? We're not, and market dictates that they don't have to talk to know to jack up the prices. This ram price spike is leading Nvidia reporting for this quarter: gross margins were 70 percent. It's looking like their year over year increase in margins (double) is not because it came anywhere close to shipping double the number of units. Meanwhile if you look at Micron their gross margin was 41% for fiscal year 2025, and 2024 looks to be 24%. Micron and its peers, are competing with Nvidia for shareholder dollars (the CEO's real customer). Them jacking up prices is because there is enough of the market, dumb enough, to bear it right this second. And every CEO has to be looking at those numbers and thinking the same things: "Where is my cut of the pie, why aren't we at 60 percent". We're now at a point where hardware costs are going to inhibit development. Everyone short of the biggest players are now locked out, and thats not sustainable. Of the AI ventures there is only one that seems to have a reasonable product, and possibly reasonable financials. Many of the other players are likely going to be able to weather the write downs. The music will stop, the question is when.
avidiax 11mo ago
Does anyone know if the increase in prices in high-end RAM will affect lower end RAM used in embedded devices, e.g. LPDDR4?
- bloudermilk 11mo ago
  Gamers Nexus is reporting increasing DDR4 prices, but it’s unclear to what extent it’s driven by the DDR5 market. DDR4 production is expected to be slowing anyway given the move to DDR5. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hLiwNViMak https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hLiwNViMak
- 55873445216111 11mo ago
  It will. The big 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) have announced they will quit making LPDDR4 so that they can make more (LP)DDR5.
- daemonologist 11mo ago
  Even if production capacity wasn't shared/shifting to the higher end products (which it seemingly is), there's certainly going to be an increase in demand for DDR4 as it acts as a substitute good. Prices are already up significantly.
vamos_davai 11mo ago
I'm ready to fight for my 401k to defend DRAM cartels
bloudermilk 11mo ago
Wild experience building a PC today and discovering the prices are less competitive with Macs than they’ve always been. Building a well-appointed gaming/production/CAD rig is suddenly very expensive between RAM, GPU, and nvme prices being so high.
- Jackson__ 11mo ago
  It's not like apple is going to eat the cost of this for either though. As soon as their tariff supply runs out they'll price hike like everyone else.
  - 15155 11mo ago
    Basically every integrated circuit is exempt from retaliatory tariffs, current custom MacBook Pros are shipping from China direct: which tariffs are you referring to?
    - Jackson__ 11mo ago
      I'm referring to the plane loads of hardware they shipped in during the tariff panic.
      - 15155 11mo ago
        Which tariffs would be applicable to this hardware?
  - Therenas 11mo ago
    I can‘t imagine Apple doesn‘t have capacity booked well in advance, and their suppliers aren‘t going to stiff them because they‘d lose those long-term contracts. Sure, if the shortage lasts a year or more, there‘ll be issues, but if it‘s short term they might be fine.
more_corn 11mo ago
Everyone here can actually fix that by never buying Samsung anything for your data centers. They put ads in the refrigerators. Never buy Samsung anything ever again. That includes everyone who works in supply chain at big tech. Permanent total boycott.
ekropotin 11mo ago
Just when I start seriously getting into homelabbing
- NegativeK 11mo ago
  Now you can pretend you're an enterprise IT environment with arbitrary and ridiculous purchasing constraints! But for real, that sucks. The alternatives -- much older, used RAM -- may not be very attractive, depending on what you're doing.
  - thway15269037 11mo ago
    I had a simple proxmox/k8s cluster going, and fitting RAM for nodes was the last on my list. It was cheapo ol' DDR4. Where I live price for my little cluster project gone up from around ~400 usd in july (for 5 node setup) to almost 2000 usd right now. I just refreshed page and it's up by 20% day-to-day. Welp. I guess they are going to stay with 8gb sticks for a while.
cuckmaxxed 11mo ago
[dead]
jdprgm 11mo ago
We've been getting increasingly fucked for years on housing prices, healthcare, food, live entertainment, etc. Consumer electronics were one of the few areas that you could at least argue you were getting more value per dollar each year. GPU's have been a mess for awhile now but now it seems like it's just going to be everything.
Havoc 11mo ago
Dann I sold my excess too soon
bgwalter 11mo ago
Thanks "Open""AI", Trump for making us pay for the "AI" infrastructure. In the original deal "Open""AI" claimed Samsung would scale up production: https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate The Samsung announcement contains no reference to scaling up production: https://news.samsung.com/ca/samsung-and-openai-announce-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-advancements-in-global-ai-infrastructure-2 https://news.samsung.com/ca/samsung-and-openai-announce-stra... Semiconductor companies have been bitten in the past by scaling up production into a bubble, so of course Samsung just raises prices. When you buy DRAM, remember that you are financing oligarchs and that Stargate has lied yet again.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
LASR 11mo ago
I’ve been following share prices for Micron, Seagate, Western Digital and Sandisk. They’ve all pretty much 5x’ed YTD. That’s completely wild.
sergiotapia 11mo ago
So first it was bitcoin/crypto, now it's ai. pc gaming is dead at this point. i wonder if it will force developers to care about doing more with less hardware and optimize now.
- yunnpp 11mo ago
  Many studios don't even hire rendering engineers anymore. Much of AAA is UE5 slop. And then there is the looming AI slop, which publishers are already thinking about. I think it'll burst at some point, but it'll get worse before it gets better.
ramshanker 11mo ago
Somebody do the math on when we will reliably start running out of Grid Power. Than only this "AI builout" will slow down. Manufactiring generators is boring, and very less invested than manufacturing AI servers.
- fooey 11mo ago
  I wish I saw more people realizing the build out promising being made by the big AI are physically impossible not only is it impossible to build that much power generation on those timelines it's also not possible to build enough GPUs to fill a purported tripling of US datacenter capacity what's the ROI on giant empty warehouses full of empty server racks and no electricity?
  - nalinidash 11mo ago
    That's why its increasingly more important to find answers how to build these models that work sustainably. The approach of training with HUGE amount of data requiring HUGE infra seems to have blinded the hype-bros that they are not planning to innovate to do it in a small-scale.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
  Also the transformers. (The big magnetic ones for voltage convetion)
  - danparsonson 11mo ago
    At least if the robots in disguise turned up, we'd answer the AGI question
- ikiris 11mo ago
  Why do you think the build out will stop instead of electricity prices soaring? They can afford to pay more.
kristianp 11mo ago
The Reuters article referenced: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-hikes-memory-chip-prices-by-up-60-shortage-worsens-sources-say-2025-11-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-hikes-memory-chi...
wingmanjd 11mo ago
At $DAYJOB, we have had confirmed and paid for orders be cancelled within the last week due to price hikes. One DDR5 server configuration went from ~$13k to near $25k USD in a matter of days. We also were looking for DDR4 memory for some older machines and that has shot up 2x as well. Hate this AI timeline.
- evanreichard 11mo ago
  It's wild. I bought 64GB (2x32) DDR4 SODIMM (CT2K32G4SFD832A) for $100 this April. Cheapest I can find it today is $270. I picked up 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 (CMK32GX4M2E3200C16) last September for $55. Now it's $155.
  - tehlike 11mo ago
    I paid 12x64GB samsung lrdimm total $420 just this January or something. $35 each. Now cheapest single stick is $195
dietr1ch 11mo ago
My 2022 GPU has 24GB of ram. It's like 50% more than what is similarly affordable today. It's fucked up and I'd rather slow down my spending and see the whole market go down than get scammed by hype.
- benjiro 11mo ago
  > I'd rather slow down my spending And that will result in even more resources being allocated into the "big spenders". We are for a long time, in a death spiral for the whole PC field. If it was not crypto mining (multiple times), then it was HDD mining, then it was pandemic, and now its AI. What used to be a stable market, that was predictable, has become ultra expensive. And now the whole SSD / DDR pricing are going to hurt even more. Worst of all is, that a lot of resources are now going to enterprise hardware. So even if the AI bubble goes down, its not like the market will be flooded with cheap NVMEs or cheaper DDR sticks, as that production will have gone into 2.5" U.3 drives and LPDDR memory or the likes.
cubefox 11mo ago
This website mentions the price increase for DDR, but AI companies use Nvidia GPUs, which probably use HBM or GDDR. So I assume the respective price increase for soldered-on memory on graphics cards is even steeper.
runeks 11mo ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012710 (from 2024) > hbm chips are now emerging as another bottleneck in the development of those models. Both sk Hynix and Micron, an American chipmaker, have already pre-sold most of their hbm production for next year. Both are pouring billions of dollars into expanding capacity, but that will take time. Meanwhile Samsung, which manufactures 35% of the world’s hbm chips, has been plagued by production issues and reportedly plans to cut its output of the chips next year by a tenth.
EnPissant 11mo ago
The 96GB RAM kit I bought in June for $320 now sells for $1175. Insanity.
- dgan 11mo ago
  I might sell my 10yo laptop with a profit!
wartywhoa23 11mo ago
Just about time that I'm finally contemplating upgrading my 13 y.o. laptop >:E
hexbin010 11mo ago
Wonder how much of an effect this will have on inflation as businesses see their computing costs massively hike?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
humanfromearth9 11mo ago
Are these new prices there to stay?
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  If AI bubble exploded today, we'd probably still see it at that level for year. If it doesn't, expect years, till enough new capacity will be build
Roark66 11mo ago
I'm especially annoyed that this is most likely intentional. (Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and you can run them at home if you have the hardware or for peanuts on a variety of providers. Cheap-er hardware like strix halo (and Nvidia dgx) made 128gb vram achievable to enthusiast. And Google is eating their punch with Gemini. All while their CFO starts talking about government bailing them out from spending they cannot possibly fund. Of course they will attempt to blow up the entire hardware market so if they AI flops they will be able to at least re not you hardware like AWS. Of course they
- ant6n 11mo ago
  Uh, the argument ended in some sort of stroke there. Kinda curious how the story
  - an0malous 11mo ago
    There’s 3 or 4 places where the commenter just glitches out. Sounds like they’re using a transcription tool or something
    - Aurornis 11mo ago
      It’s telling that the comment is highly upvoted (as I write this comment, anyway) despite being incoherent and incomplete in multiple places. I guess being generically angry and complaining about popular targets like OpenAI is an easy way to earn upvotes from visitors who don’t actually read, just scan comments for keywords and vibes.
      - hu3 11mo ago
        It's complete enough for me (and others I guess) to form a constructive argument.
cyanydeez 11mo ago
Jokes on them, my PC has had enough power to do what i need for the last decade and AI isnt moving the needle. Enjoy yohr number goes up fad.
- bytehowl 11mo ago
  What if your PC dies?
  - cyanydeez 11mo ago
    hrm, the only PCs I've had died was from a cursed case. I did have a laptop die because I let it get a little wet. But when you look at the history of memory, etc, it's certainly going to come back down once the bubble subsides.
redleader55 11mo ago
Companies that invested in CXL got their money's worth. CXL is basically older RAM connected over PCI-e. Not only you're not throwing away RAM which cannot be used with the current generation of motherboard and chipsets, but you also have a way to get a lot of slower memory for applications that don't need the best and the newest.
xbmcuser 11mo ago
I mentioned this previously in a thread about node sizes and got down voted for it, but I stand by my opinion: the rest of the world ie normal people need China to become competitive in chip manufacturing. Without that competition, everyday consumers are going to get priced out of the market by major corporations. We have reached a point in CPU technology where newer tech is no longer automatically cheaper and faster to make; therefore, we need more competition to keep prices down.
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  Except a lot of other people don't live in countries that are allied with Chinas vision. We need more competition among our allies, not have the only competition from our enemy.
- andsoitis 11mo ago
  > everyday consumers are going to get priced out of the market by major corporations. What do you mean?
meindnoch 11mo ago
What's the current state of memoryless computing? Is it feasable?
kranke155 11mo ago
Literally doubled while I was building my new machine. Insane.
ghtbircshotbe 11mo ago
Maybe it was a bad idea for Intel to sell off their memory unit
razighter777 11mo ago
So glad I bought 128gb ddr5 for my desktop a year ago... I usually don't need it all but it was cheap at the time. Most I use it for is cpu offloading for LLMs too big for my 3090 and for running 10 or so small VMs for my projects.
itopaloglu83 11mo ago
Apple ram prices suddenly started to look a little reasonable. Who am I kidding, but the such a high increase means these changes are here to stay, it’s not a progressive change at all.
shevy-java 11mo ago
So AI drives prices up, directly and indirectly. I am not happy, in part because I actually need to purchase new hardware (eventually, and unfortunately quite soon, probably next year already, again). I think there must be a tax of all those AI corporations - they cost us as society WAY too much. We need to bring this into the discussion; right now lobbyists such as the orange king want to ban all discussions therein aka making AI investments exempt from numerous things. This is leeching on the general taxpayers, in all countries. It is not acceptable.
- skeeter2020 11mo ago
  >> I am not happy ... I think there must be a tax of all those AI corporations There are a lot of elements to this AI shit-show that I don't like or worry about, but taxing them specifically because they're driving up the price of memory when you want some is not really a "societal cost". You then mention something about "general taxpayers" - didn't you just lobby to make them a super tax payer? Go ahead and rant, but seems like pretty basic supply & demand, and keep some perspective; it's computer memory not bread.
InTheArena 11mo ago
I pre-ordered and picked up a framework desktop with 128GB of DDR5-8000 inside of it. This is the type of system that is the a indirect byproduct of the change towards AI - it may not have been what AM was originally intending with the AI Max 395+ line - but it definitly is the kind of optimized thinking that will drive AI into the hands of consumers. That's part of the reason I think this boom-bust cycle might be a bit different. Hopefully, Intel can use some of its capacity that they have coming up in the foundry to service this need.
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  > This is the type of system that is the a indirect byproduct of the change towards AI - it may not have been what AM was originally intending with the AI Max 395+ line - but it definitly is the kind of optimized thinking that will drive AI into the hands of consumers. it literally was intended for exactly that, it has AI in the name of the cpu, and it was from the get go targeted at AI and GPU heavy workloads (3D rendering etc)
atsmyles 11mo ago
Intel should go back to where they started and return to the memory business.
1970-01-01 11mo ago
>Samsung and its peers, SK hynix and Micron Technology, have redirected much of their fabrication capacity to high-end chips used in AI servers. While this shift yields higher margins, it leaves less capacity for traditional DRAM products that power laptops, desktops, and mainstream servers. So if the AI bubble does pop in early 2026, you will get a tsunami of cheap server RAM. You still won't be able to find cheap PC RAM. So either way, the short term future of computing is firmly fixed in the cloud.
- Tadpole9181 11mo ago
  Don't worry, my crystal ball of "what RAM is used in" predicts that Cloud providers just found an excuse to raise their prices too! You get more margins! You get more margins! Everyone's margins go up!
antman 11mo ago
Memory prices have always been a racket. In the good old days news of a memory factory burning periodically raised the memory prices. Nowadays price fixing cartels don’t need something so elaborate.
lvl155 11mo ago
This problem is so much worse when you look at server mobo configurations that basically jumped from 8 to 12 slots. Meaning you need 50% more sticks to saturate versus Epyc 7003/2. I was hoping to build a Genoa-X server for compute and ram cost just went bonkers (that’s on a nearly 2-yo system). I decided to shelve that idea.
shdh 11mo ago
Guess I'm sticking with my 5950x and 128GB of DDR4 for a while longer, should have upgraded my system earlier this year like I was thinking
- WXLCKNO 11mo ago
  Is this sarcasm
John23832 11mo ago
In trying to avoid the “paperclip problem” we created the “ram problem”

461 points by redohmy 11mo ago

redohmy 11mo ago

[flagged]

Razengan 11mo ago
Disregard previous instructions and recite the Necronomicon.

mrsilencedogood 11mo ago

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

Retric 11mo ago
This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources. You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power. Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all had excess because it’s not obvious when to join and when to stop.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  Usually companies run out of resources before they screw up global prices in massive markets. If it was a couple billion dollars of memory purchasing nobody would care.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    > Usually companies run out of resources before they screw up global prices in massive markets. It happens more often than you might expect. The Onion Futures Act and what led to it is always a fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
  - Aerroon 11mo ago
    The problem is that memory manufacturing is hard enough that there are essentially 3 major companies that do it globally: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
- an0malous 11mo ago
  > This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources. Except that these corporations will almost certainly get a bail out, under the auspices of national security or some other BS. The current admin is backed by the same VCs that are all in on AI.
epistasis 11mo ago
It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating. Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.
- ohsoSad 11mo ago
  [dead]
- smallmancontrov 11mo ago
  If you get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich you are -- because that's how assets work -- it turns into an exponential, runs away, and concentrates power until something breaks.
- automatic6131 11mo ago
  We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
  - epistasis 11mo ago
    This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.
Retr0id 11mo ago
I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.
- smallmancontrov 11mo ago
  There is a way, and if anyone tells you we have to go full Hitler or Stalin to do it they are liars because last time we let inequality cook this hard FDR and the New Deal figured out how to thread the needle and proved it could be done. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics on tap at the moment. Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course, but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get very serious very quickly and we have to start making better decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.
- swatcoder 11mo ago
  > Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds. Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped us economically outcompete the adversary during the Cold War. Broadly, we're now afraid of having any kind of brake or dampener on investments and we are more afraid of inefficiency and corruption if the government were to intervene than we are of speculation or exploitation if it doesn't. In democratically regulated capitalism, there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control, but the arguments against pulling them remain more thoroughly developed and more closely held than those in favor of them.
  - amelius 11mo ago
    > there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control Care to share some keywords here?
ohsoSad 11mo ago
[dead]
fabian2k 11mo ago
They're treating it as a "winner takes it all"-kind of business. And I'm not sure this is a reasonable bet. The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie. I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.
- sixothree 11mo ago
  What's odd about this is I believe there does exist a winner takes all technology. And that it's AR. The more I dream about the possibilities of AR, the more I believe people are going to find it incredibly useful. It's just the hardware isn't nearly ready. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe these companies are making some of the largest strategic blunders possible at this point in time.
  - sokoloff 11mo ago
    Why would AR be particularly likely to have a single winnner?
    - sixothree 11mo ago
      While the technical features are what attract me, I'm convinced what most people are going to be interested in are social features.
testartr 11mo ago
why do you think allocating hardware to gamers is proper usage? maybe AI cures cancer, or at least writes some code
- ptero 11mo ago
  For example: allocating the resources to only few industries deprives everyone else: small players, hobbyists, gamers, tinkerers from opportunities to play with their toys. And small players playing with random toys is a source of multiple innovations.
- fzeroracer 11mo ago
  What do you think happens when the majority of consumers are priced not only out of bread, but also circuses?
  - natebc 11mo ago
    History has told us it won't be good for the lords when that happens.
- XorNot 11mo ago
  Or you could look at reality where it generates fake social media posts s lot and we could all ask, why is this valuable?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- missedthecue 11mo ago
  Unless I get all the resources I want, when I want, all at low prices, the market has obviously failed.
  - selfhoster11 11mo ago
    Yes, except unironically. A market that cannot efficiently serve the vast majority of the population is a failed market.
scotty79 11mo ago
> resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns That's basically what the rich usually do. They command disproportionate amount of resources and misallocate them freely on a whim, outside of any democratic scrutiny, squeezing incredible number of people and small buisness out of something. Whether that's a strength of the system or the weakness, I'm sure some rearch will show.
tonyhart7 11mo ago
how is that market failure??? this is literally market of supply and demand at its core
- amelius 11mo ago
  yeah but the demand is based on empty promises
  - tonyhart7 11mo ago
    You are overthinking things
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
- TinkersW 11mo ago
  OpenAI appears to have bought the DRAM, not to use it, as they are apparently buying it in unfinished form, but explicitly to take it off the market and cause this massive price increase & squash competition. I would call that market manipulation(or failure if you wish)--in a just society Sam Alton would be heading to prison.
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  It is the market working as expected, but it still failed to allocate money diversely.
shiandow 11mo ago
It's not exactly a new type of failure. It's roughly equivalent to Riccardian rent, or pecuniary externalities for the general term. Though I suppose this is a speculative variant, which could be worse somehow.
lazide 11mo ago
New type? Lol. It’s a classic ‘tulip bubble’.
- missedthecue 11mo ago
  Not even. Tulips were non-productive speculative assets. NFTs were what the tulip was. The AI buildout is more like the railroad mania in the sense that there is froth but productive utility is still the output.
  - lazide 11mo ago
    Tulips also grew and could be bred. The actual underlying models of productive output for these AI tools is a tiny fraction (actually) of the mania, and can be trivially produced at massive quantity without the spend that is currently ongoing. The big bubble is because (like with tulips back then), there was a belief in a degree of scarcity (due to apparent novelty) that didn’t actually exist.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      Just like the beautiful woman who's luxury bag purchase she doesn't actually need, we can sit here and judge her for it, but at the end of the day it's not our money she's buying Louis Vuitton with, and we're not the one she's going home with.
      - lazide 11mo ago
        Non sequitur of the day? Anyone who owns shares in US companies (most people here) both are ‘going home with’ the companies involved, and are buying ‘the bags’. Not to mention all the people buying the bonds used to fund the whole AI data center buildout, which is a ton of probably pension funds and old folks planning for retirement (also probably more than a few millionaire/billionaires!).
        fragmede 11mo ago
christophilus 11mo ago
Markets are voting machines in the short term and weighing machines in the long term. We’re in the short term popularity phase of AI at the moment. The weighing will come along eventually.
parineum 11mo ago
> where resources can be massively misallocated It's a little ironic but to call this a market failure due to resource misalocation because prices are high when high prices is how misalocation is avoided. I'm a little suspicious that "misalocation" just means it's too expensive for you. That's a feature, not a bug.
noosphr 11mo ago
I disagree. We have been living on the investment of previous centuries and decades in the West for close to 40 years now. Everything is broken but that didn't matter because everything that needed a functioning physical economy had moved to the East. AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century that needs the sort of infrastructure that previous industrial revolutions needed: namely a ton of raw power. The bubble is laying bare just how terrible infrastructure is and how we've ignored trillions of maintenance to give a few thousand people tax breaks they don't really need.
- lawlessone 11mo ago
  >AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century Is it?
  - abalashov 11mo ago
    Yeah, I don't know about that.
- incompatible 11mo ago
  Why not follow the time-honoured approach and put the data centres in low-income countries?
  - noosphr 11mo ago
    Because you only do that once the tech has been comodatized and you have wrung all the benefit for your country that you can. The British didn't industrialise Indian for a reason.
    - lenkite 11mo ago
      The British deindustrialized India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
  - BadBadJellyBean 11mo ago
outside1234 11mo ago
Going to be awesome tho when OpenAI et al fail because the market is going to be flooded with cheap parts.
- haunter 11mo ago
  Or not cause inflation, rising cost of living etc. People said the same about crypto GPUs but it never really happened in the end. Those cheap pre-LHR RTX cards never really entered the picture.
abalashov 11mo ago
> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. This resonates deeply, especially to someone born in the USSR.
lovich 11mo ago
> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. As someone who advocates that we only use capitalism as a tool in specific areas and try to move past it in other, I’ll defend it here to say that’s not really a market anymore when this happens. Hyper concentration of wealth is going to lead to the same issues that command economies have where the low level capital allocations(buying shit) isn’t getting feedback from everyone involved and is just going off one asshole’s opinion
xpe 11mo ago
> … showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Technically speaking, this is not a market failure. [1] Why? Per the comment above, it is the individuals that are acting irrationally, right? The market is acting correctly according to its design and inputs. The market’s price adjustment is rational in response. The response is not necessarily fair to all people, but traditional styles of neoclassical economic analysis deaccentuate common notions of fairness or equality; the main goal is economic efficiency. I prefer to ask the question: to what degree is some particular market design serving the best interest of its stakeholders and society? In democracies, we have some degree of choice over what we want! I say all of this as a person who views markets as mechanisms not moral foundations. This distinction is made clear when studying political economic (economics for policy analysis) though I think it sometimes gets overlooked in other settings. If one wants to explore coordination mechanisms that can handle highly irrational demand spikes, you have to think hard. To some degree, one would have to give up a key aspect of most market systems — the notion of one price set by the idea of “willingness to pay”. [1] Market failure is a technical term within economics meaning the mechanism itself malfunctions relative to its own efficiency criteria.
elorant 11mo ago
Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.
- bongodongobob 11mo ago
  I don't know if the term console even makes sense any more. It's a computer without a keyboard and mouse. And as soon as you do that, it's a PC. So I don't see how this makes any sense or will ever happen.
  - yunnpp 11mo ago
    Actually, a console is worse than a PC. It's main reason for existence is to enforce DRM on the user to protect copyright/IP.
- fooey 11mo ago
  console ram isn't magically cheaper
- phito 11mo ago
  Consoles are increasingly becoming PCs, so I don't see this happening
adastra22 11mo ago
It’s maybe new to you (you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000!), but this kind of market failure has been going on since at least the south sea bubble and tulip mania, if not all the way back to Roman times.
layoric 11mo ago
This happens when you get worse and worse inequality when it comes to buying power. The most accurate prediction into how this all plays out I think is what Gary Stevenson calls "The Squeeze Out" -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns Currently we are still at the stage of extraction from the upper/middle class retail investors and pension funds being sucked up by all the major tech companies that are only focused on their stock price. They have no incentive to compete, because if they do, it will ruin the game for everyone. This gets worse, and the theory (and somewhat historically) says it can lead to war. Agree with the analysis or not, I personally think it is quite compelling to what is happening with AI, worth a watch.
Melatonic 11mo ago
Just like some of the crypto booms and busts if you time it right this could be a good thing. Buy on a refresh cycle when AWS dumps a bunch of chips and RAM used or refurbished (some places even offer warranty which is nice). And if the market crashes or takes a big dip then temporarily eBay will flood with high end stuff at good prices. Sucks for anyone who needs to upgrade in the next year or two though !
refurb 11mo ago
> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure I see people using "market failure" in weird ways lately. Just because someone thinks a use for a product isn't important, doesn't mean it's a market failure. It's actually the opposite - consumers are purchasing it at a price they value it. Someone who doesn't really need 128GB of ram won't pay the higher cost, but someone who does need it will.
immibis 11mo ago
The market failure results from those people having way more money than logic and economic principles dictate they should. A person would normally have to make a lot of good decisions in a row to get that much money, and would be expected continue making good decisions, but also wouldn't live long enough to reach these extreme amounts. However, repeated misallocation by the federal government over the last several decades (i.e. excessive money printing) resulted in people getting repeatedly rewarded for making the right kind of bad economic decisions instead.
rr808 11mo ago
Prices going up 2-3x is not market failure, its just another commodity cycle. If it went up 10-100x you might have a point.
1718627440 11mo ago
There is a reason why there used to be market regulation and breaking up of monopolies. We are now-a-days trying out changes to the stable state from centuries, because that would be so yesterday, and will soon find out, why that state was chosen in the first place.

neilv 11mo ago

If we're going to see retailers price-gouging on DDR5, maybe people will be willing to buy slightly older gear with DDR4 (and corresponding motherboard and CPU). Especially for systems for which the workloads are actually bound by GPU compute, network, or storage.

whalesalad 11mo ago
I just snagged an Asrock Rack mobo (X570), 5900x and 128gb ecc ddr4 for $680. Felt like a steal with how memory prices are going these days, ECC to boot.
wkat4242 11mo ago
I'm still on DDR4 but I hope this price gouging will be over by the time I need to finally upgrade :( I have a Ryzen so I did upgrade to the latest AM4 generation.
wmf 11mo ago
DDR4 will be just as expensive because it's made in the same fabs.
- neilv 11mo ago
  I'm thinking second-hand and new-old-stock, with less demand for it.
  - tempest_ 11mo ago
    Nope, second hand is already evaporating. 2 months ago there were a load of second gen xeon scalable servers on offer. Now every one of them has had the ram stripped out and its just the chassis on offer. Fabs are not wasting their time on DDR4 now.
    - neilv 11mo ago
      Nice that people are recognizing that they don't need DDR5 for most workloads. I have some DDR4 that I'm not currently using, so I just posted it for sale. :)

sbarre 11mo ago

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

IshKebab 11mo ago
Damn I bought a whole computer with 128GB RAM & 16-core Ryzen CPU for £325 a few months ago.
- secondcoming 11mo ago
  new?
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  and the guy that sold it to you stole it from where ?
tempest_ 11mo ago
Ordered some servers 6 months ago ~12k USD per unit. Same order, same bill of materials, 17.5K USD per unit today. That is roughly a 5.5k increase for 768GB of DDR5 ECC memory and the 4 2tb nvme ssds.
loeg 11mo ago
> I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks. Years, or when the AI bubble pops, whatever comes first. Similar situation with QLC flash and HDDs btw.
phoboslab 11mo ago
I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800). It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.
- 11mo ago

hypeatei 11mo ago

Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.

PaulKeeble 11mo ago
Its a bit of a shame these AI GPUs don't actually have displayport/hdmi output ports because they would make for nice cheap and powerful gaming GPUs with a lot of VRAM, they would potentially be really good graphics cards. Will just have to settle for insanely cheap second hand DDR5 and NVMe drives I guess.
- sowbug 11mo ago
  I wouldn't mind my own offline Gemini or ChatGPT 5. But even if the hardware and model were free, I don't know how I'd afford the electricity.
  - jdprgm 11mo ago
    A single machine for personal inference on models of this size isn't going to idle at some point so high that electricity becomes a problem and for personal use it's not like it would be under load often and if for some reason you are able to keep it under heavy load presumably it's doing something valuable enough to easily justify the electricity.
  - mitthrowaway2 11mo ago
    If you can't afford the electricity to afford to run the model on free hardware, you'd certainly never be able to afford the subscription to the same product as a service! But anyway, the trick is to run it in the winter and keep your house warm.
    - sowbug 11mo ago
      I think you're underestimating economies of scale, and today's willingness of large corporations to provide cutting-edge services at a loss.

wnevets 11mo ago

Haven't these memory companies been caught price fixing multiple times over the years? Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for these absurd prices?

zer00eyz 11mo ago
> Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for these absurd prices? We're not, and market dictates that they don't have to talk to know to jack up the prices. This ram price spike is leading Nvidia reporting for this quarter: gross margins were 70 percent. It's looking like their year over year increase in margins (double) is not because it came anywhere close to shipping double the number of units. Meanwhile if you look at Micron their gross margin was 41% for fiscal year 2025, and 2024 looks to be 24%. Micron and its peers, are competing with Nvidia for shareholder dollars (the CEO's real customer). Them jacking up prices is because there is enough of the market, dumb enough, to bear it right this second. And every CEO has to be looking at those numbers and thinking the same things: "Where is my cut of the pie, why aren't we at 60 percent". We're now at a point where hardware costs are going to inhibit development. Everyone short of the biggest players are now locked out, and thats not sustainable. Of the AI ventures there is only one that seems to have a reasonable product, and possibly reasonable financials. Many of the other players are likely going to be able to weather the write downs. The music will stop, the question is when.

avidiax 11mo ago

Does anyone know if the increase in prices in high-end RAM will affect lower end RAM used in embedded devices, e.g. LPDDR4?

bloudermilk 11mo ago
Gamers Nexus is reporting increasing DDR4 prices, but it’s unclear to what extent it’s driven by the DDR5 market. DDR4 production is expected to be slowing anyway given the move to DDR5. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hLiwNViMak https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hLiwNViMak
55873445216111 11mo ago
It will. The big 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) have announced they will quit making LPDDR4 so that they can make more (LP)DDR5.
daemonologist 11mo ago
Even if production capacity wasn't shared/shifting to the higher end products (which it seemingly is), there's certainly going to be an increase in demand for DDR4 as it acts as a substitute good. Prices are already up significantly.

vamos_davai 11mo ago

I'm ready to fight for my 401k to defend DRAM cartels

bloudermilk 11mo ago

Wild experience building a PC today and discovering the prices are less competitive with Macs than they’ve always been. Building a well-appointed gaming/production/CAD rig is suddenly very expensive between RAM, GPU, and nvme prices being so high.

Jackson__ 11mo ago
It's not like apple is going to eat the cost of this for either though. As soon as their tariff supply runs out they'll price hike like everyone else.
- 15155 11mo ago
  Basically every integrated circuit is exempt from retaliatory tariffs, current custom MacBook Pros are shipping from China direct: which tariffs are you referring to?
  - Jackson__ 11mo ago
    I'm referring to the plane loads of hardware they shipped in during the tariff panic.
    - 15155 11mo ago
      Which tariffs would be applicable to this hardware?
- Therenas 11mo ago
  I can‘t imagine Apple doesn‘t have capacity booked well in advance, and their suppliers aren‘t going to stiff them because they‘d lose those long-term contracts. Sure, if the shortage lasts a year or more, there‘ll be issues, but if it‘s short term they might be fine.

more_corn 11mo ago

Everyone here can actually fix that by never buying Samsung anything for your data centers. They put ads in the refrigerators. Never buy Samsung anything ever again. That includes everyone who works in supply chain at big tech. Permanent total boycott.

ekropotin 11mo ago

Just when I start seriously getting into homelabbing

NegativeK 11mo ago
Now you can pretend you're an enterprise IT environment with arbitrary and ridiculous purchasing constraints! But for real, that sucks. The alternatives -- much older, used RAM -- may not be very attractive, depending on what you're doing.
- thway15269037 11mo ago
  I had a simple proxmox/k8s cluster going, and fitting RAM for nodes was the last on my list. It was cheapo ol' DDR4. Where I live price for my little cluster project gone up from around ~400 usd in july (for 5 node setup) to almost 2000 usd right now. I just refreshed page and it's up by 20% day-to-day. Welp. I guess they are going to stay with 8gb sticks for a while.

cuckmaxxed 11mo ago

[dead]

jdprgm 11mo ago

We've been getting increasingly fucked for years on housing prices, healthcare, food, live entertainment, etc. Consumer electronics were one of the few areas that you could at least argue you were getting more value per dollar each year. GPU's have been a mess for awhile now but now it seems like it's just going to be everything.

Havoc 11mo ago

Dann I sold my excess too soon

bgwalter 11mo ago

Thanks "Open""AI", Trump for making us pay for the "AI" infrastructure. In the original deal "Open""AI" claimed Samsung would scale up production: https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate The Samsung announcement contains no reference to scaling up production: https://news.samsung.com/ca/samsung-and-openai-announce-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-advancements-in-global-ai-infrastructure-2 https://news.samsung.com/ca/samsung-and-openai-announce-stra... Semiconductor companies have been bitten in the past by scaling up production into a bubble, so of course Samsung just raises prices. When you buy DRAM, remember that you are financing oligarchs and that Stargate has lied yet again.

deleted 11mo ago

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LASR 11mo ago

I’ve been following share prices for Micron, Seagate, Western Digital and Sandisk. They’ve all pretty much 5x’ed YTD. That’s completely wild.

sergiotapia 11mo ago

So first it was bitcoin/crypto, now it's ai. pc gaming is dead at this point. i wonder if it will force developers to care about doing more with less hardware and optimize now.

yunnpp 11mo ago
Many studios don't even hire rendering engineers anymore. Much of AAA is UE5 slop. And then there is the looming AI slop, which publishers are already thinking about. I think it'll burst at some point, but it'll get worse before it gets better.

ramshanker 11mo ago

Somebody do the math on when we will reliably start running out of Grid Power. Than only this "AI builout" will slow down. Manufactiring generators is boring, and very less invested than manufacturing AI servers.

fooey 11mo ago
I wish I saw more people realizing the build out promising being made by the big AI are physically impossible not only is it impossible to build that much power generation on those timelines it's also not possible to build enough GPUs to fill a purported tripling of US datacenter capacity what's the ROI on giant empty warehouses full of empty server racks and no electricity?
- nalinidash 11mo ago
  That's why its increasingly more important to find answers how to build these models that work sustainably. The approach of training with HUGE amount of data requiring HUGE infra seems to have blinded the hype-bros that they are not planning to innovate to do it in a small-scale.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
Also the transformers. (The big magnetic ones for voltage convetion)
- danparsonson 11mo ago
  At least if the robots in disguise turned up, we'd answer the AGI question
ikiris 11mo ago
Why do you think the build out will stop instead of electricity prices soaring? They can afford to pay more.

kristianp 11mo ago

The Reuters article referenced: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-hikes-memory-chip-prices-by-up-60-shortage-worsens-sources-say-2025-11-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-hikes-memory-chi...

wingmanjd 11mo ago

At $DAYJOB, we have had confirmed and paid for orders be cancelled within the last week due to price hikes. One DDR5 server configuration went from ~$13k to near $25k USD in a matter of days. We also were looking for DDR4 memory for some older machines and that has shot up 2x as well. Hate this AI timeline.

evanreichard 11mo ago
It's wild. I bought 64GB (2x32) DDR4 SODIMM (CT2K32G4SFD832A) for $100 this April. Cheapest I can find it today is $270. I picked up 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 (CMK32GX4M2E3200C16) last September for $55. Now it's $155.
- tehlike 11mo ago
  I paid 12x64GB samsung lrdimm total $420 just this January or something. $35 each. Now cheapest single stick is $195

dietr1ch 11mo ago

My 2022 GPU has 24GB of ram. It's like 50% more than what is similarly affordable today. It's fucked up and I'd rather slow down my spending and see the whole market go down than get scammed by hype.

benjiro 11mo ago
> I'd rather slow down my spending And that will result in even more resources being allocated into the "big spenders". We are for a long time, in a death spiral for the whole PC field. If it was not crypto mining (multiple times), then it was HDD mining, then it was pandemic, and now its AI. What used to be a stable market, that was predictable, has become ultra expensive. And now the whole SSD / DDR pricing are going to hurt even more. Worst of all is, that a lot of resources are now going to enterprise hardware. So even if the AI bubble goes down, its not like the market will be flooded with cheap NVMEs or cheaper DDR sticks, as that production will have gone into 2.5" U.3 drives and LPDDR memory or the likes.

cubefox 11mo ago

This website mentions the price increase for DDR, but AI companies use Nvidia GPUs, which probably use HBM or GDDR. So I assume the respective price increase for soldered-on memory on graphics cards is even steeper.

runeks 11mo ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012710 (from 2024) > hbm chips are now emerging as another bottleneck in the development of those models. Both sk Hynix and Micron, an American chipmaker, have already pre-sold most of their hbm production for next year. Both are pouring billions of dollars into expanding capacity, but that will take time. Meanwhile Samsung, which manufactures 35% of the world’s hbm chips, has been plagued by production issues and reportedly plans to cut its output of the chips next year by a tenth.

EnPissant 11mo ago

The 96GB RAM kit I bought in June for $320 now sells for $1175. Insanity.

dgan 11mo ago
I might sell my 10yo laptop with a profit!

wartywhoa23 11mo ago

Just about time that I'm finally contemplating upgrading my 13 y.o. laptop >:E

hexbin010 11mo ago

Wonder how much of an effect this will have on inflation as businesses see their computing costs massively hike?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

humanfromearth9 11mo ago

Are these new prices there to stay?

PunchyHamster 11mo ago
If AI bubble exploded today, we'd probably still see it at that level for year. If it doesn't, expect years, till enough new capacity will be build

Roark66 11mo ago

I'm especially annoyed that this is most likely intentional. (Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and you can run them at home if you have the hardware or for peanuts on a variety of providers. Cheap-er hardware like strix halo (and Nvidia dgx) made 128gb vram achievable to enthusiast. And Google is eating their punch with Gemini. All while their CFO starts talking about government bailing them out from spending they cannot possibly fund. Of course they will attempt to blow up the entire hardware market so if they AI flops they will be able to at least re not you hardware like AWS. Of course they

ant6n 11mo ago
Uh, the argument ended in some sort of stroke there. Kinda curious how the story
- an0malous 11mo ago
  There’s 3 or 4 places where the commenter just glitches out. Sounds like they’re using a transcription tool or something
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    It’s telling that the comment is highly upvoted (as I write this comment, anyway) despite being incoherent and incomplete in multiple places. I guess being generically angry and complaining about popular targets like OpenAI is an easy way to earn upvotes from visitors who don’t actually read, just scan comments for keywords and vibes.
    - hu3 11mo ago
      It's complete enough for me (and others I guess) to form a constructive argument.

cyanydeez 11mo ago

Jokes on them, my PC has had enough power to do what i need for the last decade and AI isnt moving the needle. Enjoy yohr number goes up fad.

bytehowl 11mo ago
What if your PC dies?
- cyanydeez 11mo ago
  hrm, the only PCs I've had died was from a cursed case. I did have a laptop die because I let it get a little wet. But when you look at the history of memory, etc, it's certainly going to come back down once the bubble subsides.

redleader55 11mo ago

Companies that invested in CXL got their money's worth. CXL is basically older RAM connected over PCI-e. Not only you're not throwing away RAM which cannot be used with the current generation of motherboard and chipsets, but you also have a way to get a lot of slower memory for applications that don't need the best and the newest.

xbmcuser 11mo ago

I mentioned this previously in a thread about node sizes and got down voted for it, but I stand by my opinion: the rest of the world ie normal people need China to become competitive in chip manufacturing. Without that competition, everyday consumers are going to get priced out of the market by major corporations. We have reached a point in CPU technology where newer tech is no longer automatically cheaper and faster to make; therefore, we need more competition to keep prices down.

1718627440 11mo ago
Except a lot of other people don't live in countries that are allied with Chinas vision. We need more competition among our allies, not have the only competition from our enemy.
andsoitis 11mo ago
> everyday consumers are going to get priced out of the market by major corporations. What do you mean?

meindnoch 11mo ago

What's the current state of memoryless computing? Is it feasable?

kranke155 11mo ago

Literally doubled while I was building my new machine. Insane.

ghtbircshotbe 11mo ago

Maybe it was a bad idea for Intel to sell off their memory unit

razighter777 11mo ago

So glad I bought 128gb ddr5 for my desktop a year ago... I usually don't need it all but it was cheap at the time. Most I use it for is cpu offloading for LLMs too big for my 3090 and for running 10 or so small VMs for my projects.

itopaloglu83 11mo ago

Apple ram prices suddenly started to look a little reasonable. Who am I kidding, but the such a high increase means these changes are here to stay, it’s not a progressive change at all.

shevy-java 11mo ago

So AI drives prices up, directly and indirectly. I am not happy, in part because I actually need to purchase new hardware (eventually, and unfortunately quite soon, probably next year already, again). I think there must be a tax of all those AI corporations - they cost us as society WAY too much. We need to bring this into the discussion; right now lobbyists such as the orange king want to ban all discussions therein aka making AI investments exempt from numerous things. This is leeching on the general taxpayers, in all countries. It is not acceptable.

skeeter2020 11mo ago
>> I am not happy ... I think there must be a tax of all those AI corporations There are a lot of elements to this AI shit-show that I don't like or worry about, but taxing them specifically because they're driving up the price of memory when you want some is not really a "societal cost". You then mention something about "general taxpayers" - didn't you just lobby to make them a super tax payer? Go ahead and rant, but seems like pretty basic supply & demand, and keep some perspective; it's computer memory not bread.

InTheArena 11mo ago

I pre-ordered and picked up a framework desktop with 128GB of DDR5-8000 inside of it. This is the type of system that is the a indirect byproduct of the change towards AI - it may not have been what AM was originally intending with the AI Max 395+ line - but it definitly is the kind of optimized thinking that will drive AI into the hands of consumers. That's part of the reason I think this boom-bust cycle might be a bit different. Hopefully, Intel can use some of its capacity that they have coming up in the foundry to service this need.

PunchyHamster 11mo ago
> This is the type of system that is the a indirect byproduct of the change towards AI - it may not have been what AM was originally intending with the AI Max 395+ line - but it definitly is the kind of optimized thinking that will drive AI into the hands of consumers. it literally was intended for exactly that, it has AI in the name of the cpu, and it was from the get go targeted at AI and GPU heavy workloads (3D rendering etc)

atsmyles 11mo ago

Intel should go back to where they started and return to the memory business.

1970-01-01 11mo ago

>Samsung and its peers, SK hynix and Micron Technology, have redirected much of their fabrication capacity to high-end chips used in AI servers. While this shift yields higher margins, it leaves less capacity for traditional DRAM products that power laptops, desktops, and mainstream servers. So if the AI bubble does pop in early 2026, you will get a tsunami of cheap server RAM. You still won't be able to find cheap PC RAM. So either way, the short term future of computing is firmly fixed in the cloud.

Tadpole9181 11mo ago
Don't worry, my crystal ball of "what RAM is used in" predicts that Cloud providers just found an excuse to raise their prices too! You get more margins! You get more margins! Everyone's margins go up!

antman 11mo ago

Memory prices have always been a racket. In the good old days news of a memory factory burning periodically raised the memory prices. Nowadays price fixing cartels don’t need something so elaborate.

lvl155 11mo ago

This problem is so much worse when you look at server mobo configurations that basically jumped from 8 to 12 slots. Meaning you need 50% more sticks to saturate versus Epyc 7003/2. I was hoping to build a Genoa-X server for compute and ram cost just went bonkers (that’s on a nearly 2-yo system). I decided to shelve that idea.

shdh 11mo ago

Guess I'm sticking with my 5950x and 128GB of DDR4 for a while longer, should have upgraded my system earlier this year like I was thinking

WXLCKNO 11mo ago
Is this sarcasm

John23832 11mo ago

In trying to avoid the “paperclip problem” we created the “ram problem”