11 ms·
The RAM shortage comes for us all
- nish__ 1y agoAnyone want to start a fab with me? We can buy an ASML machine and figure out the rest as we go. Toronto area btw
- jacquesm 1y agoI hope you have very deep pockets. But I'm cheering you on from the sidelines.
- nish__ 1y agoJust need a half billion in upfront investment. And thank you for the support :)
- dylan604 1y agoSo, playing the Mega Powerball are you?
- nish__ 1y agoI made a website: https://ontario-chips.vercel.app/ https://ontario-chips.vercel.app/
- dylan604 1y agowonder which one will find a winner faster...
- nish__ 1y agoIt's a toss up.
- jvdvegt 1y agoI suppose it would help if I could read the whole page: I cannot see the left few characters on Firefox on Android. What did you make this with? Note that fixing the site won't increase my chances of donating, I'm from the ASML country ;)
- collinmanderson 1y agoI'll happily invest $100 into this project in exchange for stock. let me know.
- jacquesm 1y agoKickstarter time? That would set some records.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI can't invest, your company doesn't have "AI" in the name and your business plan doesn't seem to involve shoving unwanted chatbots down everyone's throats at all. That's no way to run a modern business!
- tmaly 1y agothat is an understatement
- bhhaskin 1y agoOnly if you put up the 10 billion dollars.
- nish__ 1y agoMachines are less than 400 million.
- pixl97 1y agoAnd the cost of the people to run those machines, and the factories that are required to run the machines?
- waynesonfire 1y agoDont forget RAM.
- nish__ 1y agoI'll do it for free. And I'm sure we could rent a facility.
- bhhaskin 1y agoI think you are vastly underestimating how a modern fab works. The average cost is 10 billion and takes a about 10 years to build. They are very complex and even the slightest issue can ruin yields. There is a reason why there are so few.
- nish__ 1y agoYeah you're right. I was way off.
- acksponies 11mo agoWhy is your bitcoin donation still active then?
- GeekFortyTwo 1y agoAs someone with no skills in the space, no money, and lives near Ottawa: I'd love to help start a fab in Ontario.
- deuplonicus 1y agoSure, we can work on brining in TinyTapeout to modern fab
- Reason077 1y agoA dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now. Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?
- dylan604 1y agoAt that point, it'll be the opposite problem as more capacity than demand will be available. These new fabs won't be able to pay for themselves. Every tic receives a tok.
- School-Cotton 1y agoChina cannot buy ASML machines. All advanced semiconductor manufacturing in China is done with stockpiled ASML machines from before the ban.
- phil21 1y agoWould you really need ASML machines to do DDR5 RAM? Honest question, but I figured there was competition for the non-bleeding edge - perhaps naively so.
- squigz 1y agoAs someone who knows next to nothing about this space, why can China not build their own machines? Is ASML the only company making those machines? If so, why? Is it a matter of patents, or is the knowledge required for this so specialized only they've built it up?
- asjir 1y agoBut what if it's a bubble driven by speculation? It wouldn't pay off. Starting a futures exchange on RAM chips, on the other hand...
- panzagl 1y agoHear me out- artisanal DRAM.
- nish__ 1y agoI'm listening.
- q3k 1y agoBathtub semiconductors! Shameless plug: https://wiki.fa-fo.de/orga:donate https://wiki.fa-fo.de/orga:donate
- layer8 1y agoEvery transistor carefully hand-wired with love, giving each bit its own individual characteristic, for more organic, natural data.
- bigiain 1y agoYou've cracked the funding problem! You need to sell the artisanal DRAM to HiFi hucksters. Get Monster Cable on board to say their cables can only reach peak warmth, punch, and clarity - when using gear with artisanal DRAM. You'll easily sell into that market at $10k per GB...
- immibis 1y agoThis existed and it was called LOL memory (little old lady memory). It was knitted by little old ladies, being careful of which wires passed through which cores of course. It was ROM, not RAM.
- Kye 1y agoSome early memory was woven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory We could bring it back.
- bigiain 1y agoLocally sourced artisanal DRAM
- heisenbit 1y agoBuying may be possible but when will you get it?
- acksponies 11mo agoSince you admitted this is not feasible, you need to deactivate your bc donation link or else that's very sketchy.
- jsheard 1y agoI wonder if Apple will budge. The margins on their RAM upgrades were so ludicrous before that they're probably still RAM-profitable even without raising their prices, but do they want to give up those fat margins?
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoIt’s 4D chess my dude, they were just training people to accept those super high ram prices. They saw this coming I tell you!
- dcchambers 1y agoI am fully expecting a 20%+ price bump on new mac hardware next year.
- Eric_WVGG 1y agoNot me. It’s wildly unusual for Apple to raise their prices on basically anything… in fact I'm not sure if its ever happened. * It’s been pointed out by others that price is part of Apple's marketing strategy. You can see that in the trash can Mac Pro, which logically should have gotten cheaper over the ridiculous six years it was on sale with near-unchanged specs. But the marketing message was, "we're selling a $3000 computer." Those fat margins leave them with a nice buffer. Competing products will get more expensive; Apple's will sit still and look even better by comparison. We are fortunate that Apple picked last year to make 16gb the new floor, though! And I don't think we're going to see base SSDs get any more generous for a very, very long time. * okay I do remember that Macbook Airs could be had for $999 for a few years, that disappeared for a while, then came back
- suprnurd 1y agoI read online that Apple uses three different RAM suppliers supposedly? I wonder if Apple has the ability to just make their own RAM?
- School-Cotton 1y agoApple doesn't own semiconductor fabs. They're not capable of making their own RAM.
- hyperhello 1y agoIs this a shortage of every type of RAM simultaneously?
- internetter 1y agoEssentially yes, not necessarily equivalently but every type has increased substantially
- jsheard 1y agoEvery type of DRAM is ultimately made at the same fabs, so if one type is suddenly in high demand then the supply of everything else is going to suffer.
- bee_rider 1y agoWait, really? For CPUs each generation needs basically a whole new fab, I thought… are they more able to incrementally upgrade RAM fabs somehow?
- selectodude 1y agoThe old equipment is mothballed because china is the only buyer and nobody wants to do anything that the Trump admin will at some point decide is tariff-worthy. So it all sits.
- mixermachine 1y agoNot quickly but if somebody puts enough money on the table, the fabs change too. All about cost and return. Micron just axed their brand crucial (end customer RAM and SSD) because they will only sell to database centers from now on. Crazy times.
- fithisux 1y ago32GB should be more than enough. You can go 16GB if you go native and throw some assembly in the mix. Use old school scripting languages. Debloat browsers. It has been long delayed.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago16GB is more than fine if you're not doing high-end gaming, or heavy production workloads. No need for debloating. But it doesn't matter either way, because both 16 and 32GB have what, doubled, tripled? It's nuts. Even if you say "just buy less memory", now is a horrible time to be building a system.
- Aardwolf 1y agoI found web browser tabs eating too much memory when you only have 16GB
- Night_Thastus 1y agoThat's strange. How many tabs are we talking? Are they running something intense or just ordinary webpages?
- Aardwolf 1y agoI usually end up with a couple of browser windows on each of the 4 virtual desktops, and each window will collect a lot of tabs
- prmoustache 1y agoUse adblock, stop visiting nasty websites and open less tabs. Problem is easily solved.
- 1718627440 1y agoWith that much RAM, you could fit multiple OSes entirely into memory. That is simply a lot.
- Loic 1y agoI think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware. [0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.
- codybontecou 1y agoThis became very clear with the outrage, rather than excitement, of forcing users to upgrade to ChatGPT-5 over 4o.
- Grosvenor 1y agoCould this generate pressure to produce less memory hungry models?
- hodgehog11 1y agoThere has always been pressure to do so, but there are fundamental bottlenecks in performance when it comes to model size. What I can think of is that there may be a push toward training for exclusively search-based rewards so that the model isn't required to compress a large proportion of the internet into their weights. But this is likely to be much slower and come with initial performance costs that frontier model developers will not want to incur.
- UncleOxidant 1y agoOr maybe models that are much more task-focused? Like models that are trained on just math & coding?
- agoodusername63 1y ago
- citizenpaul 1y ago> Micron's killing the Crucial brand of RAM and storage devices completely, More rot economy. Customers are such a drag. Lets just sell to other companies for billion dollar deals at once. These AI companies have bottomless wallets. No one has thought of this before we will totally get rich.
- MengerSponge 1y ago"I don't want to make a little bit of money every day. I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
- citizenpaul 11mo agoIt's scary how real that scene is. Says a lot about human psychology.
- aynyc 1y agoHa! Maybe Javascript developers will finally drop memory usage! You need to display the multiplication table? Please allocate 1GB of RAM. Oh, you want alternate row coloring? Here is another 100MB of CSS to do that. edit: this is a joke
- phantasmish 1y agoI do sometimes reflect on how 64MB of memory was enough to browse the Web with two or three tabs open, and (if running BeOS) even play MP3s at the same time with no stutters. 128MB felt luxurious at that time, it was like having no (memory-imposed) limits on personal computing tasks at all. Now you can't even fit a browser doing nothing into that memory...
- anthk 1y agoHN works under Dillo and you don't needs JS at all. If some site needs JS, don't waste your time. Use mpv+yt-dlp where possible.
- baal80spam 1y agoHaha, the amount of downvotes of your very true comment just proves how many web developers are there on HN.
- TSiege 1y agoIts funny because the blogpost author makes the same joke
- Narishma 1y agoOne even responded to an earlier comment of mine that we shouldn't be optimizing software for low-end machines because that would be going against technological progress... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152275
- gizmo 1y agoThe big 3 memory manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron) are essentially all moving upmarket. They have limited capacity and want to use it for high margin HBM for GPUs and ddr5 for servers. At the same time CXMT, Winbond and Nanya are stepping in at the lower end of the market. I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore. Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.
- mixermachine 1y agoLet's see if this demand truly holds. I'm still unsure. Currently nobody makes money with AI. There will be a correction (if I can trust my magic crystal ball ;) )
- stevenjgarner 1y agoMy understanding is that this is primarily hitting DDR5 RAM (or better). With prices so inflated, is there an argument to revert and downgrade systems to DDR4 RAM technology in many use cases (which is not so inflated)?
- cptnapalm 1y agoDDR 4 shot up too. It was bad enough that instead of trying to put together a system with the AM4 m/b I already have, I just bought a Legion Go S.
- Numerlor 1y agoDDR4 manufacturing is mostly shut down, so if any real demand picks starts there the prices will shoot up
- gizmo 1y agoNo DDR4 is affected too. It's a simple question of production and demand, and the biggest memory manufacturers are all winding down their DDR4/DDR5 memory production for consumers (they still make some DDR5 for OEMS and servers).
- tencentshill 1y agoIt will be hit just as hard, they have stopped new DDR4 production to focus on DDR5 and HBM.
- segmondy 1y agoDDR4 prices have gone up 4x in the last 3 months.
- geerlingguy 1y agoLinked in the article, DDR4 and LPDDR4 are also 2-4x more expensive now, forcing smaller manufactures to raise prices or cancel some products entirely.
- beAbU 1y agoThey not making DDR4 anymore, so supply is limited.
- altmanaltman 1y agoI mean what's the big deal, can't we just download more ram
- phendrenad2 1y agoI'm way ahead of all of you, I'm hoarding DDR2.
- submeta 1y agoVery happy to have bought a MBP M4 with 64 gb of Ram last year.
- wslh 1y agoAnd sharing the RAM between your CPU/GPU/NPU instead of using separate memories.
- SchwKatze 1y agoI just gathered enough money to build my new PC. I'll even go to another country to pay less taxes, and this spike hit me hard. I'll buy anyway because I don't believe it will slow down so soon. But yeah, for me is a lot of money
- rolandog 1y agoMe too. I had saved up to make a small server. I guess I'll have to wait up until 2027–2028 at this rate.
- dylan604 1y agoBuy used gear and rip out the guts???
- rolandog 11mo agoThat too is becoming overpriced. Besides, that makes it hard to find what you're looking for, and it doesn't speak to the fact that we, the people, also deserve to be able to buy new stuff at reasonable prices, without some cartel doing price fixing.
- Libidinalecon 1y agoI am sure it sucks if you had a build planned. I had to shelve a build when graphics cards shot a few years back all the sudden. In general, I can't but help think it feels like something we will remember in the future as a marker of the peak of the LLM bubble.
- lawn 1y agoI was planning to buy new in October but decided to wait. That was a bad decision and I had to go down from 64 to 32GB, while still paying more. Fun times.
- comeonbro 1y agoThis is ultimately the first stage of human economic obsolescence and extinction. This https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2025.12.04.usd.ram.ddr5.6000.2x16384.5cd324eb79715651e5c39693bcec4df7.png https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2... will happen to every class of thing (once it hits energy, everything is downstream of energy).
- piekvorst 1y agoWhy should we believe in another apocalypse prediction?
- IAmBroom 1y agoOne of them has to be right, eventually!
- gooseus 1y agoBecause the collapse of complex societies is real - https://github.com/danielmkarlsson/library/blob/master/Joseph%20A%20Tainter%20-%20The%20collapse%20of%20complex%20societies.pdf https://github.com/danielmkarlsson/library/blob/master/Josep... Unbounded increases in complexity lead to diminishing returns on energy investment and increased system fragility which both contribute to an increased likelihood of collapse as solutions to old problems generate new problems faster than new solutions can be created since energy that should be dedicated to new solutions is needed to maintain the layers of complexity generated by the layers of previous solutions.
- captainkrtek 1y agoI'm no economist, but if (when?) the AI bubble bursts and demand collapses at the price point memory and other related components are at, wouldn't price recover? not trying to argue, just curious.
- reducesuffering 1y agoIF a theoretical AI bubble bursts sure. However the largest capitalized companies in the world and all the smartest people able to do cutting edge AI research are betting otherwise. This is also what the start of a takeoff looks like
- asdfman123 1y agoI can't help but be the pessimist angle. RAM production will need to increase to supply AI data centers. When the AI bubble bursts (and I do believe it will), the whole computing supply chain, which has been built around it, will take a huge hit too. Excess production capacity. Wonder what would happen if it really takes a dive. The impact on the SF tech scene will be brutal. Maybe I'll go escape on a sailboat for 3 years or something. Anyway, tangential, but something I think about occasionally.
- XorNot 1y agoPrices are high because no one believes it's not a bubble. Nvidias strategy has been careful careful with volume this whole time as well. The thing is it's also not a conventional looking bubble: what we're seeing here is cashed up companies ploughing money into the only thing in their core business they could find to do so with, rather then a lot of over exuberant public trading and debt financing.
- roadside_picnic 1y agoI know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing. I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for most people. Micron has already decided to just eliminate the Crucial brand (as mentioned in the post). It feels like if this continues, once our nice home PCs start to break, we won't be able to repair them. The extreme version of this is that even dumb terminals (which still require some ram) will be as expensive as laptops today. In this world, our entire computing experience is connecting a dumb terminal to a ChatGPT interface where the only way we can interact with anything is through "agents" and prompts. In this world, OpenAI is not overvalued, and there is no bubble because the large LLM companies become computing. But again, I think this is mostly a dystopian sci-fi fiction... but it does sit a bit too close to the realm of possible for my tastes.
- ben_w 1y agoThe first "proper" "modern" computer I had, initially came with 8 megabytes of RAM. It's not a lot, but it's enough for a dumb terminal.
- rolandog 1y agoThat's not disproving OP's comment; OpenAI is, in my opinion, making it untenable for a regular Joe to build a PC capable of running local LLM model. It's an attack on all our wallets.
- petre 1y agoWhy do you need a LLM running locally so much that's the inflated RAM prices are an attack on your wallet? One can always opt not to play this losing game. I remember when the crypto miners rented a plane to deliver their precious GPUs.
- 11mo ago
- walterbell 1y agoIf the OpenAI Hodling Company buys and warehouses 40% of global memory production or 900,000 memory wafers (i.e. not yet turned into DDR5/DDR6 DIMMs) per month at price X in October 2025, leading to supply shortages and tripling of price, they have the option of later un-holding the warehoused memory wafers for a profit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142100#46143535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142100#46143535 Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain.. What's the economic value per warehoused and insured cubic inch of 900,000 memory wafers? Grok response: > As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs. → Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.
- petre 1y agoSounds like the Silver Thursday all over again. I hope OpenAI ends up like the Hunt Btothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
- enlyth 1y ago> To save the situation, a consortium of US banks provided a $1.1 billion line of credit to the brothers which allowed them to pay Bache which, in turn, survived the ordeal. It seems once you amass a certain amount of wealth, you just get automatically bailed out from your mistakes
- toast0 1y agoThe article goes on to say that they had $5B net wealth around the time of the incident. It's not that unreasonable to get a loan of 20% of your wealth in a hurry, especially if said loan immediately benefits the lenders.
- radicality 1y agoThink the article should also mention how OpenAI is likely responsible for it. Good article I found from another thread here yesterday: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
- diabllicseagull 1y agoyes. on the moore's law is dead podcast they were talking about rumors where some 'AI enterprise company's representatives' were trying to buy memory in bulk from brick and mortar stores. in some cases openai was mentioned. crazy if true. also interesting considering none of those would be ECC certified like what you would opt for for a commercial server.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DamnInteresting 1y agoThe author does mention: > The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. This bubble can't pop fast enough. I'm curious to see which actually useful AIs remain after the burst, and how expensive they are once the cash-burning subsides.
- mschuster91 1y ago> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies. So it's the Bitcoin craze all over again. Sigh. The bubble will eventually collapse, it has to - but the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent... or, to use a more appropriate comparison, have a working computer. I for myself? I hope once this bubble collapses, we see actual punishments again. Too-large-to-fail companies broken up, people getting prosecuted for the wash trading masquerading itself as "legitimate investments" in the entire bubble (that more looks like the genetic family table of the infamously incestuous Habsburg family), greedy executives jailed or, at least where national security is impacted due to chip shortages, permanently gotten rid of. I'm sick and tired of large companies being able to just get away with gobbling up everything, killing off the economy at large, they are not just parasites - they are a cancer, killing its host society.
- otherayden 1y agoI think we kiss of deathed the article haha. Here's an archive https://archive.is/6QD8c https://archive.is/6QD8c
- carlCarlCarlCar 1y agoPricing compute out of the average persons budget to prop up investment in data centers, stocks, ultimately control agency If an RTX 5000 series price topped out at historical prices no one would need hosted AI Then it came to be that models were on a path to run well enough loaded into RAM... uh oh This is in line with ISPs long ago banning running personal services and the long held desire to sell dumb thin clients that must work with a central service Web developers fell for confidence games of old elders hook line and sinker. Nothing but the insane ego and vanity of some tech oligarchs driving this. They cannot appear weak. Vain aura farming, projection of strength.
- zoobab 1y ago"dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year." You don't need a new PC. Just use the old one.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoI just bought some 30pin SIMMs to rehab an old computer. That market is fine.
- fullstop 1y agoI have a bag of SIMMs that I saved, no idea why, because I clearly wrote BAD on the mylar bag. At time time I was messing around with the "badram" patch for Linux.
- toast0 1y agoIt's a lot harder to source ram with known errors than it is to get clean stuff, cause most of the stuff with known errors will be tossed. Makes sense to save it.
- ogogmad 1y agoEvery shortage is followed by a glut. Wait and see for RAM prices to go way down. This will happen because RAM makers are racing to produce units to reap profits from the higher price. That overproduction will cause prices to crash.
- barnas2 1y agoThey aren't overproducing consumer modules, they're actively cutting production of those. They're producing datacenter/AI specific form factors that won't be compatible with consumer hardware.
- baq 1y agosomebody will step up to pick up the free money if this continues.
- sidibe 1y agoA lot of ram and disk companies have played this game before and gotten burned so they are more conservative than you'd expect. The problem in the past is shortages cause the customers to invest in efficiency or new tech pops up, it's really hard to predict whether to jump in because of the time it takes to get production going if it gets really bad though the superscalers will guarantee them enough business years out to make the investment worth it
- ok_dad 1y agoI am very excited for a few years when the bubble bursts and all this hardware is on the market for cheap like back in the early to mid 2000's after that bubble burst and you had tons of old servers available for homelabs. I can't wait to fill a room with 50kW of bulk GPUs on a pallet and run some cool shit.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago> maybe it's a good time to dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year. Always good advice.
- haunter 1y agopanem et circenses But what will happen when people are priced out from the circus?
- mikelitoris 1y agoCompanies are adamant about RAMming AI down our throats, it seems.
- AceJohnny2 1y ago> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market. I wouldn't ascribe that much intent. More simply, datacenter builders have bought up the entire supply (and likely future production for some time), hence the supply shortfall. This is a very simple supply-and-demand situation, nothing nefarious about it.
- teamonkey 1y agoThat makes it sound like they are powerless, which is not the case. They don’t have to have their capacity fully bought out, they could choose to keep a proportion of capacity for maintaining the existing PC market, which they would do if they thought it would benefit them in the long term. They’re not doing that, because it benefits them not to.
- baq 1y ago$20B, 5 years and you can have your own DDR5 fab to print money with. jokes aside, if the AI demand actually materializes, somebody will look at the above calculation and say 'we're doing it in 12 months' with a completely straight face - incumbents' margin will be the upstart's opportunity.
- MPSimmons 1y agoThis reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk Spoiler, but the answer is basically that old hardware rules the day because it lasts longer and is more reliable of timespans of decades. DDR5 32GB is currently going for ~$330 on Amazon DDR4 32GB is currently going for ~$130 on Amazon DDR3 32GB is currently going for ~50 on Amazon (4x8GB) For anyone where cost is a concern, using older hardware seems like a particularly easy choice, especially if a person is comfortable with a Linux environment, since the massive droves of recently retired Windows 10 incompatible hardware works great with your Linux distro of choice.
- christkv 1y agoA friend built a new rig and went with DDR4 and a 5800x3d just because of this as he needed a lot of ram.
- wkat4242 1y agoI have exactly this and was planning to upgrade to AM5 soon :'( Looks like AM4 will live on for many more years in my flat
- fullstop 1y agoIf everyone went for DDR4 and DDR3, surely the cost would go up. There is no additional supply there, as they are no longer being made.
- MPSimmons 1y agoUndoubtably the cost would go up, but nobody is building out datacenters full of DDR4, either, so I don't figure it would go up nearly as much as DDR5 is right now.
- fullstop 1y agohttps://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ You can see the cost rise of DDR4 here.
- jl6 1y agoCan someone explain why OpenAI is buying DDR5 RAM specifically? I thought LLMs typically ran on GPUs with specialised VRAM, not on main system memory. Have they figured out how to scale using regular RAM?
- fullstop 1y agoThey're not. They are buying wafers / production capacity to make HBM so there is less DDR5 supply.
- jl6 1y agoOK, fair enough, but what are OpenAI doing buying production capacity rather than, say, paying NVIDIA to do it? OpenAI aren’t the ones making the hardware?
- fullstop 1y agoBecause they can provide the materials to NVIDIA for production and prevent Google, Anthropic, etc from having them.
- snuxoll 1y agoJust because Nvidia happily sells people discrete GPU's, DGX systems, etc., doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs; or, let OpenAI provide their own DRAM supply for production on an existing line. If you have a potentially multi-billion dollar contract, most businesses will do things outside of their standard product offerings to take in that revenue.
- jl6 1y agoGot it, thank you.
- vel0city 1y ago> doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs FWIW, this was the standard state of affairs of the GPU market for a long while. nVidia and AMD sold the chips they paid someone to produce to integrators like EVGA, PNY, MSI, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, etc. Cards sold under the AMD or nVidia name directly were usually partnered with one of these companies to actually build the board, place the RAM, design the cooling, etc. From a big picture perspective, it's a pretty recent thing for nVidia to only really deliver finished boards. On top of this, OpenAI/Sam Altman have been pretty open about making their own AI chips and what not. This might point to them getting closer to actually delivering on that (pure speculation) and wanting to ensure they have other needed supplies like RAM.
- christkv 1y agoI grabbed a framework desktop with 128GB due to this. I can't imagine they can keep the price down for the next batches. If you bought 128GB of ram with "close" specs to the one used just that would be 1200 EUR at retail (who are obviously taking advantage).
- RachelF 1y agoPerhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.
- alliao 1y agonow that's a word i haven't heard in a while...optimising
- cube00 1y ago> optimising Usually followed by "stock holder value"
- bigiain 1y agoAnd to the tech staff, some out of context and misunderstood quote from semi technical management which starts with the word "Premature"
- tom_ 1y agoIf you used it yourself, even if only to ask out loud whether the performance is acceptable enough not to require the extra work, you'd hear it all the time. Be the change you want to see!
- sahilagarwal 11mo agoYeah. I'm all for sprints to start focusing on optimizations and bug smashing instead of just barreling down the road of profitability while the middle managers hold a gun to your head.
- 650REDHAIR 1y agoI truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is. My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...
- vanviegen 1y ago
- hathawsh 1y agoThe article suggests that because the power and cooling are customized, it would take a ton of effort to run the new AI servers in a home environment, but I'm skeptical of that. Home-level power and cooling are not difficult these days. I think when the next generation of AI hardware comes out (in 3-5 years), there will be a large supply of used AI hardware that we'll probably be able to repurpose. Maybe we'll sell them as parts. It won't be plug-and-play at first, but companies will spring up to figure it out. If not, what would these AI companies do with the huge supply of hardware they're going to want to get rid of? I think a secondary market is sure to appear.
- dist-epoch 1y agoA single server is 20 KW. A rack is 200 KW. These are not the old CPU servers of yesterday.
- geerlingguy 1y agoAt minimum, you'd need to wire in new 240V circuits, and you could only run one or two of these servers before you'd need a service upgrade. Then you'd have to deal with noise from a literal wall of fans, or build a separate high capacity water cooling system (and still deal with dumping that heat somewhere).
- quickthrowman 1y agoA utility is most likely only going to offer a 240V 400A single-phase service at best for a residence in the US, 320A can be used continuously. If you need more they’ll usually offer multiple 400A services. I’ve heard stories about people convincing their utility to install three-phase service drops in their homes, but usually it’s not an option. Anyways, 320A continuous load at 240V single-phase is 76.8kW, if you assume 25kW per server (20 kW for server, 5kW for cooling), you can run (3) servers and 15 tons of cooling and still have just enough left for one 120V 15A circuit to charge your phone and power a light.
- 11mo ago
- topaz0 1y agoI wonder how much of that RAM is sitting in GPUs in warehouses waiting for datacenters to be built or powered?
- bibimsz 1y agotime to stop using python boys, it's zig from here on out
- arvinsim 11mo agoThe question for moving to new languages is always if there are enough jobs for it.
- QuadrupleA 1y agoOnly a matter of time before supply catches up and then likely overshoots (maybe combined with AI / datacenter bubble popping), and RAM becomes dirt cheap. Sucks for those who need it now though.
- agoodusername63 1y agoIf openai was building out with DDR5 that would create a big ol supply of DDR5 to make RAM cheap. No. They bought the wafers for HBM. The only thing thats going to get cheap when openai implodes are server stuff for homelab bros. The RAM manufacturers are using their production capacity to produce HBM for openai.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seanalltogether 1y agoI wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production guarantees like Sony or Nintendo would have. If they try to launch with a price tag over $750, they're probably not going sell a lot.
- pja 1y agoYeah, I think (sadly) this kills the Steam Machine in the short term if the competition is current consoles. At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too. In the short term the RAM shortage is going to kill homebrew PC building & small PC builders stone dead - prebuilts from the larger suppliers will be able to outcompete them on price so much that it simply won’t make any sense to buy from anyone except HP, Dell etc etc. Again, this applies only until the supply contracts those big PC firms have signed run out, or possibly only until their suppliers find they can’t source DDR5 ram chips for love nor money, because the fabs are only making HBM chips & so they have to break the contracts themselves. It’s going to get bumpy.
- fullstop 1y ago> At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too. Allegedly Sony has an agreement for a number of years, but Microsoft does not: https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-ram-shortages-microsoft-soon/ https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-r...
- pja 1y agoEesh. The fight over RAM supply is going to upend a lot of product markets. Just random happenstance over whether a company decided to lock in supply for a couple of years is going to make or break individual products.
- delfinom 1y ago
- notatoad 1y agoanybody care to speculate on how long this is likely to last? is this a blip that will resolve itself in six months, or is this demand sustainable and we are talking years to build up new manufacturing facilities to meet demand?
- boxedemp 1y agoPure speculation, nobody can say say for sure, but my guess is 2-3 years.
- T-A 1y agoIf all goes "well", starting work on a new DDR5 fab now would result in having it ready to go when DDR6 hits the market: https://www.techpowerup.com/339178/ddr6-memory-arrives-in-2027-with-8-800-17-600-mt-s-speeds https://www.techpowerup.com/339178/ddr6-memory-arrives-in-20... So the supply side won't get better until about 2028. I suppose you could hope for an AI crash bad enough to wipe out OpenAI, but unless it happens within the next few months, it may still be too late to profitably restore the DDR5 production lines now being converted to HBM, even if the broader economy doesn't tank: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/if-ai-is-bubble-economy-will-pop-with-it-2025-10-01/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/if-ai-is-bubble-econo... Perhaps not coincidentally, that Reuters article was published the same day OpenAI announced that it had cornered an estimated 40% of the world's DRAM production: https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate/ https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate/ https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- philsnow 1y agoRed chip supply problems in your factory are usually caused by insufficient plastic bars, which is usually caused by oil production backing up because you're not consuming your heavy oil and/or petroleum fast enough. Crack heavy oil to light, and turn excess petroleum into solid fuel. As a further refinement, you can put these latter conversions behind pumps, and use the circuit network to only turn the pumps on when the tank storage of the respective reagent is higher than ~80%. hth, glhf
- dbbr 1y agoYou don't happen to play Foxhole [0] do you? Because if not, the logistics Collies in SOL could make good use of a person with your talents. :-) [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/505460/Foxhole/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/505460/Foxhole/
- philsnow 1y agoHadn't heard of it before.. > Foxhole is a massively multiplayer game where nope, not my cup of tea, but thanks for the "if you like this you might like this" rec :)
- dbbr 1y agoNo problem. It was a super insider reference to that game. It is a war game, and within the game there is a 'logistics' branch which basically produces every single bullet etc. that is ever fired. There are also 'facilities' that produce gasoline for the trucks etc. to drive. Much of the language you used in your post could have been taken straight out of the game. I knew the odds that you played it were slim but I had to ask!
- wpm 1y agoYup, and stockpiling solid fuel is not a waste because you need it for rocket fuel later on. Just add more chests.
- phkahler 1y agoCalled it! About a year ago (or more?) I thought nVidia was overpriced and if AI was coming to PCs RAM would be important and it might be good to invest in DRAM makers. As usual I didn't do anything with my insight, and here we are. Micron has more than doubled since summer.
- f055 1y agoBullwhip effect on this will be funny. At least, we are in for some cheap ram in like… a dozen months or so.
- Forgeties79 1y agoI’m really hoping this doesn’t become another GPU situation where every year we think it’s going to get lower and it just stays the same or gets worse
- leeoniya 1y ago1. Buy up 40% of global fab capacity 2. Resell wafers at huge markup to competitors 3. Profit
- mastax 1y ago> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market. > So they're shutting down their consumer memory lines, and devoting all production to AI. Okay this was the missing piece for me. I was wondering why AI demand, which should be mostly HBM, would have such an impact on DDR prices, which I’m quite sure are produced on separate lines. I’d appreciate a citation so I could read more.
- levkk 1y agoNot a bad time for the secondary market to be created. We keep buying everything new, when the old stuff works just as well. There is a ton of e-waste. The enthusiast market can benefit, while the enterprise market can just eat the cost. Also, a great incentive to start writing efficient software. Does Chrome really need 5GB to run a few tabs?
- tverbeure 1y agoI updated a $330 new HP laptop (it flexes like cardboard) from 8GB to 32GB in May. Cost back then: $44. Today, the same kit costs a ridiculous $180. https://tomverbeure.github.io/2025/03/12/HP-Laptop-17-RAM-Upgrade.html https://tomverbeure.github.io/2025/03/12/HP-Laptop-17-RAM-Up...
- mixermachine 1y agoGot to say, those prices were quite cheap. I also upgraded my home server to 32GB RAM and paid something like 55€. Now we can just wait for some bubble to pop...
- mindslight 1y ago> But I've already put off some projects I was gonna do for 2026, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Let's be honest here - the projects I'm going to do in 2026, I bought the parts for those back in 2024. But this is definitely going to make me put off some projects that I might have finally gotten around to in 2028.
- almosthere 1y agoI think I paid like $500 ($1300 today) in 1989ish to upgrade from 2MB to 5MB of ram (had to remove 1MB to add 4MB)
- internet2000 1y agoHopefully Apple uses their volume as leverage to avoid getting affected by this for as long as possible. I can ride it out if they manage to.
- wkat4242 1y agoAlso I feel that when this bubble bursts, we'll have much bigger problems than some expensive ram. More like the big 2007 crisis.
- oybng 1y agoDisingenuous title and no mention of those directly responsible, Sam Altman/OpenAI. Once again Jeff is desperate for clicks
- synack 1y agoI wonder if we'll start to see instance type shortages or price increases from EC2 and GCP if they can't get enough DRAM for latest gen servers.
- ballpug 1y ago[dead]
- FootballMuse 1y agoI like this chart which shows multiple generations from September and it's only worsened. https://x.com/jukan05/status/1969551230881185866 https://x.com/jukan05/status/1969551230881185866
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Fnoord 1y ago> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies. LE should investigate as this concerns us all. However, I really don't have faith this current administration would criminally investigate this. Maybe the next one will, if there's going to be one.
- xbmcuser 1y agoI have to say I called this out few months back with my statement that the worlds needs China to get competitive on node size and crash the semiconductor market as otherwise most home users/normal people will get priced out of the market. At the time I got down voted but it is nice to be proven right
- Mcwee 11mo agoGuys We need to rise up against this. If it gets any worse than you will be stuck trying to find jobs instead of doing what you want. It like the Gatlin gun all over again. Ai was created to take the jobs we don't want but now it's taking the ones we want. Not to mention the data centers are horrible for the environment because of the cooling system. It's also used to make cp and no one does anything.
- fithisux 11mo agoI'm afraid any new company may have to start from PC133-SDRAM.