13 ms·

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

675 points by haunter 2mo ago

master_crab 2mo ago
I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure. If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
- phonon 2mo ago
  OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output. 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...
  - happyPersonR 2mo ago
    And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
    - Legend2440 2mo ago
      >even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour. The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
      - 3848488484 2mo ago
        Let's see Paul Allens IPO filling
    - nzrf 2mo ago
      I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.
      - llama052 2mo ago
        It also would be a huge win for the memory companies to agree to this, considering they will make more money with less supply. Seems interesting to me.
    - Arwill 2mo ago
      Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware. But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
      - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
        I don’t think there were some grand conspiracy to buy up the world’s ram to keep other people out, it is probably more likely that they just really thought they would need it. However, I do feel like this is the type of conspiracy that unfiltered Claude would come up with.
  - andriy_koval 2mo ago
    next they will become successful business by reselling RAM
- dgellow 2mo ago
  There is a reason NVIDIA and the hyperscalers are injecting so much money into them
- giantrobot 2mo ago
  It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo ago
  It's possible to be economically feasible. It requires the ability to pay off the capex. Not only do they have to pay off their loans in record time (prob 2-3 years), they also have to keep spending every 3 years because the failure rate of GPUs is something like 20%. In addition they need to complete building out the stuff they've started, which means not failing to acquire land, energy, and water (the most dangerously rare and absolutely necessary resource for AI), not dealing with collective bargaining, nor any increased shortages or price hikes in materials. So there is a lot of risk. Ballpark that they need to make around 110 billion a year, each, to break even on these investments. Let's estimate 550 billion a year in necessary profit required for the major frontier companies. That means there needs to be 550 billion of money, available to customers today, that isn't being spent on anything else, that they will now spend on AI. Maybe some of that comes from increased value, efficiency, or layoffs. But 550 billion is not a small amount of money. Spread over the whole globe, the cash is there. But it is a hunt for cash, combined with a battle to successfully complete their buildouts, keep them running, and make bank, before the bookie comes knocking. The railroad panics of the 19th century (and subsequent depressions) happened because they over-leveraged private capital without the ability to profit from it quick enough. So it really is a question of 1) can they really build it all, and 2) will people really pay for it all. If either answer is No, we are looking at economic catastrophe.
cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
- forinti 2mo ago
  I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
  - deadbunny 2mo ago
    Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard
  - cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
    Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part. The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
    - forinti 2mo ago
      You didn't hold on to your Pentium 4 long enough. :-)
      - dijit 2mo ago
        Anecdatum, but mine still works :D
iLoveOncall 2mo ago
Storage has more than doubled as well. The same SSD (4TB M.2) I bought in September 2025 for £229 is now £500. I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...
- bpye 2mo ago
  Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now. The possibility that these fail does concern me.
  - z2 2mo ago
    And that's the really fun part of all this, that weak substitutes will also become more expensive. But on the bright side, I've got dozens of sticks of DDR3 RAM that I'm hoarding like Pokémon cards. Any day now, we'll get desperate enough to start using them again!
palmotea 2mo ago
[flagged]
- whateveracct 2mo ago
  what the heck did you drop a '/s'?
- unsui 2mo ago
  No, this is not good, in any way, except for AI shareholders (of which I assume you are one, else not rational to support this position). Paperclipping here, greedily optimizing for shareholder value above all else. Please stop.
  - deadbunny 2mo ago
    Some people really so need the /s huh
    - unsui 2mo ago
      sadly, Poe's law scales exponentially on HN
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
      - bhaney 2mo ago
        > There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Given the number of upvotes my comment got and the other comments where people missed the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be too sure that many people have no trouble distinguishing
OutOfHere 2mo ago
I guess it's high time to stop using memory inefficient programming languages for any serious work.
- datakan 2mo ago
  Been long past that time, probably 15-20 years past. It's not even the languages its the 500 different layers of abstraction and abominations like Electron.
josefritzishere 2mo ago
The fake economics of the AI sector are damaging the real economy. This is madness.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  Deep down it's all just people telling stories. If the AI sector's story is setting the price, and yours is not, then theirs is the real real one, not yours. It's a totally broken way to practice economics, but alas, it's ours until we change it.
jayd16 2mo ago
Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?
- greggoB 2mo ago
  I believe they've been building them like crazy since covid, but it takes a looong time for them to come online (like 5-10 years?)
- nullbyte 2mo ago
  CXMT is a memory fab that just opened in China. They achieved a 90% yield on DDR5. Hopefully that could ease up the supply squeeze.
  - spystath 2mo ago
    It's very unlikely to have any meaningful effect. CXMT DRAM will also be hoovered up the moment it hits the market at the same inflated prices. Even if they had the capacity (they don't) why flood the market when you can just print money?
    - jingpostmedia 2mo ago
      [flagged]
  - mrheosuper 2mo ago
    CXMT has been in a game for a while, at least since 2025, because my SBC is using their LPDDR4 RAM.
- layer8 2mo ago
  They are building fabs on track to get online towards the end of 2027, full capacity production expected for 2028. These are serious pieces of very complex technology that take years, not months, to build.
dofm 2mo ago
I hate that I am no longer certain I don’t need to buy a new machine just in case.
nazgulsenpai 2mo ago
I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.
- greggoB 2mo ago
  I got a 3060 ti for like $900 at that time <melting-face-emoji>
nullsmack 2mo ago
Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"
- Tadpole9181 2mo ago
  Memory manufacturers have gone through several cycles of lawsuits for market collusion at this point. It's gone from an open secret to just outright flaunting in our face. Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.
mk_stjames 2mo ago
I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market. The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate. So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate. I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.
- greggoB 2mo ago
  > So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
- toenail 2mo ago
  Greed? Resellers aren't charities, good for them if the value of their stock goes up. Besides, people buying server equipment aren't exactly starving, I bet most of them can either simply not buy the server, or cut some other expense.
- aliasxneo 2mo ago
  Why would I voluntarily choose to sell the hardware I have for less than the going price? The odds of it getting picked up by a scalper and resold are extremely high. If I was sitting on a goldmine of old server hardware, I would absolutely be ripping out the RAM and selling it per stick in this market.
tedggh 2mo ago
I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.
- stuxnet79 2mo ago
  While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here. It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
  - greggoB 2mo ago
    My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices. I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
    - matt-p 2mo ago
      Typically (not always!) server memory is 'registered' so won't work with consumer CPUs which run on un-registered.
      - greggoB 2mo ago
        Does 'registration' introduce anything physically different? Or could they be completely interoperable?
poulpy123 2mo ago
I cross my fingers that my 10 years old laptop and desktop will hold until the crazyness ends
- rocketvole 2mo ago
  same. still rockin a 2016 era dell xps 13. I was about to pull the trigger on a few laptops but I always psych myself out because I assume prices will drop and I can pick them up secondhand. big mistake...
- aidenn0 2mo ago
  Ditto; my laptop is slowly losing ports on the right side, but it has 32GB of ECC ram...
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
surcap526 2mo ago
[dead]
1saadcodes 2mo ago
500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all
- luma 2mo ago
  There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.
  - cm2187 2mo ago
    You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.
    - luma 2mo ago
      Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity. This was not created by the manufacturers.
      - dawnerd 2mo ago
        The manufacturers are not doing a whole lot to fix the problem l and I don’t blame them. It’s expensive to build out and they know demand will slow down and don’t want to be stuck with excess capacity. Better to be sold out and high prices. Samsung said they were “moderating demand” which doesn’t sound like they want this problem to be solved either.
    - jpgvm 2mo ago
      It's actually both. DRAM manufactures operate on a boom bust cycle and by 2023 there was significant oversupply. This meant even leading up to that they had already decided not to invest in further capacity explicitly to recover profit on their existing lines. So a lack of builds coupled with AI boom at the same time created a perfect storm with no new capacity coming online for years after demand rapidly escalated.
Sharlin 2mo ago
I'm really happy that I bought 32G of RAM and a 2T M.2 SSD for my desktop two years ago. In retrospect, of course, I should've bought 64G and 4T.
naet 2mo ago
I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer. I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on. Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  100% what I do. I buy a few years behind the leading edge, and keep the device until it either dies or will no longer do what I need it to do. My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.
  - mordae 2mo ago
    Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not. R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.
    - simoncion 2mo ago
      > ...when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. When taking the resale value of used kit on the second-hand market into account, one must also take into account the hassle of selling on the second-hand market. For me? Personally? That hassle absolutely eliminates any money I would get from any plausible sale price. If I'm getting rid of used kit, it's going to be as donations to people I personally know who will come and pick it up at the agreed upon time.
      - 2mo ago
Taikhoom10 2mo ago
[flagged]
- HDBaseT 2mo ago
  Not every single post of yours has to be a link to your "blog".
n3ll1x93 2mo ago
It's crazy if you think that some years ago were the cheaper part of a personal computer compared to motherboard, cpu, gpu and so on.
- jnpnj 2mo ago
  last year i mis-bought a ssd on amazon (wrong size or model i can't recall) so I asked for a return, surprisingly amazon wanted to save on transport that they offered to pay me to keep it (i don't want to spread stupid claim but maybe the full item price), i was confused and worried it would create issues down the road so i sent it back thinking i'd buy the proper item the month after.. and now i'm running duplicate search programs to save space on drives.
sys32768 2mo ago
My Dell rep quoted me $736 for a single 16GB RDIMM for the newer Dell Pro 16 laptop, which retails at its baseline configuration with 16GB for ~$1000.
- bluedino 2mo ago
  Dell wants $4,507 (web price) for each 32GB RDIMM in a PowerEdge 6625 (16GB is showing as unavailable)
haunter 2mo ago
If you want even more bad news: display panel makers also want to raise prices "Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own." https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-warns-gaming-monitor-prices-are-about-to-rise/ https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...
- jnpnj 2mo ago
  It would strange if just when a lot of articles mention computing / social networks are detrimental, governments start passing laws to forbid platforms and/or phones for kids, and now price gouging flares up everywhere, this would entice people to just stop using these devices and maybe enjoy natural taper-off.
  - aok1425 2mo ago
    I like this idea! Perhaps folks will game less on PCs and consoles. But would they shift to playing on their phones? Or play less video games overall? Also, when OpenAI's new device comes out, would people shift to talking to these small devices?
    - Anoian 2mo ago
      People do not want to talk to their devices because they are in the room with other people and they dont want to disturb them. I think their device is going to be a flop.
      - firegodjr 2mo ago
        It's going to flop because everyone is already able to talk to Google Assistant to manage things, and outside of very specific circumstances (e.g. driving) everyone is still tapping screens instead
tadasv 2mo ago
Ram, hdd, ssd, even blu-ray writers are expensive. I purchased mdisc blu-ray writer for $70 in 2021, I see people are trying to sell the same device for $500+ wtf
- aidenn0 2mo ago
  Is it a Pioneer model? They stopped making their blu-ray drives which are at least perceived to be better quality than the competition, so NOS prices have gone way up.
acd 2mo ago
I have written a llm compression quantization library called glq because of the high ram prices. Glq uses qtip Trellis quantization which are efficient at low bpw 2-4 bits. As a gamer and ai developer I want to squeeze more out of the same hardware. Glq runs with vLLM. Open source https://github.com/cnygaard/glq https://github.com/cnygaard/glq Pypi glq https://pypi.org/project/glq/ https://pypi.org/project/glq/
z_rho_one 2mo ago
After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...
- elictronic 2mo ago
  If it makes you feel better. The US government looks like it might start removing some of the 28k troops that are stationed in South Korea over this. No reason to keep them in a country that enables this sort of behavior.
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Probably for the best. No hosting nation of imperialism has ever benefited and now we see what the US is willing to throw away because their corporations are upset.
    - true_religion 2mo ago
      If there is something Korea doesn’t lack, it’s manpower. The US troops are more likely there as a political shield. Indiscriminate bombing would kill them too, hence drag the US into war so any enemies of S Korea have to act judiciously.
      - shimman 2mo ago
        If you think the US public has any appetite for more wars you're straight up delusional. Iran War is going to cost the GOP the house + senate, something that wasn't really a sure then say even 7 months ago. If anything more foreign bases will be closed in the upcoming years to reign in the reckless spending + endangerment by the DoW. It's not only politically easy, foreign bases don't have representation in Congress, but it's a great to sell alternative governing visions (less on foreign imperialism vs more domestic spending).
    - 2mo ago
platevoltage 2mo ago
AI Datacenter proponents do not get to complain about this.
geodel 2mo ago
No hope in US but I hope EU regulators are taking note of this working on fix as we talk.
paulpauper 2mo ago
This is "the memory shortage that no one saw coming." To the best of my knowledge, no podcasters, bloggers, or experts in AI predicted this or were sounding the alarm of a memory shortage. No one was saying pre-2025 to buy memory/data storage stocks. This goes to show how hard it is to predict. Everyone was saying to buy NVDA, which had done well from 2022-2024, and then stalled out, only to be surpassed by memory stocks like SanDisk, Western Digital, and Micron, which took many by surprise.
- mike_hearn 2mo ago
  There were some. Read SemiAnalysis. I picked up some Micron last year anticipating memory demand, but then the stock went down for a while. I waited, it went up and I took 25% profit as I figured they couldn't add any new capacity and would have sold all the capacity from their existing fabs on long term contracts. Then prices went crazy, sigh. I'm not sure why prices have gone boom now rather than before given we're years into the LLM boom, but probably it's to do with capacity lockups expiring or something similar.
varispeed 2mo ago
With such profit margins, any new players entering the market will want those. This means prices are unlikely going to go down unless demand for memory vanishes, even if new suppliers come to the table.
techteach00 2mo ago
There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.
- techteach00 2mo ago
  Just so I make it clear. I'm deeply opposed to this change.
- Cider9986 2mo ago
  Apple is making Macs and iPhones more powerful every year. Macs are more affordable and powerful that other computers since the M series. People are buying them to run their own private on device AI. This is a signal for personal computing.
  - vor_ 2mo ago
    > Macs are more affordable and powerful that other computers since the M series. Apple has been raising prices on Macs and other products.
- ivanjermakov 2mo ago
  Personal computing has been in a sad state for a while now. Only "PC enthusiasts" were gamers. Rest of the population uses their phone 18hrs a day and seldomly use PC for Excel tasks at work.
- crm9125 2mo ago
  [dead]
- nullbio 2mo ago
  This is the ultimate dystopian outcome. How do we stop this?
dawnerd 2mo ago
What’s dumb is even older tech has gone up. Look at microsd and usb thumb drives. There’s a lot of price gouging just because they can. There’s a real shortage and then there’s just “it’s memory so price go up”
- spudlyo 2mo ago
  Tried to buy old DDR4 memory recently? I've been revitalizing some old laptops, and I foolishly paid nearly $200 for a Crucial 32GB Kit of DDR4 PC4-19200.
  - TapamN 2mo ago
    I bought 32GB of DDR4 SODIMMs (16GBx2 Corsair 3200MHz) April last year for $50.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
      128GB 3600Mhz… $600 just last week.
0xbadcafebee 2mo ago
It turns out supply and demand is a thing, and can go both ways. Remember that in 2001, memory prices dropped like a rock, from $300 to $80. A ton of memory capacity came online at the same time, the market was flooded, so prices sank. The loss of revenue then hurt the memory industry.
frobisher 2mo ago
Well this seems sustainable.
atleastoptimal 2mo ago
Is the end result of this is that anything that is useful to AI going to be permanently more expensive, as the value a human hobbyist can get out of a certain amount of RAM will always be far less than the value a frontier AI model can get out of it?
- TSiege 2mo ago
  If demand remains as elevated as it is you will definitely see new fabs breaking ground to meet it. China is expanding a lot as well. Even if AI doesn’t go anywhere there is no way prices remain this elevated or climb forever
  - m4rtink 2mo ago
    More likely AI companies go bankrupt and market is flooded by repurposed hardware sold for pennies by creditors AND Chinese memory from their new fabs, hopefully also killing the existing memory manufacturing cartel. So basically utopia. ;-)
devdoshi 2mo ago
Are we observing corresponding work to make things use less memory though? I've switched a lot of things to WASM and use way less RAM.
- devdoshi 2mo ago
  or rather, get more done with the same RAM
realo 2mo ago
But what about Apple, with their memory-carrying SOC, one would think they are in a very cool position?
- tynorf 2mo ago
  They still need to buy said RAM from all the same players.
rossant 2mo ago
Really happy I got a new PC last year with 128 GB of RAM, 4 TB SSD, and an RTX 5090. This would have been prohibitively expensive now.
- andrewstuart2 2mo ago
  Congrats. Happy for you. Nice. Yeah, I built mine in 3090 times and told myself I'd upgrade every 2-3 GPU generations. I do have 128G ram and I'm thankful for that but I'm definitely not on the same upgrade schedule any more.
  - rjh29 2mo ago
    I have 32GB and an aging 5800X3D and I have not had any issues running games yet. Honestly would love to know what games need more powerful RAM/CPU outside of stuff like Flight Simulator, or running at 160fps without framegen.
    - andrewstuart2 2mo ago
      Honestly I have a steam deck and that has gotten me accustomed to not sweating the lower frame rates. That and the ridiculous number of great indie games that aren't heavy on the graphics, and I'm not too worried about upgrades as much as I am worried about replacements if/when the time comes.
gambiting 2mo ago
My PC built February 2025, with a 5090 and 64GB of ram, is literally worth more than double than what I paid for it. I'm actually concerned what my home insurance would do if it was stolen, since the cost of replacement is so much higher than my invoices say.
mrlonglong 2mo ago
I'm waiting for China to start selling cheaper memory. They can have my money. The greed of US billionaires need to be lanced with a hefty kick in their wallets.
lubitelpospat 2mo ago
What do I read to quickly get a grasp of how economics works, from a high level perspective?
- jpadkins 2mo ago
  200 pages https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3028.Economics_in_One_Lesson https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3028.Economics_in_One... There are free PDFs if you don't want to buy it.
  - arjie 2mo ago
    Seems solid rec. For lazy person, I think a couple of things that will give you quick intuition for present affairs are: * The Fifth Discipline - read the beer game chapter and AI summaries for the rest, helps build intuition for chained systems * Chip War - a quick read but AI summaries will suffice, helps build knowledge for semiconductor industry orientation * The Goal - classic business book on just-in-time, useful to overturn standard human reactions. read if you're a quick reader, AI summary otherwise
  - lubitelpospat 2mo ago
    Nice thanks
x0xMaximus 2mo ago
We had last bought 24TB+ (4x 24 racks, and some miscellaneous) of DDR5 4800 and 6400 last year while finishing a move off of AWS entirely. I tried to be responsible and prioritize a cold and warm spares of all our equipment and over allocation to ensure proper redundancy capacity. At the time it was a hard pill to swallow looking at our budget; but a few months ago we've started to offload some DIMMs on various channels. What went from a cost analysis between a cloud provider, to having to manage transit, circuits, equipment, a IP blocks, etc etc and all the operational obligations that come with it.. it ultimately covering our hosting costs entirely for the next ~18months *at least* (while "only" coming at the cost of having slightly less cold spares sitting in the bottom of our cages). Given we're all 9004/9005 now, and that (from what I understand) Venice will support 6400. Will hopefully buy back in a glut comes ready for the next bubble. It's been wild, I even posted a small 32GB DDR5-4800 that was not getting recognized for $100 on eBay and it was literally purchased within ~15min of being live.
iluvcommunism 2mo ago
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nirav72 2mo ago
I've inadvertently stocked piled a bunch of DDR4 memory over the years. Usually bought them on an impulse when I saw a good deal, hoping to use it later when someone in the family/friend wanted a new gaming PC or for my own homelab projects. I'm happy with just using DDR4 at this point. The motherboards/CPUs are still relatively cheap either new or on secondary markets. With a decent GPU, the performance difference between DDR4 vs DDR5 is marginal. Most people won't even notice it. My point is, if cost is a factor for a new build, then stick with older hardware. Especially if your use case is gaming or home server.
jmward01 2mo ago
If this was a competitive market some suppliers would be ramping up pc memory and avoiding the AI buildout. But instead we see all of them diverting to GPU memory and cutting production of PC related parts universally. This sure looks like a coordinated move. I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life. Consumer DRAM will stay very high while the cartel retools and moves back into that space. This means that the cartel wins and pays no real price for it when they shift back to producing consumer ram, they step immediately into a massive demand for pc RAM and keep raking in $$$. But they all have to do it in lockstep so that they have a market to come back to. Otherwise someone would become the king of PC ram and they couldn't re-enter easily if/when the AI server market fails. Being in lock-step means they rake in more money and mitigate the risk of an AI bubble, all at the cost of the consumer. At least that is what this looks like to me. They know they could make a lot of money ignoring the AI server build out but they all magically didn't. A competitive market would have seen a spike in price when this much demand came in, but the lockstep movement of the big three shows that they are coordinated and not competing.
- hnav 2mo ago
  CXMT is almost certainly going to eat the DDR5 market (not that will change anything in the next year or two)
- biddit 2mo ago
  > This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life. This was true until the last year. P40, P100, V100, A40, etc are selling like hotcakes and prices have been rapidly increasing.
  - cjbprime 2mo ago
stingraycharles 2mo ago
I already decided I won’t be upgrading any hardware for a few years and I’m going to ride this out. As right now we’re seeing that all prices of everything electronics is going up, my biggest worry is that once memory prices go down, the rest of the electronics will stay high. Eg after the price hike of all Apple electronics, will they go down again in prices in a few years after RAM goes down? If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent.
- dudul 2mo ago
  > If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent. There was a massive spike of RAM prices from 2016 to 2018 followed by a price crash in 2019...
  - HumblyTossed 2mo ago
    But if we learn anything from big corporations, they'll keep the difference as profits. IOW, Apple won't be lowering their prices.
    - Petersipoi 2mo ago
      Nope. Apple wants to maximize profits. They clearly make more at lower prices. Source: the fact that they had lower prices until they were forced to increase them. They will be hoping to return to a more optimal price point as soon as they can.
      - HumblyTossed 2mo ago
        And when they don't, copium will suggest that it is due to market conditions.
rubiquity 2mo ago
Boy am I feeling this. I had my eye on building a new Threadripper machine, which requires DDR5 RDIMMs. Much to my surprise while happily building out a parts list one fine evening I learned that these are going for between $500 and $1000 for one single 16GB module right now. I think I'll hold off and squeeze a few more years out of DDR4 and PCIe 4.0.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
  I just laid an arm and a leg for 128GB of DDR4. More than I normally would have ever spent, because the alternatives were far worse.
  - account42 2mo ago
    I'll go hug my 128GB ECC DDR4 from 2019. With eletrostatic-safe clothing of course.
- dbetteridge 2mo ago
  $580 aud for a single 32gb module last month, that really hurt
g3e0 2mo ago
Doesn't solve the present shortage, but perhaps this is a good opportunity for software developers to start caring about memory usage again, since consumers may be forced to keep their existing hardware for a few more years.
- jayd16 2mo ago
  Honestly? Is it even going to be a drop in the bucket? This push is from massive data needs. The amount of ram code uses becomes an even smaller percentage of the growing pool.
- trinsic2 2mo ago
  Yea here's hope'in. Memory management as been really inefficient for a long time.
- dsign 2mo ago
  Who the hell needs more than 640 KB anyway? :-) Jokes aside, I've been extremely frugal with memory in my latest project, in the hope that it can fit in a few megabytes of RAM. But we have come a long way since the eighties, and now an audio codec (OPUS) takes the best part of a megabyte, and so do "frugal" scripting engines such as Lua and even SQLite \o/.
jakeinspace 2mo ago
I've got a dead older GPU (RTX titan, 24GB of GDDR6). It's been a paper weight for a while, core is damaged, but I realize I could probably sell it or just the memory chips for a decent price on eBay. Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.
blurbleblurble 2mo ago
Time for memristors?
robmccoll 2mo ago
Just had an HDD in my array die. Thought I'd replace it and add another spare. The prices are up 300% from 2 years ago. For spinning disks. Why?
- mediaman 2mo ago
  My theory is demand substitution. NVME/SSD is up so much people at the margin are switching to spinning rust, which nobody was prepared for, so now they too are drowning in demand.
- LetsGetTechnicl 2mo ago
  I've resorted to buying refurb HDD's for my NAS (which I backup to rsync.net) but like damn!
- mbesto 2mo ago
  (1) Because they can. Implied (2) If you're WD, Seagate, etc. you may shift all your fabs to higher growth areas which means you create less supply for less demand products (spinning disks)
abeppu 2mo ago
So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?
- sheeshkebab 2mo ago
  llms make it trivial writing code in rust, without even knowing rust. There is hope…
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    When even the large AI labs that supposedly sit on (/with) the best of the best can't even ship native cross-platform desktop applications and instead ship some bloated Electron monsters, I'm not sure what kind of hope there is. The ones who were publishing lightweight apps continue to do so, the ones who didn't care, still don't care.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - sheeshkebab 2mo ago
      writing native gui code is atrocious, add to that llms being horrible with ui dev and you end up with with what you describe. but at least if we get more non-ui stuff written in more efficient languages there is going to be some benefit.
      - embedding-shape 2mo ago
        > writing native gui code is atrocious Compared to what though? It's not nearly as horrible as it used to be, and you can do it fairly neatly today, and end up with something much better. Requires you to actually have skill and knowledge about there being other alternatives to Electron though, which seems like knowledge hard to come by these days.
LetsGetTechnicl 2mo ago
and FOR WHATTTT
diogenescynic 2mo ago
Inflation, cost of living, purchasing power... I feel like life is getting really difficult right now for most people in ways it hasn't been in decades. I don't think memory prices going up this much this fast is good. I think it's a sign of how bad things are and that we are heading in a terrible direction. I think we're going to get a BIG wave of inflation in 2027.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
  Life on earth today has objectively never been better in the history of our entire species. Try to retain some perspective.
  - Pxtl 2mo ago
    On a macro level you're correct. On a micro level, I miss the pre-pandemic, pre-AI era before stuff got expensive, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before the Israel/Palestine strife went into overdrive, and before the US declared war on Iran, Canada, Greenland, and Minnesota.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
      Almost everything that is upsetting is you, is being intentionally shoved in front of your face to make you feel mad. You are being played. Your great-grandparents had like a 40% child mortality rate. You’ll be ok that some people around the world are fighting which has been a human constant throughout all of history.
      - Synaesthesia 2mo ago
        At the same time hundreds of thousands of children die annually from diseases which would cost pennies to treat. From starvation. The world is still a horrible place for many people, and there's no real reason why it has to be that way.
        SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
nullbio 2mo ago
This is more concerning than anything else happening in the AI space.
thelastgallon 2mo ago
Intel should probably restart their Optane and also get back in RAM.
whatever1 2mo ago
You will not believe the amounts of ram I will buy once the whole thing crashes. Like my raspberry pi clone will be running on a terabyte of ram.
ggm 2mo ago
I would be very surprised if the cost of the inputs being hoovered up by AI drops after this. Without ever forming a real cabal, I think the functional behaviour of the disparate people in this supply chain are going to hold on to the profit margin because there isn't a clear basis to stop them. Sure, some imaginary perfect market would drop. This one is far from perfect, and it may drop by marginal percentages. It won't drop back to what it was before it went up 4x in price. I would be very surprised if a market for older, superceded chips takes off, not because it isn't a brilliant idea, but because in order to use them, you have to make boards and systems which can consume them, and right now, the people who do that for a living are making a good living selling stuff as inputs to the people making a good living selling memory at inflated prices to the AI factories. It's turtles all the way down.
zmmmmm 2mo ago
I wonder if supply chain constraints currently represent an inherent scepticism of manufacturers that demand will last. It feels to me like a side effect of the self-dealing / incestuous financing that is going on is that manufacturers are not willing to bet on it all materialising and therefore are not scaling up capacity nearly as much as they would if they thought it was certain.
- porkpieshoe 2mo ago
  Counterpoint: I drove past TSMC in Surprise AZ and I counted at least 18 large construction cranes on that single site.
  - zmmmmm 2mo ago
    TSMC in the US is a bit of a special case .... wouldn't surprise me at all if they were virtue signalling to the Trump admin more than anything with what they are doing there.
    - UberFly 2mo ago
      How so? They are diversifying their production chain so that all their eggs aren't in one basket. Taiwan might be threatened one day but their US, Japan, and German plants will much less likely be in the same danger.
      - LeBit 2mo ago
        Using tariff threats, Trump forced them to build a plant in the USA because… America First ™
      - m4rtink 2mo ago
        That seems wrong to me - the idea of the "Silicon shield of Taiwain" is that alle the critical cutting edge production is all physically in Taiwan & rigged to be destroyed if Taiwan is ever attacked. If they do diversify, they are compromising a key policy protecting their homeland, it makes no sense!
Utilera 2mo ago
The weird part is that RAM used to be the component you barely thought about when budgeting a build
aussieguy1234 2mo ago
While I regret not getting 64GB, I do not regret getting an additional 32GB stick for my PC, for a total of 48GB before the ram crisis kicked off. That's probably in the range of $600+ today for just $120.
gkanai 2mo ago
These unintended (or intended?) affects of the AI boom are yet another cause for hate among a key demographic (people who use/buy/build PCs) who might otherwise be pro-AI but because of this are quite anti-AI.
- x-complexity 2mo ago
  Seconded. The mad dash for everything is screwing up future expansion opportunities, because everyone in the market wants a future slice at any cost.
rldjbpin 2mo ago
the memory kit i bought earlier this year has been within ~10% of the price for the past 8 months. do with that as you may. a simple ddr5 stick of 6000 mt/s cl30 if wondering. ever since i had my own money, gpu or general hardware had some excuse to fleece us. however, with ram the blatant collusion throughout history does not invite confidence. this looks as dramatic as it does because the recent trend happened right after a major crash in prices. throughout the years, the usual price for an 8gb stick would hover around 50-80 usd (albeit laptop one, might be lower for desktop). ddr5 also started being 50-100% more expensive than the incumbent when it first dropped. it took a better part of a year to be in a similar price bracket as ddr4. all this to say, this situation sucks but those of us with 64+ gigs, bought during the last crash, are eating good but got used to using much more memory than they really need. while it is insane to pay a decent cpu price for 16 gigs today, getting a "good enough" computer still makes more economic sense than a max plan from a frontier lab.
dat999zx 2mo ago
[dead]
ProllyInfamous 2mo ago
I was at the Marietta Microcenter, yesterday, and truly experienced sticker shock on the DDR5 aisle. hlyfcknsht I'll just stay with 32gb RAM on my main machine (6000MT was a few hundred dollars I don't even remember because it was not feasible). So I went to the DDR4 aisle (similarly: wow!), and realized that I'm sitting on a gold-mine of reclaimed DDR4, from several 8th-10th-gen Intels (probably a few hundred gbs, total, mostly as 8gb modules). Incredibly, this was all e-waste (given to me "if I took it all"). Eureka. If anybody wants any DDR2/DDR3, I'm in SE Tennessee (and have even more of that... not worth too much, pay for shipping). ---- Anybody shopping for RTX 5050 or 5060 (for new OEM, 8GB both, non-Ti), WalMart has the best prices (probably hasn't recalibrated recently?), beating Microcenter by $85 and $115, respectively. I ended up getting a 5070Ti from MicroCenter (for a great price; my local WalMart does not carry this xx70Ti version), so the trip wasn't wasted.
m4rtink 2mo ago
I've just compared prices for an SSD and a rotary disk drive I bought both about 2 years ago. The same SSD is now 3x as expensive and the rotary drive is twice as expensive. This is insane & needs to stop. Also those responsible should be punished for undermining modern society (which is heavily dependent on IT equipment) in such a manner for personal gain.
- yomismoaqui 2mo ago
  So... blame capitalism? Capitalism gave you cheap hardware and then took it away. PS: Don't worry, memory is a boom/bust business.
- GreenLightGo 2mo ago
  If this really happened, then someone is clearly benefiting from it. Basically, it’s speculation and an artificial shortage. But that’s just how the game works.

675 points by haunter 2mo ago

I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure. If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?

phonon 2mo ago
OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output. 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...
- happyPersonR 2mo ago
  And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
  - Legend2440 2mo ago
    >even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour. The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
    - 3848488484 2mo ago
      Let's see Paul Allens IPO filling
  - nzrf 2mo ago
    I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.
    - llama052 2mo ago
      It also would be a huge win for the memory companies to agree to this, considering they will make more money with less supply. Seems interesting to me.
  - Arwill 2mo ago
    Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware. But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
      I don’t think there were some grand conspiracy to buy up the world’s ram to keep other people out, it is probably more likely that they just really thought they would need it. However, I do feel like this is the type of conspiracy that unfiltered Claude would come up with.
- andriy_koval 2mo ago
  next they will become successful business by reselling RAM
dgellow 2mo ago
There is a reason NVIDIA and the hyperscalers are injecting so much money into them
giantrobot 2mo ago
It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.
0xbadcafebee 2mo ago
It's possible to be economically feasible. It requires the ability to pay off the capex. Not only do they have to pay off their loans in record time (prob 2-3 years), they also have to keep spending every 3 years because the failure rate of GPUs is something like 20%. In addition they need to complete building out the stuff they've started, which means not failing to acquire land, energy, and water (the most dangerously rare and absolutely necessary resource for AI), not dealing with collective bargaining, nor any increased shortages or price hikes in materials. So there is a lot of risk. Ballpark that they need to make around 110 billion a year, each, to break even on these investments. Let's estimate 550 billion a year in necessary profit required for the major frontier companies. That means there needs to be 550 billion of money, available to customers today, that isn't being spent on anything else, that they will now spend on AI. Maybe some of that comes from increased value, efficiency, or layoffs. But 550 billion is not a small amount of money. Spread over the whole globe, the cash is there. But it is a hunt for cash, combined with a battle to successfully complete their buildouts, keep them running, and make bank, before the bookie comes knocking. The railroad panics of the 19th century (and subsequent depressions) happened because they over-leveraged private capital without the ability to profit from it quick enough. So it really is a question of 1) can they really build it all, and 2) will people really pay for it all. If either answer is No, we are looking at economic catastrophe.

cosmic_cheese 2mo ago

The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.

forinti 2mo ago
I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
- deadbunny 2mo ago
  Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard
- cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
  Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part. The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
  - forinti 2mo ago
    You didn't hold on to your Pentium 4 long enough. :-)
    - dijit 2mo ago
      Anecdatum, but mine still works :D

iLoveOncall 2mo ago

Storage has more than doubled as well. The same SSD (4TB M.2) I bought in September 2025 for £229 is now £500. I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...

bpye 2mo ago
Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now. The possibility that these fail does concern me.
- z2 2mo ago
  And that's the really fun part of all this, that weak substitutes will also become more expensive. But on the bright side, I've got dozens of sticks of DDR3 RAM that I'm hoarding like Pokémon cards. Any day now, we'll get desperate enough to start using them again!

palmotea 2mo ago

[flagged]

whateveracct 2mo ago
what the heck did you drop a '/s'?
unsui 2mo ago
No, this is not good, in any way, except for AI shareholders (of which I assume you are one, else not rational to support this position). Paperclipping here, greedily optimizing for shareholder value above all else. Please stop.
- deadbunny 2mo ago
  Some people really so need the /s huh
  - unsui 2mo ago
    sadly, Poe's law scales exponentially on HN
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
    - bhaney 2mo ago
      > There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.
      - dgellow 2mo ago
        Given the number of upvotes my comment got and the other comments where people missed the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be too sure that many people have no trouble distinguishing

OutOfHere 2mo ago

I guess it's high time to stop using memory inefficient programming languages for any serious work.

datakan 2mo ago
Been long past that time, probably 15-20 years past. It's not even the languages its the 500 different layers of abstraction and abominations like Electron.

josefritzishere 2mo ago

The fake economics of the AI sector are damaging the real economy. This is madness.

__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
Deep down it's all just people telling stories. If the AI sector's story is setting the price, and yours is not, then theirs is the real real one, not yours. It's a totally broken way to practice economics, but alas, it's ours until we change it.

jayd16 2mo ago

Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?

greggoB 2mo ago
I believe they've been building them like crazy since covid, but it takes a looong time for them to come online (like 5-10 years?)
nullbyte 2mo ago
CXMT is a memory fab that just opened in China. They achieved a 90% yield on DDR5. Hopefully that could ease up the supply squeeze.
- spystath 2mo ago
  It's very unlikely to have any meaningful effect. CXMT DRAM will also be hoovered up the moment it hits the market at the same inflated prices. Even if they had the capacity (they don't) why flood the market when you can just print money?
  - jingpostmedia 2mo ago
    [flagged]
- mrheosuper 2mo ago
  CXMT has been in a game for a while, at least since 2025, because my SBC is using their LPDDR4 RAM.
layer8 2mo ago
They are building fabs on track to get online towards the end of 2027, full capacity production expected for 2028. These are serious pieces of very complex technology that take years, not months, to build.

dofm 2mo ago

I hate that I am no longer certain I don’t need to buy a new machine just in case.

nazgulsenpai 2mo ago

I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.

greggoB 2mo ago
I got a 3060 ti for like $900 at that time <melting-face-emoji>

nullsmack 2mo ago

Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"

Tadpole9181 2mo ago
Memory manufacturers have gone through several cycles of lawsuits for market collusion at this point. It's gone from an open secret to just outright flaunting in our face. Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.

mk_stjames 2mo ago

I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market. The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate. So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate. I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.

greggoB 2mo ago
> So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
toenail 2mo ago
Greed? Resellers aren't charities, good for them if the value of their stock goes up. Besides, people buying server equipment aren't exactly starving, I bet most of them can either simply not buy the server, or cut some other expense.
aliasxneo 2mo ago
Why would I voluntarily choose to sell the hardware I have for less than the going price? The odds of it getting picked up by a scalper and resold are extremely high. If I was sitting on a goldmine of old server hardware, I would absolutely be ripping out the RAM and selling it per stick in this market.

tedggh 2mo ago

I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.

stuxnet79 2mo ago
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here. It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
- greggoB 2mo ago
  My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices. I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
  - matt-p 2mo ago
    Typically (not always!) server memory is 'registered' so won't work with consumer CPUs which run on un-registered.
    - greggoB 2mo ago
      Does 'registration' introduce anything physically different? Or could they be completely interoperable?

poulpy123 2mo ago

I cross my fingers that my 10 years old laptop and desktop will hold until the crazyness ends

rocketvole 2mo ago
same. still rockin a 2016 era dell xps 13. I was about to pull the trigger on a few laptops but I always psych myself out because I assume prices will drop and I can pick them up secondhand. big mistake...
aidenn0 2mo ago
Ditto; my laptop is slowly losing ports on the right side, but it has 32GB of ECC ram...

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

surcap526 2mo ago

[dead]

1saadcodes 2mo ago

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

luma 2mo ago
There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.
- cm2187 2mo ago
  You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.
  - luma 2mo ago
    Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity. This was not created by the manufacturers.
    - dawnerd 2mo ago
      The manufacturers are not doing a whole lot to fix the problem l and I don’t blame them. It’s expensive to build out and they know demand will slow down and don’t want to be stuck with excess capacity. Better to be sold out and high prices. Samsung said they were “moderating demand” which doesn’t sound like they want this problem to be solved either.
  - jpgvm 2mo ago
    It's actually both. DRAM manufactures operate on a boom bust cycle and by 2023 there was significant oversupply. This meant even leading up to that they had already decided not to invest in further capacity explicitly to recover profit on their existing lines. So a lack of builds coupled with AI boom at the same time created a perfect storm with no new capacity coming online for years after demand rapidly escalated.

Sharlin 2mo ago

I'm really happy that I bought 32G of RAM and a 2T M.2 SSD for my desktop two years ago. In retrospect, of course, I should've bought 64G and 4T.

naet 2mo ago

I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer. I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on. Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.

SoftTalker 2mo ago
100% what I do. I buy a few years behind the leading edge, and keep the device until it either dies or will no longer do what I need it to do. My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.
- mordae 2mo ago
  Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not. R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.
  - simoncion 2mo ago
    > ...when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. When taking the resale value of used kit on the second-hand market into account, one must also take into account the hassle of selling on the second-hand market. For me? Personally? That hassle absolutely eliminates any money I would get from any plausible sale price. If I'm getting rid of used kit, it's going to be as donations to people I personally know who will come and pick it up at the agreed upon time.
    - 2mo ago

Taikhoom10 2mo ago

[flagged]

HDBaseT 2mo ago
Not every single post of yours has to be a link to your "blog".

n3ll1x93 2mo ago

It's crazy if you think that some years ago were the cheaper part of a personal computer compared to motherboard, cpu, gpu and so on.

jnpnj 2mo ago
last year i mis-bought a ssd on amazon (wrong size or model i can't recall) so I asked for a return, surprisingly amazon wanted to save on transport that they offered to pay me to keep it (i don't want to spread stupid claim but maybe the full item price), i was confused and worried it would create issues down the road so i sent it back thinking i'd buy the proper item the month after.. and now i'm running duplicate search programs to save space on drives.

sys32768 2mo ago

My Dell rep quoted me $736 for a single 16GB RDIMM for the newer Dell Pro 16 laptop, which retails at its baseline configuration with 16GB for ~$1000.

bluedino 2mo ago
Dell wants $4,507 (web price) for each 32GB RDIMM in a PowerEdge 6625 (16GB is showing as unavailable)

haunter 2mo ago

If you want even more bad news: display panel makers also want to raise prices "Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own." https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-warns-gaming-monitor-prices-are-about-to-rise/ https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...

jnpnj 2mo ago
It would strange if just when a lot of articles mention computing / social networks are detrimental, governments start passing laws to forbid platforms and/or phones for kids, and now price gouging flares up everywhere, this would entice people to just stop using these devices and maybe enjoy natural taper-off.
- aok1425 2mo ago
  I like this idea! Perhaps folks will game less on PCs and consoles. But would they shift to playing on their phones? Or play less video games overall? Also, when OpenAI's new device comes out, would people shift to talking to these small devices?
  - Anoian 2mo ago
    People do not want to talk to their devices because they are in the room with other people and they dont want to disturb them. I think their device is going to be a flop.
    - firegodjr 2mo ago
      It's going to flop because everyone is already able to talk to Google Assistant to manage things, and outside of very specific circumstances (e.g. driving) everyone is still tapping screens instead

tadasv 2mo ago

Ram, hdd, ssd, even blu-ray writers are expensive. I purchased mdisc blu-ray writer for $70 in 2021, I see people are trying to sell the same device for $500+ wtf

aidenn0 2mo ago
Is it a Pioneer model? They stopped making their blu-ray drives which are at least perceived to be better quality than the competition, so NOS prices have gone way up.

acd 2mo ago

I have written a llm compression quantization library called glq because of the high ram prices. Glq uses qtip Trellis quantization which are efficient at low bpw 2-4 bits. As a gamer and ai developer I want to squeeze more out of the same hardware. Glq runs with vLLM. Open source https://github.com/cnygaard/glq https://github.com/cnygaard/glq Pypi glq https://pypi.org/project/glq/ https://pypi.org/project/glq/

z_rho_one 2mo ago

After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...

elictronic 2mo ago
If it makes you feel better. The US government looks like it might start removing some of the 28k troops that are stationed in South Korea over this. No reason to keep them in a country that enables this sort of behavior.
- shimman 2mo ago
  Probably for the best. No hosting nation of imperialism has ever benefited and now we see what the US is willing to throw away because their corporations are upset.
  - true_religion 2mo ago
    If there is something Korea doesn’t lack, it’s manpower. The US troops are more likely there as a political shield. Indiscriminate bombing would kill them too, hence drag the US into war so any enemies of S Korea have to act judiciously.
    - shimman 2mo ago
      If you think the US public has any appetite for more wars you're straight up delusional. Iran War is going to cost the GOP the house + senate, something that wasn't really a sure then say even 7 months ago. If anything more foreign bases will be closed in the upcoming years to reign in the reckless spending + endangerment by the DoW. It's not only politically easy, foreign bases don't have representation in Congress, but it's a great to sell alternative governing visions (less on foreign imperialism vs more domestic spending).
  - 2mo ago

platevoltage 2mo ago

AI Datacenter proponents do not get to complain about this.

geodel 2mo ago

No hope in US but I hope EU regulators are taking note of this working on fix as we talk.

paulpauper 2mo ago

This is "the memory shortage that no one saw coming." To the best of my knowledge, no podcasters, bloggers, or experts in AI predicted this or were sounding the alarm of a memory shortage. No one was saying pre-2025 to buy memory/data storage stocks. This goes to show how hard it is to predict. Everyone was saying to buy NVDA, which had done well from 2022-2024, and then stalled out, only to be surpassed by memory stocks like SanDisk, Western Digital, and Micron, which took many by surprise.

mike_hearn 2mo ago
There were some. Read SemiAnalysis. I picked up some Micron last year anticipating memory demand, but then the stock went down for a while. I waited, it went up and I took 25% profit as I figured they couldn't add any new capacity and would have sold all the capacity from their existing fabs on long term contracts. Then prices went crazy, sigh. I'm not sure why prices have gone boom now rather than before given we're years into the LLM boom, but probably it's to do with capacity lockups expiring or something similar.

varispeed 2mo ago

With such profit margins, any new players entering the market will want those. This means prices are unlikely going to go down unless demand for memory vanishes, even if new suppliers come to the table.

techteach00 2mo ago

There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.

techteach00 2mo ago
Just so I make it clear. I'm deeply opposed to this change.
Cider9986 2mo ago
Apple is making Macs and iPhones more powerful every year. Macs are more affordable and powerful that other computers since the M series. People are buying them to run their own private on device AI. This is a signal for personal computing.
- vor_ 2mo ago
  > Macs are more affordable and powerful that other computers since the M series. Apple has been raising prices on Macs and other products.
ivanjermakov 2mo ago
Personal computing has been in a sad state for a while now. Only "PC enthusiasts" were gamers. Rest of the population uses their phone 18hrs a day and seldomly use PC for Excel tasks at work.
crm9125 2mo ago
[dead]
nullbio 2mo ago
This is the ultimate dystopian outcome. How do we stop this?

dawnerd 2mo ago

What’s dumb is even older tech has gone up. Look at microsd and usb thumb drives. There’s a lot of price gouging just because they can. There’s a real shortage and then there’s just “it’s memory so price go up”

spudlyo 2mo ago
Tried to buy old DDR4 memory recently? I've been revitalizing some old laptops, and I foolishly paid nearly $200 for a Crucial 32GB Kit of DDR4 PC4-19200.
- TapamN 2mo ago
  I bought 32GB of DDR4 SODIMMs (16GBx2 Corsair 3200MHz) April last year for $50.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
    128GB 3600Mhz… $600 just last week.

0xbadcafebee 2mo ago

It turns out supply and demand is a thing, and can go both ways. Remember that in 2001, memory prices dropped like a rock, from $300 to $80. A ton of memory capacity came online at the same time, the market was flooded, so prices sank. The loss of revenue then hurt the memory industry.

frobisher 2mo ago

Well this seems sustainable.

atleastoptimal 2mo ago

Is the end result of this is that anything that is useful to AI going to be permanently more expensive, as the value a human hobbyist can get out of a certain amount of RAM will always be far less than the value a frontier AI model can get out of it?

TSiege 2mo ago
If demand remains as elevated as it is you will definitely see new fabs breaking ground to meet it. China is expanding a lot as well. Even if AI doesn’t go anywhere there is no way prices remain this elevated or climb forever
- m4rtink 2mo ago
  More likely AI companies go bankrupt and market is flooded by repurposed hardware sold for pennies by creditors AND Chinese memory from their new fabs, hopefully also killing the existing memory manufacturing cartel. So basically utopia. ;-)

devdoshi 2mo ago

Are we observing corresponding work to make things use less memory though? I've switched a lot of things to WASM and use way less RAM.

devdoshi 2mo ago
or rather, get more done with the same RAM

realo 2mo ago

But what about Apple, with their memory-carrying SOC, one would think they are in a very cool position?

tynorf 2mo ago
They still need to buy said RAM from all the same players.

rossant 2mo ago

Really happy I got a new PC last year with 128 GB of RAM, 4 TB SSD, and an RTX 5090. This would have been prohibitively expensive now.

andrewstuart2 2mo ago
Congrats. Happy for you. Nice. Yeah, I built mine in 3090 times and told myself I'd upgrade every 2-3 GPU generations. I do have 128G ram and I'm thankful for that but I'm definitely not on the same upgrade schedule any more.
- rjh29 2mo ago
  I have 32GB and an aging 5800X3D and I have not had any issues running games yet. Honestly would love to know what games need more powerful RAM/CPU outside of stuff like Flight Simulator, or running at 160fps without framegen.
  - andrewstuart2 2mo ago
    Honestly I have a steam deck and that has gotten me accustomed to not sweating the lower frame rates. That and the ridiculous number of great indie games that aren't heavy on the graphics, and I'm not too worried about upgrades as much as I am worried about replacements if/when the time comes.

gambiting 2mo ago

My PC built February 2025, with a 5090 and 64GB of ram, is literally worth more than double than what I paid for it. I'm actually concerned what my home insurance would do if it was stolen, since the cost of replacement is so much higher than my invoices say.

mrlonglong 2mo ago

I'm waiting for China to start selling cheaper memory. They can have my money. The greed of US billionaires need to be lanced with a hefty kick in their wallets.

lubitelpospat 2mo ago

What do I read to quickly get a grasp of how economics works, from a high level perspective?

jpadkins 2mo ago
200 pages https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3028.Economics_in_One_Lesson https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3028.Economics_in_One... There are free PDFs if you don't want to buy it.
- arjie 2mo ago
  Seems solid rec. For lazy person, I think a couple of things that will give you quick intuition for present affairs are: * The Fifth Discipline - read the beer game chapter and AI summaries for the rest, helps build intuition for chained systems * Chip War - a quick read but AI summaries will suffice, helps build knowledge for semiconductor industry orientation * The Goal - classic business book on just-in-time, useful to overturn standard human reactions. read if you're a quick reader, AI summary otherwise
- lubitelpospat 2mo ago
  Nice thanks

x0xMaximus 2mo ago

We had last bought 24TB+ (4x 24 racks, and some miscellaneous) of DDR5 4800 and 6400 last year while finishing a move off of AWS entirely. I tried to be responsible and prioritize a cold and warm spares of all our equipment and over allocation to ensure proper redundancy capacity. At the time it was a hard pill to swallow looking at our budget; but a few months ago we've started to offload some DIMMs on various channels. What went from a cost analysis between a cloud provider, to having to manage transit, circuits, equipment, a IP blocks, etc etc and all the operational obligations that come with it.. it ultimately covering our hosting costs entirely for the next ~18months *at least* (while "only" coming at the cost of having slightly less cold spares sitting in the bottom of our cages). Given we're all 9004/9005 now, and that (from what I understand) Venice will support 6400. Will hopefully buy back in a glut comes ready for the next bubble. It's been wild, I even posted a small 32GB DDR5-4800 that was not getting recognized for $100 on eBay and it was literally purchased within ~15min of being live.

iluvcommunism 2mo ago

[dead]

nirav72 2mo ago

I've inadvertently stocked piled a bunch of DDR4 memory over the years. Usually bought them on an impulse when I saw a good deal, hoping to use it later when someone in the family/friend wanted a new gaming PC or for my own homelab projects. I'm happy with just using DDR4 at this point. The motherboards/CPUs are still relatively cheap either new or on secondary markets. With a decent GPU, the performance difference between DDR4 vs DDR5 is marginal. Most people won't even notice it. My point is, if cost is a factor for a new build, then stick with older hardware. Especially if your use case is gaming or home server.

jmward01 2mo ago

If this was a competitive market some suppliers would be ramping up pc memory and avoiding the AI buildout. But instead we see all of them diverting to GPU memory and cutting production of PC related parts universally. This sure looks like a coordinated move. I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life. Consumer DRAM will stay very high while the cartel retools and moves back into that space. This means that the cartel wins and pays no real price for it when they shift back to producing consumer ram, they step immediately into a massive demand for pc RAM and keep raking in $$$. But they all have to do it in lockstep so that they have a market to come back to. Otherwise someone would become the king of PC ram and they couldn't re-enter easily if/when the AI server market fails. Being in lock-step means they rake in more money and mitigate the risk of an AI bubble, all at the cost of the consumer. At least that is what this looks like to me. They know they could make a lot of money ignoring the AI server build out but they all magically didn't. A competitive market would have seen a spike in price when this much demand came in, but the lockstep movement of the big three shows that they are coordinated and not competing.

hnav 2mo ago
CXMT is almost certainly going to eat the DDR5 market (not that will change anything in the next year or two)
biddit 2mo ago
> This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life. This was true until the last year. P40, P100, V100, A40, etc are selling like hotcakes and prices have been rapidly increasing.
- cjbprime 2mo ago

stingraycharles 2mo ago

I already decided I won’t be upgrading any hardware for a few years and I’m going to ride this out. As right now we’re seeing that all prices of everything electronics is going up, my biggest worry is that once memory prices go down, the rest of the electronics will stay high. Eg after the price hike of all Apple electronics, will they go down again in prices in a few years after RAM goes down? If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent.

dudul 2mo ago
> If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent. There was a massive spike of RAM prices from 2016 to 2018 followed by a price crash in 2019...
- HumblyTossed 2mo ago
  But if we learn anything from big corporations, they'll keep the difference as profits. IOW, Apple won't be lowering their prices.
  - Petersipoi 2mo ago
    Nope. Apple wants to maximize profits. They clearly make more at lower prices. Source: the fact that they had lower prices until they were forced to increase them. They will be hoping to return to a more optimal price point as soon as they can.
    - HumblyTossed 2mo ago
      And when they don't, copium will suggest that it is due to market conditions.

rubiquity 2mo ago

Boy am I feeling this. I had my eye on building a new Threadripper machine, which requires DDR5 RDIMMs. Much to my surprise while happily building out a parts list one fine evening I learned that these are going for between $500 and $1000 for one single 16GB module right now. I think I'll hold off and squeeze a few more years out of DDR4 and PCIe 4.0.

SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
I just laid an arm and a leg for 128GB of DDR4. More than I normally would have ever spent, because the alternatives were far worse.
- account42 2mo ago
  I'll go hug my 128GB ECC DDR4 from 2019. With eletrostatic-safe clothing of course.
dbetteridge 2mo ago
$580 aud for a single 32gb module last month, that really hurt

g3e0 2mo ago

Doesn't solve the present shortage, but perhaps this is a good opportunity for software developers to start caring about memory usage again, since consumers may be forced to keep their existing hardware for a few more years.

jayd16 2mo ago
Honestly? Is it even going to be a drop in the bucket? This push is from massive data needs. The amount of ram code uses becomes an even smaller percentage of the growing pool.
trinsic2 2mo ago
Yea here's hope'in. Memory management as been really inefficient for a long time.
dsign 2mo ago
Who the hell needs more than 640 KB anyway? :-) Jokes aside, I've been extremely frugal with memory in my latest project, in the hope that it can fit in a few megabytes of RAM. But we have come a long way since the eighties, and now an audio codec (OPUS) takes the best part of a megabyte, and so do "frugal" scripting engines such as Lua and even SQLite \o/.

jakeinspace 2mo ago

I've got a dead older GPU (RTX titan, 24GB of GDDR6). It's been a paper weight for a while, core is damaged, but I realize I could probably sell it or just the memory chips for a decent price on eBay. Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.

blurbleblurble 2mo ago

Time for memristors?

robmccoll 2mo ago

Just had an HDD in my array die. Thought I'd replace it and add another spare. The prices are up 300% from 2 years ago. For spinning disks. Why?

mediaman 2mo ago
My theory is demand substitution. NVME/SSD is up so much people at the margin are switching to spinning rust, which nobody was prepared for, so now they too are drowning in demand.
LetsGetTechnicl 2mo ago
I've resorted to buying refurb HDD's for my NAS (which I backup to rsync.net) but like damn!
mbesto 2mo ago
(1) Because they can. Implied (2) If you're WD, Seagate, etc. you may shift all your fabs to higher growth areas which means you create less supply for less demand products (spinning disks)

abeppu 2mo ago

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

sheeshkebab 2mo ago
llms make it trivial writing code in rust, without even knowing rust. There is hope…
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  When even the large AI labs that supposedly sit on (/with) the best of the best can't even ship native cross-platform desktop applications and instead ship some bloated Electron monsters, I'm not sure what kind of hope there is. The ones who were publishing lightweight apps continue to do so, the ones who didn't care, still don't care.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sheeshkebab 2mo ago
    writing native gui code is atrocious, add to that llms being horrible with ui dev and you end up with with what you describe. but at least if we get more non-ui stuff written in more efficient languages there is going to be some benefit.
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
      > writing native gui code is atrocious Compared to what though? It's not nearly as horrible as it used to be, and you can do it fairly neatly today, and end up with something much better. Requires you to actually have skill and knowledge about there being other alternatives to Electron though, which seems like knowledge hard to come by these days.

LetsGetTechnicl 2mo ago

and FOR WHATTTT

diogenescynic 2mo ago

Inflation, cost of living, purchasing power... I feel like life is getting really difficult right now for most people in ways it hasn't been in decades. I don't think memory prices going up this much this fast is good. I think it's a sign of how bad things are and that we are heading in a terrible direction. I think we're going to get a BIG wave of inflation in 2027.

SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
Life on earth today has objectively never been better in the history of our entire species. Try to retain some perspective.
- Pxtl 2mo ago
  On a macro level you're correct. On a micro level, I miss the pre-pandemic, pre-AI era before stuff got expensive, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before the Israel/Palestine strife went into overdrive, and before the US declared war on Iran, Canada, Greenland, and Minnesota.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
    Almost everything that is upsetting is you, is being intentionally shoved in front of your face to make you feel mad. You are being played. Your great-grandparents had like a 40% child mortality rate. You’ll be ok that some people around the world are fighting which has been a human constant throughout all of history.
    - Synaesthesia 2mo ago
      At the same time hundreds of thousands of children die annually from diseases which would cost pennies to treat. From starvation. The world is still a horrible place for many people, and there's no real reason why it has to be that way.
      - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago

nullbio 2mo ago

This is more concerning than anything else happening in the AI space.

thelastgallon 2mo ago

Intel should probably restart their Optane and also get back in RAM.

whatever1 2mo ago

You will not believe the amounts of ram I will buy once the whole thing crashes. Like my raspberry pi clone will be running on a terabyte of ram.

ggm 2mo ago

I would be very surprised if the cost of the inputs being hoovered up by AI drops after this. Without ever forming a real cabal, I think the functional behaviour of the disparate people in this supply chain are going to hold on to the profit margin because there isn't a clear basis to stop them. Sure, some imaginary perfect market would drop. This one is far from perfect, and it may drop by marginal percentages. It won't drop back to what it was before it went up 4x in price. I would be very surprised if a market for older, superceded chips takes off, not because it isn't a brilliant idea, but because in order to use them, you have to make boards and systems which can consume them, and right now, the people who do that for a living are making a good living selling stuff as inputs to the people making a good living selling memory at inflated prices to the AI factories. It's turtles all the way down.

zmmmmm 2mo ago

I wonder if supply chain constraints currently represent an inherent scepticism of manufacturers that demand will last. It feels to me like a side effect of the self-dealing / incestuous financing that is going on is that manufacturers are not willing to bet on it all materialising and therefore are not scaling up capacity nearly as much as they would if they thought it was certain.

porkpieshoe 2mo ago
Counterpoint: I drove past TSMC in Surprise AZ and I counted at least 18 large construction cranes on that single site.
- zmmmmm 2mo ago
  TSMC in the US is a bit of a special case .... wouldn't surprise me at all if they were virtue signalling to the Trump admin more than anything with what they are doing there.
  - UberFly 2mo ago
    How so? They are diversifying their production chain so that all their eggs aren't in one basket. Taiwan might be threatened one day but their US, Japan, and German plants will much less likely be in the same danger.
    - LeBit 2mo ago
      Using tariff threats, Trump forced them to build a plant in the USA because… America First ™
    - m4rtink 2mo ago
      That seems wrong to me - the idea of the "Silicon shield of Taiwain" is that alle the critical cutting edge production is all physically in Taiwan & rigged to be destroyed if Taiwan is ever attacked. If they do diversify, they are compromising a key policy protecting their homeland, it makes no sense!

Utilera 2mo ago

The weird part is that RAM used to be the component you barely thought about when budgeting a build

aussieguy1234 2mo ago

While I regret not getting 64GB, I do not regret getting an additional 32GB stick for my PC, for a total of 48GB before the ram crisis kicked off. That's probably in the range of $600+ today for just $120.

gkanai 2mo ago

These unintended (or intended?) affects of the AI boom are yet another cause for hate among a key demographic (people who use/buy/build PCs) who might otherwise be pro-AI but because of this are quite anti-AI.

x-complexity 2mo ago
Seconded. The mad dash for everything is screwing up future expansion opportunities, because everyone in the market wants a future slice at any cost.

rldjbpin 2mo ago

the memory kit i bought earlier this year has been within ~10% of the price for the past 8 months. do with that as you may. a simple ddr5 stick of 6000 mt/s cl30 if wondering. ever since i had my own money, gpu or general hardware had some excuse to fleece us. however, with ram the blatant collusion throughout history does not invite confidence. this looks as dramatic as it does because the recent trend happened right after a major crash in prices. throughout the years, the usual price for an 8gb stick would hover around 50-80 usd (albeit laptop one, might be lower for desktop). ddr5 also started being 50-100% more expensive than the incumbent when it first dropped. it took a better part of a year to be in a similar price bracket as ddr4. all this to say, this situation sucks but those of us with 64+ gigs, bought during the last crash, are eating good but got used to using much more memory than they really need. while it is insane to pay a decent cpu price for 16 gigs today, getting a "good enough" computer still makes more economic sense than a max plan from a frontier lab.

dat999zx 2mo ago

[dead]

ProllyInfamous 2mo ago

I was at the Marietta Microcenter, yesterday, and truly experienced sticker shock on the DDR5 aisle. hlyfcknsht I'll just stay with 32gb RAM on my main machine (6000MT was a few hundred dollars I don't even remember because it was not feasible). So I went to the DDR4 aisle (similarly: wow!), and realized that I'm sitting on a gold-mine of reclaimed DDR4, from several 8th-10th-gen Intels (probably a few hundred gbs, total, mostly as 8gb modules). Incredibly, this was all e-waste (given to me "if I took it all"). Eureka. If anybody wants any DDR2/DDR3, I'm in SE Tennessee (and have even more of that... not worth too much, pay for shipping). ---- Anybody shopping for RTX 5050 or 5060 (for new OEM, 8GB both, non-Ti), WalMart has the best prices (probably hasn't recalibrated recently?), beating Microcenter by $85 and $115, respectively. I ended up getting a 5070Ti from MicroCenter (for a great price; my local WalMart does not carry this xx70Ti version), so the trip wasn't wasted.

m4rtink 2mo ago

I've just compared prices for an SSD and a rotary disk drive I bought both about 2 years ago. The same SSD is now 3x as expensive and the rotary drive is twice as expensive. This is insane & needs to stop. Also those responsible should be punished for undermining modern society (which is heavily dependent on IT equipment) in such a manner for personal gain.

yomismoaqui 2mo ago
So... blame capitalism? Capitalism gave you cheap hardware and then took it away. PS: Don't worry, memory is a boom/bust business.
GreenLightGo 2mo ago
If this really happened, then someone is clearly benefiting from it. Basically, it’s speculation and an artificial shortage. But that’s just how the game works.