3 ms·

It's not a shortage, it's a cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY

Alifatisk 7mo ago
The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
- ahurmazda 7mo ago
  aside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.
  - Alifatisk 7mo ago
    Couldn't find the summary button anywhere, but, when searching around I found out that you can apparently paste in Youtube links on Google AI studio and summarize it.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - HPsquared 7mo ago
    That sounds pretty ironic, given the topic.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  I haven't watched up the video but I went way too into the weeds of the ram crisis. I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday) My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc. Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests rates and actually scrambled to find the 20 Billion $ (they commited combined with oracle to around 500 billion $) (Btw The datacenter thing is being done in a similar fashion by Oracle) Almost all of that money when given to OpenAI was used/(will be used?) to commit 20% of the Ram supply of the whole world at a more expensive package because these companies just package ram in different order to get "AI ram" and then Micron shuts down the consumer brand (Crucial) This has now caused Ram prices to spike 5 times the cost in a couple of months back. Also, the inflation is happening in hard drive and just Nand in general. The largest impacts I can see that is that even companies like google were scrambling to find Ram. I find this to be one of the larger reasons why they might need so much ram all of a sudden. I mean Google and Anthropic were needing Ram but not 20% of it and not committed in such a way and I am not sure if datacenters are even being built for ram to be stored[1] OpenAI datacenters in Argentina for example is operated by such a shady company that came like 1-2 years ago IIRC. So a 500 Billion $ Project is just picking any random companies ... Yea no, I have the belief that they don't trust it themselves especially when a company is scrambling for money. All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI all was that we normal everyday people get impacted too and I am sure that when they made such a large decision, they must have internally thought about it but we all know the morality of OpenAI now after the DoD deal. But I don't think that google and other companies are that impacted by it all it seems as well. Only the average consumer and Hosting providers (Thus seeing OVH,Hetzner raise prices for example). The average AWS/GCP/Azure makes enough money that they might not even raise money for sometime and they'll be fine having another additional benefit that more people worried about increasing prices would go to Microsoft Azure/GCP/AWS even more so. Edit: Gamers are being pushed out of consoles and everything too and some are saying seeing the cloud connection and AWS coming out and saying that we want Gamers on cloud (paraphrasing) as meaning that its all done to move everything to cloud. I do believe that this might be only half the story as OpenAI does benefit from everything moving to the cloud (somewhat) but its done even more to prevent competition in the whole genre as well. I believe that they thought about it and treated it as a plus point but before all and everything, it helped them thought that it can help them maintain their flimsy lead in AI models as more and more catch up by having a more monopolistic lead by stifling competition by rising prices 5 times. Gamers and normal people were just the largest casuality in this crossfire. I was thinking in the past month when I found all this that damn, OpenAI's morality sucks and they did all of it on purpose And then they had the department of defence* deal and the whole controversy surrounding it so yeah, that too. OpenAI doesn't want your benefit. It wants its profit and when these are conflict, OpenAI doesn't care a cent about you, not anymore than the cent that you give it. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-seeks-record-loan-of-up-to-40-billion-for-openai-stake https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-... [1]: https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas-data-center-expansion-scrapped https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas...
  - Alifatisk 7mo ago
    Incredible digging. I remember reading comments about the reason the price hike was the Sam Altman secured a deal with the few ram producer in secrecy were they promised to reserve a large portion of their production to OpenAI for the next years (I don't remember how long). Supposedly Sam will just to put them in a warehouse to collect dust.
    - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
      > Incredible digging Thanks. I appreciate your kind words, I was thinking of writing some piece/blog about it but procastination is definitely something :) But I am just happy that I finally wrote a comment atleast explaining all/most of my understanding. That's more than fine for me. > Incredible digging. I remember reading comments about the reason the price hike was the Sam Altman secured a deal with the few ram producer in secrecy were they promised to reserve a large portion of their production to OpenAI for the next years (I don't remember how long). Supposedly Sam will just to put them in a warehouse to collect dust. I do believe that's gonna be the case as well. Most of the ram is probably not needed currently (thats what I feel like) so its gonna sit on dust, That, or oracle/microsoft will use it within their datacenters as old ram breaks apart to have some more monopoly given their close ties to OpenAI. Even if OpenAI internally sells them at half the market price to microsoft/oracle, they still technically turn a profit. I actually felt too conspiratorial thinking about it when I had first discovered it because I was under the previous assumption that OpenAI actually needed the ram myself too. But seeing recent events of OpenAI with Department of Defense, I definitely think that they did this on purpose.
      - r_lee 7mo ago
        I would say, just post these kind of rants on a substance and X or something, don't LLM format it, just kind of lay it out and fix whatever typos and let loose it'd be interesting to just hear some thoughts and opinions from someone who has done some research on the topic in a light way vs a huge article/documentary
  - gruez 7mo ago
- harias 7mo ago
  You can use Gemini or NotebookLM to summarize it
- sva_ 7mo ago
  I haven't watched the whole thing either, but basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal + showing the people responsible have only been promoted in those companies + pointing out 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) companies at the heart of it now have 95% of market share + hypothesis they've doing it again (or rather, have continued doing it "business as usual")
cubefox 7mo ago
No, it's a shortage due to high demand from AI data centers.
- amelius 7mo ago
  Why are you so sure?
  - gruez 7mo ago
    You could ask the same about OP.
    - amelius 7mo ago
      At least that video contains a bunch of argumentation.
  - cubefox 7mo ago
    Inference to the best explanation.
groundzeros2015 7mo ago
I hope so. If the government isn’t protecting them all we need to do is wait for new participants in the market.
snczl 7mo ago
The story here is about what lesson was learned by the DRAM cartel after they got busted and hit with large fines. One might hope the lesson learned would be, "we should not fix prices", but what got them in trouble was colluding secretly. What if we just did it via earnings reports, press releases, and other public statements? While there is some market variance like the 2022 to 2023 glut, DRAM prices haven't fallen in real terms in over 15 years. This was all done by controlling supply, and it was all done in public. It starts with one of the big three putting out a statement like, "Samsung is considering reducing DRAM wafer output due to softness in the mobile PC segment." The actual reason varies and often makes little sense. This is followed by similar public statements from the other large vendors expressing a willingness to reduce supply. Once everyone commits in this way, the companies follow up with announcements of actual supply reductions. You can watch this happen any time prices start to dip. My bet is if the DOJ investigates, they will not find the same sort of embarrassing smoking gun emails between representatives of Micron, Hynix, and Samsung. The collusion was all done in public. The companies will claim it is just good business management, a strategy known as "conscious parallelism." They used this exact defense to get a 2022 antitrust lawsuit dismissed. That said, their goal seemed to be just keeping prices fixed. They wanted to avoid boom and bust cycles, keep profits high, and keep prices stagnant. A massive price hike invites investigations and creates problems. If DRAM prices just never fall, they can enjoy healthy profits with little risk. But what happens when your intentionally constrained supply hits a sudden large spike in demand? Prices skyrocket, everyone gets mad, and demands investigations. My guess is instead of being thrilled with the price spike, the executives at the large DRAM manufacturers are very worried someone put something incriminating in a document somewhere that can be subpoenaed ("how we're going to fix prices in public and get away with it").
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  Publicly announcing reductions in DRAM wafer output is not per se nefarious. You need to do it from time to time anyway, if only as part of retooling towards newer technologies that will be required when making DRAM dies for newer standards.

Alifatisk 7mo ago

The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.

ahurmazda 7mo ago
aside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.
- Alifatisk 7mo ago
  Couldn't find the summary button anywhere, but, when searching around I found out that you can apparently paste in Youtube links on Google AI studio and summarize it.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- HPsquared 7mo ago
  That sounds pretty ironic, given the topic.
Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
I haven't watched up the video but I went way too into the weeds of the ram crisis. I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday) My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc. Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests rates and actually scrambled to find the 20 Billion $ (they commited combined with oracle to around 500 billion $) (Btw The datacenter thing is being done in a similar fashion by Oracle) Almost all of that money when given to OpenAI was used/(will be used?) to commit 20% of the Ram supply of the whole world at a more expensive package because these companies just package ram in different order to get "AI ram" and then Micron shuts down the consumer brand (Crucial) This has now caused Ram prices to spike 5 times the cost in a couple of months back. Also, the inflation is happening in hard drive and just Nand in general. The largest impacts I can see that is that even companies like google were scrambling to find Ram. I find this to be one of the larger reasons why they might need so much ram all of a sudden. I mean Google and Anthropic were needing Ram but not 20% of it and not committed in such a way and I am not sure if datacenters are even being built for ram to be stored[1] OpenAI datacenters in Argentina for example is operated by such a shady company that came like 1-2 years ago IIRC. So a 500 Billion $ Project is just picking any random companies ... Yea no, I have the belief that they don't trust it themselves especially when a company is scrambling for money. All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI all was that we normal everyday people get impacted too and I am sure that when they made such a large decision, they must have internally thought about it but we all know the morality of OpenAI now after the DoD deal. But I don't think that google and other companies are that impacted by it all it seems as well. Only the average consumer and Hosting providers (Thus seeing OVH,Hetzner raise prices for example). The average AWS/GCP/Azure makes enough money that they might not even raise money for sometime and they'll be fine having another additional benefit that more people worried about increasing prices would go to Microsoft Azure/GCP/AWS even more so. Edit: Gamers are being pushed out of consoles and everything too and some are saying seeing the cloud connection and AWS coming out and saying that we want Gamers on cloud (paraphrasing) as meaning that its all done to move everything to cloud. I do believe that this might be only half the story as OpenAI does benefit from everything moving to the cloud (somewhat) but its done even more to prevent competition in the whole genre as well. I believe that they thought about it and treated it as a plus point but before all and everything, it helped them thought that it can help them maintain their flimsy lead in AI models as more and more catch up by having a more monopolistic lead by stifling competition by rising prices 5 times. Gamers and normal people were just the largest casuality in this crossfire. I was thinking in the past month when I found all this that damn, OpenAI's morality sucks and they did all of it on purpose And then they had the department of defence* deal and the whole controversy surrounding it so yeah, that too. OpenAI doesn't want your benefit. It wants its profit and when these are conflict, OpenAI doesn't care a cent about you, not anymore than the cent that you give it. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-seeks-record-loan-of-up-to-40-billion-for-openai-stake https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-... [1]: https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas-data-center-expansion-scrapped https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas...
- Alifatisk 7mo ago
  Incredible digging. I remember reading comments about the reason the price hike was the Sam Altman secured a deal with the few ram producer in secrecy were they promised to reserve a large portion of their production to OpenAI for the next years (I don't remember how long). Supposedly Sam will just to put them in a warehouse to collect dust.
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    > Incredible digging Thanks. I appreciate your kind words, I was thinking of writing some piece/blog about it but procastination is definitely something :) But I am just happy that I finally wrote a comment atleast explaining all/most of my understanding. That's more than fine for me. > Incredible digging. I remember reading comments about the reason the price hike was the Sam Altman secured a deal with the few ram producer in secrecy were they promised to reserve a large portion of their production to OpenAI for the next years (I don't remember how long). Supposedly Sam will just to put them in a warehouse to collect dust. I do believe that's gonna be the case as well. Most of the ram is probably not needed currently (thats what I feel like) so its gonna sit on dust, That, or oracle/microsoft will use it within their datacenters as old ram breaks apart to have some more monopoly given their close ties to OpenAI. Even if OpenAI internally sells them at half the market price to microsoft/oracle, they still technically turn a profit. I actually felt too conspiratorial thinking about it when I had first discovered it because I was under the previous assumption that OpenAI actually needed the ram myself too. But seeing recent events of OpenAI with Department of Defense, I definitely think that they did this on purpose.
    - r_lee 7mo ago
      I would say, just post these kind of rants on a substance and X or something, don't LLM format it, just kind of lay it out and fix whatever typos and let loose it'd be interesting to just hear some thoughts and opinions from someone who has done some research on the topic in a light way vs a huge article/documentary
- gruez 7mo ago
harias 7mo ago
You can use Gemini or NotebookLM to summarize it
sva_ 7mo ago
I haven't watched the whole thing either, but basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal + showing the people responsible have only been promoted in those companies + pointing out 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) companies at the heart of it now have 95% of market share + hypothesis they've doing it again (or rather, have continued doing it "business as usual")

cubefox 7mo ago

No, it's a shortage due to high demand from AI data centers.

amelius 7mo ago
Why are you so sure?
- gruez 7mo ago
  You could ask the same about OP.
  - amelius 7mo ago
    At least that video contains a bunch of argumentation.
- cubefox 7mo ago
  Inference to the best explanation.

groundzeros2015 7mo ago

I hope so. If the government isn’t protecting them all we need to do is wait for new participants in the market.

snczl 7mo ago

The story here is about what lesson was learned by the DRAM cartel after they got busted and hit with large fines. One might hope the lesson learned would be, "we should not fix prices", but what got them in trouble was colluding secretly. What if we just did it via earnings reports, press releases, and other public statements? While there is some market variance like the 2022 to 2023 glut, DRAM prices haven't fallen in real terms in over 15 years. This was all done by controlling supply, and it was all done in public. It starts with one of the big three putting out a statement like, "Samsung is considering reducing DRAM wafer output due to softness in the mobile PC segment." The actual reason varies and often makes little sense. This is followed by similar public statements from the other large vendors expressing a willingness to reduce supply. Once everyone commits in this way, the companies follow up with announcements of actual supply reductions. You can watch this happen any time prices start to dip. My bet is if the DOJ investigates, they will not find the same sort of embarrassing smoking gun emails between representatives of Micron, Hynix, and Samsung. The collusion was all done in public. The companies will claim it is just good business management, a strategy known as "conscious parallelism." They used this exact defense to get a 2022 antitrust lawsuit dismissed. That said, their goal seemed to be just keeping prices fixed. They wanted to avoid boom and bust cycles, keep profits high, and keep prices stagnant. A massive price hike invites investigations and creates problems. If DRAM prices just never fall, they can enjoy healthy profits with little risk. But what happens when your intentionally constrained supply hits a sudden large spike in demand? Prices skyrocket, everyone gets mad, and demands investigations. My guess is instead of being thrilled with the price spike, the executives at the large DRAM manufacturers are very worried someone put something incriminating in a document somewhere that can be subpoenaed ("how we're going to fix prices in public and get away with it").

zozbot234 7mo ago
Publicly announcing reductions in DRAM wafer output is not per se nefarious. You need to do it from time to time anyway, if only as part of retooling towards newer technologies that will be required when making DRAM dies for newer standards.