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DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why
- wnevets 10mo agoGlad to see I'm not the only bringing up just how untrustworthy these memory companies are.
- andrewmcwatters 10mo ago[dead]
- downrightmike 10mo ago"For context, these increases have even outpaced the surge in gold prices over the same period" And you can't just manufacture or not the gold supply into scarcity
- knowitnone3 10mo agoyes you can. It's called mining
- sexeriy237 10mo agoactually the problem was population boom. FDR raised the rate from $20 to $35/ounce, and by timeNixon took the USA off standard the global population 3x. So gold is no longer scarce because it isn't backing real currency anymore. Its just metal
- teeray 10mo agoThis quote is basically the TL;DR: > memory suppliers have both the motive and precedent to coordinate behavior, even tacitly, in order to keep prices high. When only a handful of firms control the taps, it doesn't take a formal cartel for them to collectively benefit from constrained supply. Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove. The backdrop of past cartels makes it hard not to be cynical when hearing that "AI demand" is solely to blame for increased prices. Whether or not any collusion is happening now, it's clear that memory companies are profiting immensely from the current crisis. After bleeding financially during the last oversupply downturn, the major DRAM makers are now seeing record-high earnings in the third quarter of 2025 thanks to the price surge, and to put it bluntly, the shortage is great for business.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoI'm so excited to read the pro-monopoly take on this.
- sershe 10mo agoNot pro monopoly as such, but in the recently posted article on UK shipbuilding they mentioned that a major reason for it's decline was it didn't build out capital capacity after being repeatedly burned by cyclical nature of the industry, with some quote even claiming they thought they would be best positioned for the next bust explicitly. What choice do these companies have, even assuming the demand doesn't crash? They can build out and cause a glut in a few years. They can not build out and then what? Barriers to entry are high but not insurmountable; long term they'll go the way of UK shipbuilding. It might take a while, though. Also one defector building out would have massive advantage, so it doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium. See also constant bickering in the OPEC, an explicit cartel.
- walterbell 10mo ago> Each firm knows In some cases, firm == family, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol A chaebol is a large industrial South Korean conglomerate run and controlled by an individual or family. A chaebol often consists of multiple diversified affiliates, controlled by a person or group. Several dozen large South Korean family-controlled corporate groups fall under this definition.
- minkeymaniac 10mo agoYep, it doubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM I upgraded my PC by adding 64GB.. two Fridays ago I sold the 32 GB I took out for the same amount of what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
- magicalhippo 10mo agoAnd I'm beating myself for not preemptively ordering that 128G kit for $500 a couple of months ago, thinking about upgrading soon. Last week it went to $1300 and now it's not available anymore. Guess I'll just skip AM5 and wait for AM6 at this rate...
- energy123 10mo agoSame situation. I looked up the previous RAM boom and bust cycles (thanks Gemini) and we are looking at over a year of waiting potentially.
- brendoelfrendo 10mo agoBought a 64gb upgrade kit in September for my wife's new PC for $205. The same kit right now on Newegg is $570. That's not even double in 4 months; thats almost triple in 2 months.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoIf I can get that right now $389 retail is there an arb opportunity (not in US, but maybe you are getting fucked on tariffs? Could that be the difference?)
- andix 10mo agoI bought a refurbished laptop with 64gb ddr4 (so-dimm) last week. It was just slightly more expensive than the 32gb variant with same specs. I guess the seller was not yet aware of the high memory prices. In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just selling the memory.
- Mistletoe 10mo agoYou’ll own nothing, not even your own short term memory, and you’ll be happy.
- eb0la 10mo agoEvery 3-4 years RAM prices spike. There is always an excuse like a fire in a factory. I believe the truth is 1) we have little amount of suppliers, and 2) supply is very near the limit of what can be sold.
- kllrnohj 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal There's also been not one but two price fixing settlements at different times for the same companies. Almost like every few years they get bold enough to try again, and just settle as the cost of doing business
- walterbell 10mo ago"OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND production quotas? https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423 https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423 > Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01 million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year. Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production at Fab 7 in Singapore—its largest NAND production base—in the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply posture. China YMTC (sanctioned by US) and CXMT are increasing production capacity.
- gruez 10mo agoCan you blame them, though? Between the notorious boom-and-bust cycle of semiconductor industry, and everyone (including much of this forum) thinking that AI is a bubble that will crash any minute, is it really that unreasonable that they're not trying to massively ramp up supply?
- 10mo ago
- groundzeros2015 10mo agoCompanies will always seek to maximize revenue. Your options are 1) don’t buy 2) choose competition.
- jandrese 10mo agoAnd the competition doesn't exist anymore.
- foobarian 10mo agoIsn't this just the normal process of market clearing, if they are still selling out? It may be a bit coarse grained due to long lead times for more supply but still.
- legitster 10mo agoWhat's happening right now is very different than what happened back during the dot com crash. When they were doing price fixing it was because there was a glut of supply and demand was tanking. Prices were falling and they coordinated to keep prices from falling less. Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative. It would also be dumb to cut production when prices are high because you increase the incentive for one of the outside players to suddenly ramp up production and jump in the market. Not saying they aren't coordinating in other ways (following each other's leads on price hikes and availability). But again the context here is literally the opposite as last time.
- bakugo 10mo ago> Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless Why is demand extremely high right now when it wasn't a couple of months ago? What changed since then that caused it to triple overnight?
- ares623 10mo agoMaybe Some nerds joked at lunch that if we hoard all the RAM we cut it off from competitors. They saw what COVID did to supply chains and thought they’d be so smart if they could simulate it.
- gishh 10mo agoNo no no, it’s all just the bullwhip effect, remember? Remember when prices went fucking nuts during Covid and then dropped? Oh wait, they never fucking dropped. Still waiting, all you bullshit, er, bullwhip truthers out there.
- bigiain 10mo agoDRAM 2025 as toilet paper from 2020. Seems plausible.
- alephnerd 10mo ago
- mindslight 10mo agoHey, at least a fab didn't have to burn down this time. That's progress. I've maxed out the RAM on every (consumer mobo) build I've ever done, and have always ended up appreciating it. I did a Ryzen build with 192GB back in January, so despite the questionable signal integrity of DDR5 especially on AM5 (more than one DIMM on each channel means lower speed) this time turned out to be no exception. I also stocked up on 130TB of HDD and 30TB of SSD, as it was clear we were headed towards some kind of economic disaster. (look, I'm avoiding politics!) But the best RAM purchase I ever did was during the dot com crash glut a few decades ago. I maxed out my Athlon XP with 3x 512MB sticks for $27 each. A gig and a half of RAM. Those were the days.
- e145bc455f1 10mo agoWhat do you do with 192GB RAM?
- mindslight 10mo agoMy main desktop has 256GB, and my "router" has 128GB. Mostly used for software builds (I use NixOS as a source distribution) and VMs (which themselves are mostly used for web browsing, surprise surprise). The desktop had been fine at 112GB because that was the max that coreboot could train, but the coreboot code has been updated and used DDR3 sticks are cheap. The goals of the new 192GB machine are more of that existing usage, plus LLM experimentation and possible VFX rendering/video work. It's speculative of course, but as I've said I've never regretted bulking up on RAM. If it ends up feeling too vacant and echoey, I can always grab another motherboard and processor and make two 96GB machines.
- snovv_crash 10mo agoIs there a futures market for DRAM? I feels like there should be...
- dist-epoch 10mo agoof course there is - https://www.dramexchange.com https://www.dramexchange.com
- okanat 10mo agoYou can always buy some SKHynix or Micron shares.
- snovv_crash 10mo agoThat doesn't help me lock in prices when I'm giving quotes on hardware that still needs to be manufactured.
- tmikaeld 10mo agoI expected that this was because China use DDR5 in their new AI chips (Due to not having access to (enough) HBM)
- vlovich123 10mo agoHBM is independent of the DDR revision being used. HBM how the DRAM attaches to the chip. Really not sure what you’re trying to say.
- tmikaeld 10mo agoHBM stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically on top of each other (typically 4-12 layers). It’s very different from DDR, especially during manufacturing because it has to be integrated with custom chips. Afaik, this isn’t available to Chinese foundries.. yet. Thus, they have DDR available. Specifically, theyre using LPDDR5 so far.
- vlovich123 10mo agoBut it’s still the same dies- the shortage is in the dies not the packaging, no?
- tmikaeld 10mo agoIt’s difficult to integrate as HBM and the density is very different. China wouldnt select 30x slower bandwith if they had a choice.
- ksec 10mo agoI said this last time, YMTC from China is making NAND and finally crossed the 10% market share. I would not be surprised if they have 30% by 2030. The more NAND Fabs reconfigured to DRAM from Samsung or others the more YMTC will grab NAND market share. So yes naturally those profit current NAND and DRAM player enjoys provides an extra cushion for them to build their Fab which is becoming ever more expensive due it its size and machinery required. But also as war chest. And they know it well. CXMT's DDR5 and LPDDR5 is also slowly gaining market shares, although not at the pace of YMTC due to yield and cost issues. Both company are close or already at escape velocity. And then there will be a moment like electric car where DRAM and NAND will oversupply. Which is another reason why DRAM manufactures are eager to move to LPDDR6.
- elektronika 10mo agoYMTC also announced entry into the DRAM market a couple months back. CXMT recently announced DDR5-8000. Sanctions clearly aren't working to slow progress in China's tech sector, but they seem to be great for the profits of US vassal-states
- alan-jordan13 10mo ago[dead]
- GuestFAUniverse 10mo agoShorten patents to 18months (the industry's innovation cycle, in the past). I'll bet you'll see a lot more output, esp. with low margins -- to make the market uninteresting for new players.
- mjevans 10mo agoMy personal opinion: Trade Mark - as long as dues are paid Patents a yearly cap of N things and only the most worthy get a 20 year patent, world wide. Copyright ~ 5 years auto with exponentially more expensive renewals in 5 year blocks.
- itopaloglu83 10mo agoAre we not in a trade war according to some? Prove it by checking their production quotas, if they’re purposely running under capacity then just cancel their patents. Wright Brothers didn’t make much money from their invention due to the Great War and their patents being canceled to help with the war efforts.
- avidphantasm 10mo agoQuick, buy a Mac with higher-specced memory while the price is almost reasonable.
- kwanbix 10mo agoWhat? Apple's memory upgrades are never reasonable. Last time I checked going from 16 to 32GB in a Mac Mini was more expensive (or as expensive) than buying two 16GB Mac Minis.
- 360MustangScope 10mo agoRight now in this environment, they look reasonable. Not that they are
- ahartmetz 10mo ago*only slightly less reasonable than market prices before they adjust it in order to stay at 2x less reasonable
- kristianp 10mo agoI'm wondering if Apple will need to adjust their prices to maintain their margins. Given the scale of price rises I'd say yes.
- zarzavat 10mo agoThere's no way that Apple pays spot. They will have contracts directly with the manufacturers, guaranteeing them a given supply at a given price. Their whole business kinda depends on it.
- kristianp 10mo agoSure, but eventually the contracts will be renewed at possibly a much higher price. It depends on the details of the agreement whether the price is adjusted based on market price periodically too.
- mindcrash 10mo agoUnfortunately got some experience with that... Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD... Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be. Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...
- samarthr1 10mo agoI am loving my sapphire 9070xt (pulse). It's pretty decent, and gets me ~100 tokens per second on gpt-oss-20b at i think 5bit quant. Bought it for a high high price of 70_000 inr in september
- QuantumSeed 10mo agoI ordered 96GB of memory last Tuesday from Corsair. Two days later when I checked the website again, the exact same memory was being sold for twice what I paid for it.
- unethical_ban 10mo agoJust throwing another anecdote out there, my Zen 1 CPU (1700) was flaking out and I was kind of thinking of doing an AM5 build, with an IPMI motherboard and some nice DDR5 memory. DDR5 has a quasi-ECC built in, which is good for a server. Thing is, I have 128GB of memtest86-passed DDR4 RAM, and while I don't need that much, the idea of spending ~$300 on 32GB was ludicrous. So I have a Ryzen 5700G now, and all is well.
- beloch 10mo agoI've seen a fair number of articles suggesting that the finances of AI companies have lost touch with reality and that the AI sector is now well within bubble territory. If AI companies continue to scale up and buy massive amounts of memory as prices spike, how much will that intensify the spike? Could feedback of this nature cause a price shock sufficient to pop the AI bubble earlier than it might have otherwise? How soon might that happen?
- danishSuri1994 10mo ago[flagged]
- zozbot234 10mo agoMight we perhaps see some meaningful investment into long-term alternatives to DRAM as a result of this price spike? Will Intel bring back their Optane persistent memory? What about HP's memristors/ReRAM? Magnetic core memory/MRAM?
- nsriv 10mo agoThis is what I'm hopeful for, but haven't researched enough into whether there are hardware startups in this space as I believe the majors will chase the hype cycle. Optane being canned always felt like a poor, shortsighted decision to me.
- leoc 10mo agoAdd to that the fact that you can now buy your way out of US antitrust enforcement by taking to the right guy.
- Juliate 10mo agoIs RAM the new oil, then?
- super256 10mo agoI am currently trying to sell a brand new DDR5 6000 64GB CL 28-36-36-96 kit for 100€ below market prices with warranty (I purchased it 3 months ago, and never opened it as I figured I don't need 128GB in my PC.) But it's just not selling. I guess most people don't even check ebay, and go straight to hardware online retailers.
- derkster 10mo agopersonally, i always check ebay. but i know general sentiment around "used/like new" items is fairly poor. just ask grand pap sitting in florida, buying half the computer new, because "he would never buy used", aka some returned tower.
- Panzer04 10mo agoThe question is how much of this consumer memory is selling either. It may well be that not many people are actually buying DRAM right now, given how much prices have spiked. I also have a lot more luck selling PC hardware on bespoke forums than on ebay etc.
- duffyjp 10mo agoI looked at sold listings on eBay recently, very little was actually going for the crazy market rate. Plenty had sold at the old prices from sellers who hadn't gotten the memo though. I have some ram I could live without if it's worth its weight in gold, but if you're going to get ripped off I think people want to avoid the used market and its extra risk.
- anonymousDan 10mo agoI don't understand when people blame AI for buying DDR5 DRAM - aren't they mostly interested in HBM? Or is the fab space being diverted to manufacture more HBM than DDR DRAM previously?
- mistercheph 10mo agoInference, don't need gpu's for inference. Frontier labs are eking out progress by scaling up inference-time compute. Pre-training scaling has kind of stalled / giving diminishing returns (for now).
- andix 10mo agoIf/when the AI bubble bursts, there will be a lot of cheap used parts available to buy. Is it actually standard modules that are high on demand, or are the chips directly soldered to custom mainboards?
- andix 10mo agoMaybe the crypto bros reallocated from bitcoin to DRAM.
- arn3n 10mo agoI keep hearing about how the supply and demand cycles are “lagged” and that this price spike happens every 3-5 years for purely economical reasons. I feel like I’m being gaslit — I don’t recall any such price spikes in the past of this magnitude. You’re telling me that there’s a totally predictable price cycle and NO ONE has prepared for it? Or else prices are just high temporarily and no one can step in to increase supply? Either way, it seems that there’s not enough competition in this market.
- refulgentis 10mo agoI’m sad the mid to late 2010s alt reality era has come for HN the last 6 months, after 16 years here. This was my last respite for intellectual argumentation. Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it and anyone who does is a grifter and or amateur and or embarrassing and any data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999…so therefore, $X! (In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging) As my MD friend noted wisely a couple weeks ago: it’s noteworthy how this became a culture after LLMs became ubiquitous and user friendly. It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
- tonyhart7 10mo agoUS gov wouldn't let AI bubble pop, the amount of money in circulation would make the US set back 5+ years and potentially into great depression the aftermath for tax payer and your 401k would be devastating
- zozbot234 10mo agoNot saying that you're wrong, but of course if there is a real AI bubble, then "not letting it pop" only escalates the damage when it does eventually pop. The best outcome all-around is for the market to form accurate expectations quite promptly about the real potential and capabilities of AI, regardless of the immediate consequences. My own wild guess is that this spike in RAM and storage costs is more of a potential drag on the tech sector as a whole than AI companies specifically. Maybe we'll see some systems being reengineered to cut the waste and the technical debt throughout and be a bit leaner and meaner, since that will be making a real difference to the bottom line.
- tonyhart7 10mo agoor there is third way, AI company would achieve "near AGI" and "only" eliminated 80% job market
- theandrewbailey 10mo agoI work in the refurb division of an ewaste recycling company. I was tipped off to these insane prices about two months ago, and switched focus from laptops to drives and RAM, and I'm starting to make bank. Roughly a petabyte of hard drives showed up two weeks ago, and I'm almost halfway through preparing all the drives. Hopefully I'll be able to finish and sell them in time to have a very merry Christmas.
- mistercheph 10mo agoI'm curious what industry knew / tipped you off.
- theandrewbailey 10mo agoIt was coworkers or news articles, I forget which came first. Could have been this one: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/ai-triggers-hard-drive-shortage-amidst-dram-squeeze-enterprise-hard-drives-on-backorder-by-2-years-as-hyperscalers-switch-to-qlc-ssds https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/ai-triggers-...
- gettingoverit 10mo agoOkay, this will be a bit on a conspiracy theory side, but there was a paper recently describing how to do matrix computations on a RAM stick connected to FPGA, and they've shown it's possible to do it cheaper per flop that GPUs. Except, of course, there's a variety of RAM producers. It might either be artificial to keep GPU prices where they are, or someone already started building their RAM-based AI datacenter.
- protocolture 10mo ago>Memory is being allocated to those with deeper pockets first Yes, sellers fill the most expensive bids first. >OpenAI's new "Stargate" project reportedly signed deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month to feed its AI clusters, which is an amount close to 40% of total global DRAM output if it's ever met. Right, so demand has pretty much doubled. >In this cycle, manufacturers had cut back production and investment during the last downturn (2022), and they've been slow to ramp back up. And manufacturers have been burnt by over production before and are cautious >Another factor limiting supply of standard RAM is that memory firms are diverting their limited manufacturing capacity to the most lucrative products. Specifically, there's a gold rush for HBM, which is a special kind of memory used by AI accelerator GPUs, because HBM commands far higher prices and profit margins than commodity DRAM. See above about filling the more lucrative bids first. >I'm not saying that all of these reasons given aren't the cause for the recent price boom, but what I am saying is that it wouldn't be the first time that price-fixing occurred in the memory industry. Ok so what should be done about it? >While that second lawsuit didn't hold up in court (and failed in appeal), that ongoing suspicion exists for a reason. K so there have been 2 claims, one spurious. >Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove. See: Have been burnt by over production before. And Unspoken coordination is hardly an issue. Reacting to private information is bad, reacting to public information is normal and expected. >It's hard not to see this supposedly coincidental aligned strategy of restraint and wonder if there's something more at play. All of these actions support pricing stability (for those companies) and suggests that no one is "breaking ranks" to grab a larger share by undercutting prices. You are telling me that you are suspicious of an industry that has expanded, caused a glut that hurt their own businesses and killed their competitors, and are shying away from repeating that event that you outline as a clear mistake. If theres so much money on the table, you will need another vendor. New RAM vendors have to weigh risk, including all the risk you have outlined, against what is likely a very massive capital outlay.
- KronisLV 10mo agoI think it's gonna be like with the price spikes around the time of COVID: corpos complained about the global supply chain disruptions and when all of that was over... just left the prices high up. It's gonna be the same as what you see with food prices nowadays, even fast food - they just increased a whole bunch and nobody can really do anything about it. It's not like there's that many widespread food chains popping up to replace McDonald's, given that most new players in the market are more likely to go bankrupt than anything. And when it comes to stuff that's actually hard to manufacture, like GPUs and RAM and other components? The corporations will just lie, or in some cases set the MSRP pretty low (e.g. Intel Arc release) and watch the retailers crank up the prices anyways. Even the one case where it did matter a lot was the Intel Core Ultra release where they didn't move units, but only because of AMD CPUs being cheaper, even those prices were known before release. But even so, who's to say that you're not picking the least bad option which still happens to be bad, how close to BOM pricing are those CPUs? And in that BOM, how many middle men are also pushing their own markup? What are you gonna do about it, since you can't ever look at their books and validate their claims NOR really buy the product elsewhere because like 3 or 4 corps have an oligopoly over the entire planet's supply? Nothing.