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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
- DocTomoe 10mo agoI feel we have a RAM price surge every four years. The excuses change, but it's always when we see a generation switch to the next gen of DDR. Which makes me believe it's not AI, or graphics cards, or crypto, or gaming, or one of the billion other conceivable reasons, but price-gouging when new standards emerge and production capacity is still limited. Which would be much harder to justify than 'the AI/Crypto/Gaming folks (who no-one likes) are sweeping the market...'
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoRegardless of whether it is Crypto/AI/etc., this would seem to be wake-up call #2. We're finding the strangle-points in our "economy"—will we do anything about it? A single fab in Phoenix would seem inadequate?
- baiwl 10mo agoWhat will we do with that fab in two years when nobody needs that excess RAM?
- jacquesm 10mo agoThere has never been 'an excess of RAM', the market has always absorbed what was available.
- jack_tripper 10mo agoYeah right, tell that to Qimonda.
- Ericson2314 10mo agoSell it at lower prices. Demand is a function of price, not a scalar.
- h2zizzle 10mo agoTax write-off donations to schools and non-profits, too.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoI suspect there will be a shortage of something else then… And regardless, you could flip it around and ask, what will we do in x years when the next shortage comes along and we have no fabs? (And that shortage of course could well be an imposed one from an unfriendly nation.)
- jacquesm 10mo agoIf 'the West' would be half as smart as they claim to be there would be many more fabs in friendly territory. Stick a couple in Australia and NZ too for good measure, it is just too critical of a resource now.
- jack_tripper 10mo agoThe west is only smart at financial engineering (printing money to inflate stocks and housing). Anything related to non-military manufacturing should be outsourced to the cheapest bidder to increase shareholder value.
- fullstop 10mo agoMicron is bringing up one in Boise Idaho as well.
- xzjis 10mo agoIt's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI within a few years, but reallocating it right now is detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
- jacquesm 10mo agoWhy is this downvoted, this is not the first time I've heard that opinion expressed and every time it happens there is more evidence that maybe there is something to it. I've been following the DRAM market since the 4164 was the hot new thing and it cost - not kidding - $300 for 8 of these which would give you all of 64K RAM. Over the years I've seen the price surge multiple times and usually there was some kind of hard to verify reason attached to it. From flooded factories to problems with new nodes and a whole slew of other issues. RAM being a staple of the computing industry you have to wonder if there aren't people cleaning up on this, it would be super easy to create an artificial shortage given the low number of players in this market. In contrast, say the price of gasoline, has been remarkably steady with one notable outlier with a very easy to verify and direct cause.
- zorked 10mo agoThis industry has a history of forming cartels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- sharpshadow 10mo agoThere is also the side effect of limiting people to run powerful models themselves. Could very well be part of a strategy.
- blurbleblurble 10mo agoIt's absolutely part of the strategy and the strategy has multiple prongs. Another prong is this obnoxious push for regulatory capture in the name of "safety".
- muvlon 10mo agoBut we're not currently switching to a next gen of DDR. DDR5 has been around for several years, DDR6 won't be here before 2027. We're right in the middle of DDR5's life cycle. That is not to say there is no price-fixing going on, just that I really can't see a correlation with DDR generations.
- itopaloglu83 10mo agoThe manufacturers are willing to quadruple the prices for the foreseeable future but not change their manufacturing quotes a bit. So much for open markets, somebody must check their books and manufacturing schedules.
- dgacmu 10mo agoIn their defense, how many $20 billion fabs do you want to build in response to the AI ... (revolution|bubble|other words)? It seems very, very difficult to predict how long DRAM demand will remain this elevated. It's dangerous for them in both directions: Overbuilding capacity if the boom busts vs. leaving themselves vulnerable to a competitor who builds out if the boom is sustained. Glad I don't have to make that decision. :)
- itopaloglu83 10mo agoI don’t think they’re working at 100% capacity or don’t have any other FAB that they can utilize for other low profit stuff. Let’s check their books and manufacturing schedule to see if they’re artificially constraining the supply to jack up the prices on purpose.
- dgacmu 10mo agoI'd take the opposite bet on this. They're diverting wafer capacity from lower-profit items to things like HBM, but all indications are that wafer starts are up a bit. Just not up enough. For example: https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery "Sequentially, DRAM revenue increased 15% with bit shipments increasing over 20% and prices decreasing in the low single-digit percentage range, primarily due to a higher consumer-oriented revenue mix" (from june of this year). The problem is that the DRAM market is pretty tight - supply or demand shocks tend to produce big swings. And right now we're seeing both an expected supply shock (transition to new processes/products) as well as a very sudden demand shock.
- 10mo ago
- jsheard 10mo agoTo be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same device.
- morcus 10mo ago> two versions of the same phone with different processors That's hilarious, which phone is this?
- namibj 10mo agoSeveral high end Galaxy S's AFAIK.
- grincek 10mo agoThis is the case as recent as of S24, phones can come with exynos or snapdragon, with exynos usually featuring worse performance and battery life
- petcat 10mo agoBasically every Galaxy phone comes in two versions. One with Exynos and one with Snapdragon. It's regional though. US always gets the Snapdragon phones while Europe and mostly Asia gets the Exynos version. My understanding is that the Exynos is inferior in a lot of ways, but also cheaper.
- sgerenser 10mo agoIn the past using Snapdragon CPUs for the U.S. made sense due to Qualcomm having much better support for the CDMA frequencies needed by Verizon. Probably no longer relevant since the 5G transition though.
- muvlon 10mo agoNot one phone, they did this all over the place. Their flagship line did this starting with the Galaxy S7 all the way up to Galaxy S24. Only the most recent Galaxy S25 is Qualcomm Snapdragon only, supposedly because their own Exynos couldn't hit volume production fast enough.
- awongh 10mo agoThis seems to be for chips put in phones in 2026? I thought these orders were booked further in advance, or is that only for processors?
- shevy-java 10mo agoAI companies must compensate us for this outrage. A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought some DDR4, 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid you not - the local price here is now 2.5 times as it was back in 2023 or so, give or take. I want my money back, OpenAI!
- Uvix 10mo agoDDR4 manufacturing is being spun down due to lack of demand. The prices on it would be going up regardless of what's happening with DDR5.
- toss1 10mo agoYup. And even more outrageous is the power grid upgrades they are demanding. If they need the power grid upgraded to handle the load for their data centers, they should pay 100% of the cost for EVERY part of every upgrade needed for the whole grid, just as a new building typically pays to upgrade the town road accessing it. Making ordinary ratepayers pay even a cent for their upgrades is outrageous. I do not know why the regulators even allow it (yeah, we all do, but it is wrong).
- fullstop 10mo agoI bought 2x16 (32GB) DDR4 in June for $50. It is now ~$150. I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what it was then. My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.
- moregrist 10mo agoUsually the narrative for externalizing these kinds of costs is that the investment will result in lots of jobs in the upgrade area. Sometimes that materializes. Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our expensive infrastructure and we’ll take all your jobs. It’s a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV AI barons will have at the end of the day.
- nickjj 10mo agoI'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs very well at 2560x1440. For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.
- Barathkanna 10mo agoI agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.
- asenna 10mo agoI know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.
- crazygringo 10mo agoThis. My M1 MacBook felt like a similarly shocking upgrade -- probably not quite as much as my first SSD did, but still the only other time when I've thought, "holy sh*t, this is a whole different thing".
- wongarsu 10mo agoThe M1 was great. But the jump felt particularly great because Intel Macbooks had fallen behind in performance per dollar. Great build quality, great trackpad, but if you were after performance they were not exactly the best thing to get
- Barathkanna 10mo agoWhen RAM gets so expensive that even Samsung won’t buy Samsung from Samsung, you know the market has officially entered comic mode. At this rate their next quarterly report is just going to be one division sending the other an IOU.
- Ericson2314 10mo agoOverleverage / debt, and refusing to sell at a certain price, are actually very different things though. OpenAI might be a tire fire, but Samsung is the gold pan seller here, and presumably has an excellent balance sheet.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- rafaelmn 10mo agoApple is going to be even more profitable in the consumer space because of RAM prices ? I feel like they are the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off guard, have good prices locked in enough in advance and suppliers not willing to antagonize such a big customer by backing out of a deal.
- londons_explore 10mo agoApple software typically seems to give a better user experience in less RAM in both desktop and mobile. For the last 10+ years apples iPhones have shipped with about half the ram of a flagship android for example.
- Miraste 10mo agoThey used to, but they've caught up. The flagship iPhone 17 has 12GB RAM, the same as the Galaxy S25. Only the most expensive Z Fold has more, with 16GB. RAM pricing segmentation makes Apple a lot of money, but I think they scared themselves when AI took off and they had millions of 4GB and 8GB products out in the world. The Mac minimum RAM specs have gone up too, they're trying to get out of the hole they dug.
- fennecbutt 10mo agoPeople always make this argument. But could you please expand on what you think is actually in memory? code:data, by and large I bet that content held in ram takes up the majority of space. And people have complained about the lack of ram in iPhones for ages now, particularly with how it affects browsers.
- Dibby053 10mo ago>the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off guard What?
- Miraste 10mo agoTim Cook is the Supply Chain Guy. He has been for decades, before he ever worked at Apple. He does everything he can to make sure that Apple directly controls as much of the supply chain as possible, and uses the full extent of their influence to get favorable long-term deals on what they don't make themselves. In the past this has resulted in stuff like Samsung Display sending their best displays to Apple instead of Samsung Mobile.
- potato3732842 10mo agoYou make more money selling the good stuff. It's like this in just about every industry.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoWhy bother selling to regular consumers at all then? One or two big companies can have everything, and the rest of us can have nothing. And we will like it.
- SanjayMehta 10mo agoIn the 90s, Motorola Mobile used Cypress SRAMs and not Motorola SRAMs. Pricing.
- maxglute 10mo agoKdrama on this when?
- monster_truck 10mo agoBased on my time working for Samsung this does not surprise me. The silos within fight against one another more than they ever bother to compete with anyone else
- meindnoch 10mo agoI've bought 2x16GB Samsung ECC RAM last week for $150.
- DustinBrett 10mo agoIronically that site was eating up my RAM. PC World has some issues, Chrome & Firefox.
- time4tea 10mo agoDec 2023: 96GB (2x48) DDR5 5x00 £260 today £1050 128GB (4x32 ) DDR5 5x00 £350 today £1500 Wut? Edit: formatting
- dehrmann 10mo agoECC memory has been one of my better investments in the past two years, and now because of the crashes it might have prevented.
- bpye 10mo agoKind of wish I went for 2x48GB last year, not 2x32GB. Oh well.
- tehlike 10mo agoJust earlier this year I pad 35$ for 64gb lrdimm stick (420$ total for 12). Now each stick is over 180$.
- araes 10mo agoSomebody had PC Part Picker [1] on a different thread. Found it kind of helpful. 3x, 3.5x, and 4x is relatively common across most memory types. DDR4-3200 2x32GB is one of the few that appears to have flattened slightly at 2.5x, although most DDR4-3200 is not as severe as other DDR4 or DDR5. None of the other lines appear to have flattened significantly yet. [1] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
- khannn 10mo ago"The price of eggs has nothing on the price of computer memory right now.". A dozen eggs went to ~$5. They are eggs and most people use what, max 12 eggs a month? Get out of here with that trite garbage. Everyone knew that the egg shortage was due to the extreme step the US does of culling herds infected with avian flu and that they were transitory.
- 542458 10mo agoSurprisingly, apparently Americans average 279 eggs per year per person or 24 per month. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/28/why-americans-are-track-eat-most-eggs-nearly-half-century/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/28/why-ameri... (This is not a comment making any judgements about cost or the state of the economy, I was just surprised to find it that high)
- red-iron-pine 10mo agocuz eggs are in breakfast sandwiches, are ingredients in pastries, act as binders in things like meatloaf or fried chicken, etc. etc.
- baud147258 10mo agoMaybe if you include all the eggs in processed food like cookies or cakes and in restaurants or other catering operations you reach that number? And eggs consumed at home could still be around 12 per person?
- silisili 10mo agoThat sounded high to me as well(probably because I rarely eat eggs), but then I remembered my parents who each eat two per day which isn't that uncommon I guess.
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoThe average person buys, what, 0 ram per month? Which cares.
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- me551ah 10mo agoIt is absolutely the worst time to be a gamer. First it was the GPU prices that went up and NVIDIA started to focus on their enterprise cards more and more RAM prices. I don’t think I’ve seen the price of computer components go up so much.
- qwertox 10mo agoI had planned to build a new workstation this fall, all the parts were in the list. but seeing the ram go from 300€ (96 GB) to 820€, in-stock for 999€, in under a month made me decide that i will continue using that laptop from 2019 for maybe another 1.5 years. It's a ridiculous situation and these companies, whoever they are, should be somewhat ashamed of themselves for the situation they're putting us in. That goes specially for those MF at OpenAI who apparently grabbed 40% of the worldwide DRAM production, as well as those sold in stores.
- aceazzameen 10mo agoI really wanted to build a new PC this year, which is obviously not happening anymore. But I do have 2x16GB DDR5 SODIMMs from my laptop that I'm not using, after I upgraded to 64GB a while back. Now I wonder if I can build a tiny PC around those? Does anyone make motherboards that support DDR5 laptop memory?
- ineedasername 10mo agoA bunch of the NUC models use laptop RAM, and often have barebones kits. Looks like ASUS has a decent range of kits and prebuilt, but you may be able to find boards. If you want something expandable, look for the "Pro" and "Extreme" range. I had one of the first gaming-oriented NUC's a while back, Hades Canyon, highly capable.
- bakugo 10mo agohttps://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X600TM-ITX/index.asp https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X600TM-ITX/index.asp Can't find it for sale, though. There's also a barebones mini-PC: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20X600%20Series/index.asp https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20X600%20Series/i...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- max-leo 10mo agoMinisforum offer a Mini-ITX board with a 16-core Zen4 AMD CPU soldered on for under $400. The AM5 socket version of that same CPU alone is over 500. It uses SO-DIMM DDR5 so might be an interesting option in your case. (Yes, it is a mobile CPU but it has the same amounts of L2/L3 Cache as the AM5 chip, just clocked 300MHz slower) https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-motherboard https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-motherboard
- ThatPlayer 10mo agoThere are adapters that convert the laptop memory for desktop motherboards. So that's an option too.
- blindriver 10mo agoI bought 64 GB DDR4 RAM for $189 in 2022. The exact same memory is now almost $600 on Amazon. How can this not impact PC sales and the sale of other electronics?
- layer8 10mo agoIt will. Manufacturers who didn’t get good supply contracts in time might be forced to leave the market.
- dreamcompiler 10mo agoOnce the AI bubble pops there will be smoking deals on RAM (and everything else).
- Shank 10mo agoThis is going to be a serious problem. We’ve had smart devices percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines to fridges. That’s all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At what point does this become a national security issue? People need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.
- tippa123 10mo agoThis is to be expected from any large corporation. In my experience, this sort of infighting leads to low morale and wastes a significant amount of energy that could be directed somewhere far more productive.
- venturecruelty 10mo agoIt's unfortunate that we will soon not have computers because it is not profitable enough. Alas. Too bad the market is so efficient.
- dmix 10mo agoI'd much rather be in a country where the odd temporary shortage happens due to a massive new market appearing than one where supply/demand is always fixed and static because nothing new gets built without extreme careful planning. AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up. Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt.
- venturecruelty 10mo ago>AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up. What will they do when people continue to not pay for this crap and investors demand their pound of flesh? Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars... >Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt. Which data centers?
- dmix 10mo ago> Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars... I pay for 3 different AI products and every person on my team is paying for at least one. Just because some enterprise sales teams rushed to oversell some half-baked AI products they duct taped together doesn't mean there isn't a huge market. > Which data centers? Microsoft https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/18/inside-the-worlds-most-powerful-ai-datacenter/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/18/inside-the-world... Anthropic https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-construction/anthropic-fluidstack-to-pour-50-billion-into-us-data-centers https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-construction... Twitter https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musks-twitterx-granted-10-million-tax-break-for-ai-hardware-in-georgia/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musks-twitte... CoreSite https://www.coresite.com/news/coresite-launches-ny3-data-center-expanding-ai-optimized-capacity-in-the-new-york-metro-area https://www.coresite.com/news/coresite-launches-ny3-data-cen... Meta, Google, and Oracle are scaling theirs up too
- fennecbutt 10mo agoWell well well. From an anti monopoly standpoint isn't it interesting that each business is doing what it should for its own best interests rather than special deals because they're under the same umbrella?
- venturecruelty 10mo agoI love how I've seen a bunch of responses that amount to "do you really need that much RAM anyway?" Unreal.
- Night_Thastus 10mo agoI am sooooooooooooooooooooooo glad I bought a 6000Mhz 2x16 kit before all this nonsense started. I'll be honest, I have 0 confidence that this is a transient event. Once the AI hype cools off, Nvidia will just come up with something else that suddenly needs all their highest end products. Tech companies will all hype it up, and suddenly hardware will be expensive again. The hardware manufacturers and chip designers have gotten a taste of inflated prices and they are NOT going to let it go. Do not expect a 'return to normal' Even if demand goes back to exactly what it what, expect prices to for some reason be >30% higher than before for no reason - or as they would call it 'market conditions'.
- rwyinuse 10mo agoI'm now glad I bought 128GB of DDR4 when building a new dual purpose server-gaming PC two years ago. The RAM is now worth way more than the rest of the parts combined. I wonder how this will impact phone prices.
- dcchambers 10mo agoSeriously concerned for the future of consumer electronics right now. Next up: Nvidia exits the consumer hardware space and shifts fully to datacenter chips.
- browningstreet 10mo agoApple has the opportunity to do something really funny and radically increase the base RAM configurations of all their unified memory/CPU/GPU chips. Intel/AMD builders would struggle to meet the price/capacity points.
- OhMeadhbh 10mo agoOr we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface. In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be a middle ground between 64k for a craptastic text-only email client and a 1Gb OS / Browser / Webmail combo that could probably run that DOS TSR in an emulator as an attachment to a short email.
- knallfrosch 10mo agoYou have to ship software that behaves exactly the same across three desktop operating systems and two mobile operating systems. Be glad we leave out tablets for this. You're able to hire 4 vibecoding juniors and your deadline is in 6 months. You know what you choose for a frontend? It's Electron + React and React Native. And none of your customers will complain because the people with money to spend are rocking 12GB of RAM on their phone.
- OhMeadhbh 10mo agoYeah. That's not the world I live in. I live in the terminal.
- joks 10mo agoCongrats on being part of the 0.001% I guess?
- jbverschoor 10mo agoThe election apps are the same size as a complete VM of windows 2000.
- cyanydeez 10mo agoYo, your comment makes it seem like AI deserves this memory and chrome does not...
- ralferoo 10mo agoI'm not surprised this is happening in a massive group of companies. I once worked for a smallish company with 400 staff, with basically one product, but different teams - backend, frontend, database, QA, sales, etc... If you were ever speaking to someone from a different team for more than 15 minutes, it had to be put into your weekly timesheet so your time could be cross-billed to the other department. Obviously the net effect was to silo all the different departments so that nobody really knew how the entire product worked, except the few smokers who'd regularly go outside and smoke for 15+ minutes and chat to whoever else was around.
- rigrassm 10mo agoI am so glad when I decided to upgrade my AM4 system a few years back to a 5800X (3D model at the time I believe was just released and was questionable at the time if it was worth it outside of gaming) I wanted to build a PC from my hand me downs for my kid so I went ahead and upgraded my storage and RAM to a decent 64GB DDR4 set that ended up with a decent stable overclock. Prices weren't great when I bought it at the time but compared to now, I'm glad I bit the bullet when I did.