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The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

62 points by perelin 18d ago

N_Lens 18d ago
The big companies are insulated because they've locked in multi-year supply contracts with ram manufacturers - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon (All on 3-5 yr contracts). OAI's deal with Samsung & SK Hynix is also colossal - locking up roughly 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of world output (Stargate project). Apple got caught out because it had a shorter contract that ended in the beginning of Q3, and they've tried to source their RAM from Chinese CXMT who declined because all capacity was already locked in contracts. They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia. Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions.
- josephg 18d ago
  > OAI's deal with Samsung & SK Hynix is also colossal - locking up roughly 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of world output (Stargate project). I wonder if they'll, at some point, have enough RAM? Or is this is the new normal? Will models keep scaling with the amount of ram chips openai and anthropic own?
  - bionhoward 18d ago
    Even with efficiency breakthroughs, it would just afford packing more agents per unit of memory. Scaling compute and data keeps paying off, leading to smarter models, and smarter models have more demand even at higher prices because they can accomplish more work at higher quality. Sovereign AI hasn’t even really taken off yet to anywhere near the level it could. That’s going to dramatically increase the number of massive-scale users of AI agents. So no, IMHO they will “never” have “enough.”
    - epicureanideal 18d ago
      At some point though, won't someone be able to extrapolate the demand growth curve, and invest some colossal amount of money into making and selling more RAM chips?
      - fragmede 18d ago
        Yes. China's done just that. Expect those factories to come online within 2-3 years.
    - cyanydeez 17d ago
      Weve hit the sigmoid. Whats scalling is ancillary to the model. The cry for a slowdown is because the open weight models demonstrate the cost of parameter pacling is not work neither inference nor training. The assumption about the singularity simply is a delusion with LLMs. However, the models do provide a means to improve the harness universe, so that residual will continue to improve perception. Parameter cpunt will stagnate and training wont be justifiable from every angle.
  - ohyes 18d ago
    Hard to know, does each GB of ram give some marginal increase in profit or potential profit? I’d guess no. Past a certain point the model has all the capabilities it can possibly usefully offer and honestly we may already be past that. The next gen model just doesn’t seem like as clear a step up as it once was.
    - Leonard_of_Q 17d ago
      That point is said to lie somewhere around 640 KB if I recall correctly. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-gates-say-640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-everyone https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-g...
    - josephg 17d ago
      LLMs still seem pretty bad at writing large scale software like web browsers. Though it’s probably a problem of managing large context windows more than anything. Not sure if larger models will magically overcome that.
      - cyanydeez 17d ago
        The LLM by itself will never create software of any nontrivial (training) complexity. The harness though will improve while parameter count stagnates. The Qwen3.8 models are strong enough when given proper context.
        josephg 17d ago
        > The LLM by itself will never create software of any nontrivial (training) complexity. Huh? I'm not sure what the word "training" does in that sentence. But "never" my arse. Frontier models can make nontrivial software already. For example, the other day I asked fable to reverse engineer the satisfactory blueprint file format. Then write a program to read the logistic flow graph in a blueprint. Then make an auditing tool that can analyse the graph to find problems. Well, it totally knocked it out of the park: https://seph.au/blueprints/#bp=0%3Aalumina.sbp https://seph.au/blueprints/#bp=0%3Aalumina.sbp This is a relatively small program, but it's not trivial. I'd consider a trivial program to be something I could code up in 20 minutes. It would have taken me a couple weeks to make this blueprint auditing tool, including reverse engineering the file format, writing the analysis code, making the website, scraping all the in-game data on available recipes and icons and so on. I've got a lot of mixed feelings about LLMs. But it seems very silly to lie about what they're capable of.
- seanmcdirmid 18d ago
  > and they've tried to source their RAM from Chinese CXMT who declined because all capacity was already locked in contracts. The US Government also wouldn't let Apple use Chinese RAM anyways, even for product that was just going to be used in China. China does have capacity issues though, and focusing on local brands first is probably the right call. Hopefully they can ramp even if they can't get the fancy lithography machines from the Netherlands.
  - noduerme 18d ago
    [dead]
- duskwuff 18d ago
  > They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia. Formerly known as Toshiba's memory division. They spun off the business as Kioxia in 2017.
- rasz 18d ago
  >lesser known company Kioxia Kioxia is Toshiba, The most known company from the list, and it doesnt make any ram
- georgemcbay 18d ago
  > Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions. Mirroring trends throughout the entire economy (not just RAM and other inputs for AI). Everyone is chasing the top 10% or higher of the K-shaped economy for all goods and services, servicing everyone else isn't seen as being worth the investment. This will just keep getting worse and worse everywhere for everything as long as we allow income inequality to keep exploding, which seems to be the plan.
  - dendrite9 18d ago
    I wonder how this plays out with automotive? Seems like it could get messy, especially if automotive rated parts are decided to not be worth the premium.
  - dingaling 18d ago
    "companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions." Because the end users keep rushing to use the megacorps' latest AI models, weaving them into their work and life. So the megacorps keep locking in contracts to build more compute. If you use LLMs, you're responsible for this, there's no way to pass the buck. "I only use it as a companion for learning about history" - it's still your fault. "I only use it to help guide my solitions, not for vibecoding" - it's still your fault.
    - Sabinus 18d ago
      If you want an industry to act in a certain way you legislate for it, not wag fingers at consumers buying things. "If you want cheaper consumer devices we all need to individually stop using AI" is not useful or realistic.
  - azan_ 18d ago
    And how do you think it will work? Do you really believe that once competition to serve top 10% get really fierce, no company will try to capture the remaining 90%?
    - 18d ago
- discordance 18d ago
  China's pretty good at bending the curve. I expect that by the end of 2027 we'll see a lot more available for consumers. As others have pointed out, this might not be available in US markets. "CXMT currently has two 12-inch DRAM fabrication plants — or fabs - in Hefei and one in Beijing, with a combined capacity of about 300,000 wafers per month. With the new Shanghai facility and other new capacity, CXMT will double its DRAM wafer output to approximately 600,000 wafers per month, all three sources added." https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cxmt-wins-3-billion-memory-supply-deal-with-tencent-sources-say-2026-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cxmt-wins-3-billi...
  - rdedev 18d ago
    This is probably my ignorance but why are we assuming that CXMT capacity will also not be gobbled up for datacenters?
    - quux0r 18d ago
      If I'm not mistaken I believe that CXMT's fabrication process is not suitable for manufacturing within the super tight tolerances that are needed for data center HBM, but I may be mis remembering. I think I recall a chart from somewhere showing that frontier memory manufacturers could achieve something like double the memory throughput for example.
      - jauntywundrkind 18d ago
        allegedly the yields are not great https://www.techpowerup.com/352511/cxmt-reportedly-struggles-with-hbm3e-yields-are-only-25 https://www.techpowerup.com/352511/cxmt-reportedly-struggles... but i feel like this will not last that long and that cxmt will be layering dram for hbm stacks with abandon, like everyone else, uninterested in selling ram to anyone else. meanwhile now we are seeing vertically stacked ram in regular dimms too, for 512GB sticks. once again increasing the multipliers of how many ram chips go into servers. https://www.techpowerup.com/352730/micron-develops-512-gb-ddr5-rdimm-server-memory-reaching-9200-mt-s https://www.techpowerup.com/352730/micron-develops-512-gb-dd...
- bigglebear 18d ago
  > Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions. It's almost like these companies WANT a dystopia with a centralized winner-takes-all power structure. Anything in the name of profits, who gives a fuck about humanity and distribution of rights or freedoms.
- brcmthrowaway 18d ago
  This seems completely sourced from twitter rumours. No mention of NVidia either.
- whatever1 18d ago
  Apple has no excuse to be cornered when it had $300B in cash sitting. They f’ed up big time.
  - isomorphic 18d ago
    Well, you know what they say. The best time to blow tens of billions you might never get back on a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. The second best time is today!
    - whatever1 18d ago
      Will they ever not need memory for their products? Why have pants down exposure to the market prices? Specially when they have 300B in the bank and a fab costs what 20-30B? They are lucky they did not get squeezed out of tsmc too, otherwise they would have to re release the iPhone X in 2027.
    - lelanthran 17d ago
      > a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. What makes it risky? Do you think that Apple will pivot into something that doesn't require RAM? Maybe like an IBM, they pivot to services?
      - timw4mail 17d ago
        Ram is boom or bust industry. The big manufacturers remain because they were either wise in their bets or lucky.
  - robocat 18d ago
    You don't know how that is deployed. Some of their treasury (Non-Current Marketable Securities) could be bonds that are invested with targeted contracts for trade-secret benefits. Say TSMC needs capital, and say Apple has spare capital: they are both likely to agree to an investment where Apple gets contractual benefits that other customers do not. I would expect Apple to be very aggressively investing into suppliers to get results that strongly benefits Apple and perhaps that disadvantages competitors.
MiroslavPokorny 18d ago
Its a good thing the data centers in the Gulf states didnt get bombed.
shoobiedoo 18d ago
On the bright side, this will further accelerate the retro computing scene as people throw their hands up at the thought of building something shiny and new
- _carbyau_ 18d ago
  I was hoping not to have to keep my current machine until it classified as retro....
  - shoobiedoo 18d ago
    yours is already a horse and carriage at this point, might as well send it to me
cryptoegorophy 18d ago
When will supply catchup with demand?
- lioeters 18d ago
  That's the neat part: it won't until some kind of market dominance is established and maximally exploited by the biggest players. Like during the pandemic when the biggest companies got bailed out while smaller businesses got crushed, permanently shifting the power balance. It's almost as if by collusion.
Barrin92 18d ago
we're driving consumer prices up and delaying the climate transition for Rube Goldberg slop machines. In case any future historiographer decides to go with the title "the age of intelligence, our stupidest period yet" I'd like some royalties
bigglebear 18d ago
I think it's time we start talking about putting limits on how much compute AI companies can purchase or own, relative to the rest of the world. It's not fair that they can use trillions of dollars of investor billionaires money to consume all of the resources that everybody needs. Where is fair distribution? What about all of the industries they're destroying in the process by hoarding it all for themselves? Otherwise, there will be no end to this. There are no hard limits on the speed of a parallel bruteforce. It's an infinite complexity problem class. The more parallel bruteforce power you have, the more likely you are to be able to solve a problem. So there is no world where demand ends. So if something isn't done about this, we'll have million dollar GPUs and RAM sticks because they've priced everyone out of the market and are the only ones able to afford them. Say goodbye to owning your own hardware at that point.
- ollysb 18d ago
  How could you enforce this?
  - bigglebear 17d ago
    That's the entire point of having the discussion. Figuring out how to enforce it.
- deathanatos 18d ago
  > I think it's time we start talking about putting limits on how much compute AI companies can purchase or own, relative to the rest of the world. It's not fair that they can use trillions of dollars of investor billionaires money to consume all of the resources that everybody needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market Right now, the RAM market is effectively cornered. Anti-trust enforcement is what I'd look to, but the GOP do not believe in ensuring competitive markets / enforcement. (The current admin is pretty clearly 110% pro corporation.) Vote in November, but in all likelihood, there won't be government intervention earlier than 2028, and even that is optimistic. One hopes the AI bubble pops, but I think this market can remain irrational for far longer than I can keep old hardware alive.
xbmcuser 18d ago
I called this almost a year ago that the way things are going that home users and pc enthusiasts will be priced out of computing. And the best thing for the rest of the world is China reaching on parity on node side and crash the market. What would be the prices today if Chinese companies were not forced to build their own chips.
- AmazingTurtle 18d ago
  This is the first time that I hope that china fucks this up
smy20011 18d ago
The good thing is that we no longer consider RAM is free and forced to develop more efficient program (hopefully)
- timw4mail 17d ago
  Hah! One could only hope.
- nathanaldensr 17d ago
  Who is "we?" Software developers who are growing up "vibe coding?" We're even further from the underlying hardware on the abstraction layers; just how are "we" going to care more about efficiency?
p0w3n3d 18d ago
What about Samsung Hynix cartel? Were they punished already?
SillyUsername 18d ago
Pretty soon we'll see a renaissance in the tech that we gave up years ago or can still be improved - memory compression algorithms - alternative LLM architectures that don't rely on memory or GPUs - compatibility hardware (like DDR3 to DDR4 boards) - distributed computing improvements, both at local GPU and networking levels (SLI for AI) - GPU hacks to add more memory or support older architectures I'm personally looking forward to the new LLM architectures that don't require as much compute, e.g. DLLMs, which can be good enough for CPU usage but lack the accuracy of frontier models currently. When this happens the bottom will fall out of the GPU and memory markets, putting a glut of cheap hardware out there. Doom mongering like this never seems to include these as viable future alternatives, which is standard market adjustments, I wonder who the doom narrative helps? :)
- VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
  No. You are projecting things will happen when there is no guarantee. The DRAM issue has halted the industry. AI companies need to back down. That is the only objective solution.
  - SillyUsername 16d ago
    Jev, Bonsai 2, Edge 0 and even SwiftQwen are anecdotal evidence, this isn't a projection. I can run my own sizeable agent swarm with Mastra, something I have not been able to do but will accelerate my solutions to the point I replace a single paid frontier model doing it.
haakon 18d ago
I can't even read this blog post because Cloudflare's "security verification" fails over and over again. The internet sucks now.
- thenthenthen 18d ago
  You are not missing much (it is basically an advertisement), besides the somewhat intimidating mugshot of a German dude as the header image.
YuechenLi 18d ago
DRAM pricing has historically been cyclical in nature, and the only reason for the current high DRAM pricing is that current AI inference is unnecessarily RAM intensive/inefficient. Interesting effect is that since DRAM production tooling has been switched from DDR/GDDR to HBM, we may finally see the proliferation of HBM in consumer GPUs/accelerators after the bust cycle starts.
- Catloafdev 18d ago
  >the only reason ... is that current AI inference is unnecessarily RAM intensive There's no indication that this will change, and every indication this will continue to grow. This is not some temporary thing. Demand is already exponentially higher than what is possible to produce, and there's no current reason to believe it has any ceiling.
  - YuechenLi 18d ago
    I've actually done some work and was able to get the full 12GB Z-image Turbo to run on my 8Gb 3070, and throughout the generation only 600MB of VRAM was allocated (you can get a speed-up by double buffering, but the maximum VRAM was still only ~1GB through inference). It's very experimental and pretty much requires you to write all the compute kernels directly specifically against that particular weight and statically allocate the memory at compile time instead of using current ML frameworks like Pytorch/JAX, but I think in time somebody else would figure it out.
    - ASalazarMX 17d ago
      The hardware savings at the scale Anthropic or Google use would me immense, it makes me wonder why no big player has done more optimization already. When DeepSeek showed how inneficient were the models of its time, I'd expected each to create a permanent optimization team with all the talent they have hired. I guess hardware is not that expensive to them in the grand scheme of things, at least not at this stage. OTOH, their propietary models might be thoughly optimized and we can't know, because they're still bound by supply contracts to buy the same amount of hardware nevertheless.
Catloafdev 18d ago
I fear that, whenever consumer-facing supply finally starts to return, the opportunity cost will be priced in. Consumer RAM may end up being nearly as pricey as HBM for a while, and I don't see any reason why it would ever go back down on it's own, unless there are entirely new fab processes that don't meaningfully overlap HBM.
uejfiweun 18d ago
This article is certainly a bit light on details. I'd prefer some more fine-grained and thorough analysis when it comes to this. Like, honestly, I'd have learned more by just asking Claude.
belZaah 18d ago
This assumes the current demand will continue. Which is unlikely given the order of magnitude difference between capex by the Big Folks and the revenue generated by that capex. Given they now need to fund this spend from money markets, they are likely to be told off pretty soon. Feds go “ooh” and Google goes “aah”.
alanfranz 18d ago
What kind of article is that? No explanation, no thoughts, just an empty "trust me bro" prediction from a website that usually publishes consumer hardware reviews. And the article doesn't even appear in their homepage. And the author is somebody from a company that "provides you with quality RAM" Flagged. How did this even get to HN ?

62 points by perelin 18d ago

The big companies are insulated because they've locked in multi-year supply contracts with ram manufacturers - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon (All on 3-5 yr contracts). OAI's deal with Samsung & SK Hynix is also colossal - locking up roughly 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of world output (Stargate project). Apple got caught out because it had a shorter contract that ended in the beginning of Q3, and they've tried to source their RAM from Chinese CXMT who declined because all capacity was already locked in contracts. They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia. Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions.

josephg 18d ago
> OAI's deal with Samsung & SK Hynix is also colossal - locking up roughly 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of world output (Stargate project). I wonder if they'll, at some point, have enough RAM? Or is this is the new normal? Will models keep scaling with the amount of ram chips openai and anthropic own?
- bionhoward 18d ago
  Even with efficiency breakthroughs, it would just afford packing more agents per unit of memory. Scaling compute and data keeps paying off, leading to smarter models, and smarter models have more demand even at higher prices because they can accomplish more work at higher quality. Sovereign AI hasn’t even really taken off yet to anywhere near the level it could. That’s going to dramatically increase the number of massive-scale users of AI agents. So no, IMHO they will “never” have “enough.”
  - epicureanideal 18d ago
    At some point though, won't someone be able to extrapolate the demand growth curve, and invest some colossal amount of money into making and selling more RAM chips?
    - fragmede 18d ago
      Yes. China's done just that. Expect those factories to come online within 2-3 years.
  - cyanydeez 17d ago
    Weve hit the sigmoid. Whats scalling is ancillary to the model. The cry for a slowdown is because the open weight models demonstrate the cost of parameter pacling is not work neither inference nor training. The assumption about the singularity simply is a delusion with LLMs. However, the models do provide a means to improve the harness universe, so that residual will continue to improve perception. Parameter cpunt will stagnate and training wont be justifiable from every angle.
- ohyes 18d ago
  Hard to know, does each GB of ram give some marginal increase in profit or potential profit? I’d guess no. Past a certain point the model has all the capabilities it can possibly usefully offer and honestly we may already be past that. The next gen model just doesn’t seem like as clear a step up as it once was.
  - Leonard_of_Q 17d ago
    That point is said to lie somewhere around 640 KB if I recall correctly. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-gates-say-640k-ought-to-be-enough-for-everyone https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2863/did-bill-g...
  - josephg 17d ago
    LLMs still seem pretty bad at writing large scale software like web browsers. Though it’s probably a problem of managing large context windows more than anything. Not sure if larger models will magically overcome that.
    - cyanydeez 17d ago
      The LLM by itself will never create software of any nontrivial (training) complexity. The harness though will improve while parameter count stagnates. The Qwen3.8 models are strong enough when given proper context.
      - josephg 17d ago
        > The LLM by itself will never create software of any nontrivial (training) complexity. Huh? I'm not sure what the word "training" does in that sentence. But "never" my arse. Frontier models can make nontrivial software already. For example, the other day I asked fable to reverse engineer the satisfactory blueprint file format. Then write a program to read the logistic flow graph in a blueprint. Then make an auditing tool that can analyse the graph to find problems. Well, it totally knocked it out of the park: https://seph.au/blueprints/#bp=0%3Aalumina.sbp https://seph.au/blueprints/#bp=0%3Aalumina.sbp This is a relatively small program, but it's not trivial. I'd consider a trivial program to be something I could code up in 20 minutes. It would have taken me a couple weeks to make this blueprint auditing tool, including reverse engineering the file format, writing the analysis code, making the website, scraping all the in-game data on available recipes and icons and so on. I've got a lot of mixed feelings about LLMs. But it seems very silly to lie about what they're capable of.
seanmcdirmid 18d ago
> and they've tried to source their RAM from Chinese CXMT who declined because all capacity was already locked in contracts. The US Government also wouldn't let Apple use Chinese RAM anyways, even for product that was just going to be used in China. China does have capacity issues though, and focusing on local brands first is probably the right call. Hopefully they can ramp even if they can't get the fancy lithography machines from the Netherlands.
- noduerme 18d ago
  [dead]
duskwuff 18d ago
> They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia. Formerly known as Toshiba's memory division. They spun off the business as Kioxia in 2017.
rasz 18d ago
>lesser known company Kioxia Kioxia is Toshiba, The most known company from the list, and it doesnt make any ram
georgemcbay 18d ago
> Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions. Mirroring trends throughout the entire economy (not just RAM and other inputs for AI). Everyone is chasing the top 10% or higher of the K-shaped economy for all goods and services, servicing everyone else isn't seen as being worth the investment. This will just keep getting worse and worse everywhere for everything as long as we allow income inequality to keep exploding, which seems to be the plan.
- dendrite9 18d ago
  I wonder how this plays out with automotive? Seems like it could get messy, especially if automotive rated parts are decided to not be worth the premium.
- dingaling 18d ago
  "companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions." Because the end users keep rushing to use the megacorps' latest AI models, weaving them into their work and life. So the megacorps keep locking in contracts to build more compute. If you use LLMs, you're responsible for this, there's no way to pass the buck. "I only use it as a companion for learning about history" - it's still your fault. "I only use it to help guide my solitions, not for vibecoding" - it's still your fault.
  - Sabinus 18d ago
    If you want an industry to act in a certain way you legislate for it, not wag fingers at consumers buying things. "If you want cheaper consumer devices we all need to individually stop using AI" is not useful or realistic.
- azan_ 18d ago
  And how do you think it will work? Do you really believe that once competition to serve top 10% get really fierce, no company will try to capture the remaining 90%?
  - 18d ago
discordance 18d ago
China's pretty good at bending the curve. I expect that by the end of 2027 we'll see a lot more available for consumers. As others have pointed out, this might not be available in US markets. "CXMT currently has two 12-inch DRAM fabrication plants — or fabs - in Hefei and one in Beijing, with a combined capacity of about 300,000 wafers per month. With the new Shanghai facility and other new capacity, CXMT will double its DRAM wafer output to approximately 600,000 wafers per month, all three sources added." https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cxmt-wins-3-billion-memory-supply-deal-with-tencent-sources-say-2026-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cxmt-wins-3-billi...
- rdedev 18d ago
  This is probably my ignorance but why are we assuming that CXMT capacity will also not be gobbled up for datacenters?
  - quux0r 18d ago
    If I'm not mistaken I believe that CXMT's fabrication process is not suitable for manufacturing within the super tight tolerances that are needed for data center HBM, but I may be mis remembering. I think I recall a chart from somewhere showing that frontier memory manufacturers could achieve something like double the memory throughput for example.
    - jauntywundrkind 18d ago
      allegedly the yields are not great https://www.techpowerup.com/352511/cxmt-reportedly-struggles-with-hbm3e-yields-are-only-25 https://www.techpowerup.com/352511/cxmt-reportedly-struggles... but i feel like this will not last that long and that cxmt will be layering dram for hbm stacks with abandon, like everyone else, uninterested in selling ram to anyone else. meanwhile now we are seeing vertically stacked ram in regular dimms too, for 512GB sticks. once again increasing the multipliers of how many ram chips go into servers. https://www.techpowerup.com/352730/micron-develops-512-gb-ddr5-rdimm-server-memory-reaching-9200-mt-s https://www.techpowerup.com/352730/micron-develops-512-gb-dd...
bigglebear 18d ago
> Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions. It's almost like these companies WANT a dystopia with a centralized winner-takes-all power structure. Anything in the name of profits, who gives a fuck about humanity and distribution of rights or freedoms.
brcmthrowaway 18d ago
This seems completely sourced from twitter rumours. No mention of NVidia either.
whatever1 18d ago
Apple has no excuse to be cornered when it had $300B in cash sitting. They f’ed up big time.
- isomorphic 18d ago
  Well, you know what they say. The best time to blow tens of billions you might never get back on a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. The second best time is today!
  - whatever1 18d ago
    Will they ever not need memory for their products? Why have pants down exposure to the market prices? Specially when they have 300B in the bank and a fab costs what 20-30B? They are lucky they did not get squeezed out of tsmc too, otherwise they would have to re release the iPhone X in 2027.
  - lelanthran 17d ago
    > a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. What makes it risky? Do you think that Apple will pivot into something that doesn't require RAM? Maybe like an IBM, they pivot to services?
    - timw4mail 17d ago
      Ram is boom or bust industry. The big manufacturers remain because they were either wise in their bets or lucky.
- robocat 18d ago
  You don't know how that is deployed. Some of their treasury (Non-Current Marketable Securities) could be bonds that are invested with targeted contracts for trade-secret benefits. Say TSMC needs capital, and say Apple has spare capital: they are both likely to agree to an investment where Apple gets contractual benefits that other customers do not. I would expect Apple to be very aggressively investing into suppliers to get results that strongly benefits Apple and perhaps that disadvantages competitors.

MiroslavPokorny 18d ago

Its a good thing the data centers in the Gulf states didnt get bombed.

shoobiedoo 18d ago

On the bright side, this will further accelerate the retro computing scene as people throw their hands up at the thought of building something shiny and new

_carbyau_ 18d ago
I was hoping not to have to keep my current machine until it classified as retro....
- shoobiedoo 18d ago
  yours is already a horse and carriage at this point, might as well send it to me

cryptoegorophy 18d ago

When will supply catchup with demand?

lioeters 18d ago
That's the neat part: it won't until some kind of market dominance is established and maximally exploited by the biggest players. Like during the pandemic when the biggest companies got bailed out while smaller businesses got crushed, permanently shifting the power balance. It's almost as if by collusion.

Barrin92 18d ago

we're driving consumer prices up and delaying the climate transition for Rube Goldberg slop machines. In case any future historiographer decides to go with the title "the age of intelligence, our stupidest period yet" I'd like some royalties

bigglebear 18d ago

I think it's time we start talking about putting limits on how much compute AI companies can purchase or own, relative to the rest of the world. It's not fair that they can use trillions of dollars of investor billionaires money to consume all of the resources that everybody needs. Where is fair distribution? What about all of the industries they're destroying in the process by hoarding it all for themselves? Otherwise, there will be no end to this. There are no hard limits on the speed of a parallel bruteforce. It's an infinite complexity problem class. The more parallel bruteforce power you have, the more likely you are to be able to solve a problem. So there is no world where demand ends. So if something isn't done about this, we'll have million dollar GPUs and RAM sticks because they've priced everyone out of the market and are the only ones able to afford them. Say goodbye to owning your own hardware at that point.

ollysb 18d ago
How could you enforce this?
- bigglebear 17d ago
  That's the entire point of having the discussion. Figuring out how to enforce it.
deathanatos 18d ago
> I think it's time we start talking about putting limits on how much compute AI companies can purchase or own, relative to the rest of the world. It's not fair that they can use trillions of dollars of investor billionaires money to consume all of the resources that everybody needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market Right now, the RAM market is effectively cornered. Anti-trust enforcement is what I'd look to, but the GOP do not believe in ensuring competitive markets / enforcement. (The current admin is pretty clearly 110% pro corporation.) Vote in November, but in all likelihood, there won't be government intervention earlier than 2028, and even that is optimistic. One hopes the AI bubble pops, but I think this market can remain irrational for far longer than I can keep old hardware alive.

xbmcuser 18d ago

I called this almost a year ago that the way things are going that home users and pc enthusiasts will be priced out of computing. And the best thing for the rest of the world is China reaching on parity on node side and crash the market. What would be the prices today if Chinese companies were not forced to build their own chips.

AmazingTurtle 18d ago
This is the first time that I hope that china fucks this up

smy20011 18d ago

The good thing is that we no longer consider RAM is free and forced to develop more efficient program (hopefully)

timw4mail 17d ago
Hah! One could only hope.
nathanaldensr 17d ago
Who is "we?" Software developers who are growing up "vibe coding?" We're even further from the underlying hardware on the abstraction layers; just how are "we" going to care more about efficiency?

p0w3n3d 18d ago

What about Samsung Hynix cartel? Were they punished already?

SillyUsername 18d ago

Pretty soon we'll see a renaissance in the tech that we gave up years ago or can still be improved - memory compression algorithms - alternative LLM architectures that don't rely on memory or GPUs - compatibility hardware (like DDR3 to DDR4 boards) - distributed computing improvements, both at local GPU and networking levels (SLI for AI) - GPU hacks to add more memory or support older architectures I'm personally looking forward to the new LLM architectures that don't require as much compute, e.g. DLLMs, which can be good enough for CPU usage but lack the accuracy of frontier models currently. When this happens the bottom will fall out of the GPU and memory markets, putting a glut of cheap hardware out there. Doom mongering like this never seems to include these as viable future alternatives, which is standard market adjustments, I wonder who the doom narrative helps? :)

VCFundedGenYer 17d ago
No. You are projecting things will happen when there is no guarantee. The DRAM issue has halted the industry. AI companies need to back down. That is the only objective solution.
- SillyUsername 16d ago
  Jev, Bonsai 2, Edge 0 and even SwiftQwen are anecdotal evidence, this isn't a projection. I can run my own sizeable agent swarm with Mastra, something I have not been able to do but will accelerate my solutions to the point I replace a single paid frontier model doing it.

haakon 18d ago

I can't even read this blog post because Cloudflare's "security verification" fails over and over again. The internet sucks now.

thenthenthen 18d ago
You are not missing much (it is basically an advertisement), besides the somewhat intimidating mugshot of a German dude as the header image.

YuechenLi 18d ago

DRAM pricing has historically been cyclical in nature, and the only reason for the current high DRAM pricing is that current AI inference is unnecessarily RAM intensive/inefficient. Interesting effect is that since DRAM production tooling has been switched from DDR/GDDR to HBM, we may finally see the proliferation of HBM in consumer GPUs/accelerators after the bust cycle starts.

Catloafdev 18d ago
>the only reason ... is that current AI inference is unnecessarily RAM intensive There's no indication that this will change, and every indication this will continue to grow. This is not some temporary thing. Demand is already exponentially higher than what is possible to produce, and there's no current reason to believe it has any ceiling.
- YuechenLi 18d ago
  I've actually done some work and was able to get the full 12GB Z-image Turbo to run on my 8Gb 3070, and throughout the generation only 600MB of VRAM was allocated (you can get a speed-up by double buffering, but the maximum VRAM was still only ~1GB through inference). It's very experimental and pretty much requires you to write all the compute kernels directly specifically against that particular weight and statically allocate the memory at compile time instead of using current ML frameworks like Pytorch/JAX, but I think in time somebody else would figure it out.
  - ASalazarMX 17d ago
    The hardware savings at the scale Anthropic or Google use would me immense, it makes me wonder why no big player has done more optimization already. When DeepSeek showed how inneficient were the models of its time, I'd expected each to create a permanent optimization team with all the talent they have hired. I guess hardware is not that expensive to them in the grand scheme of things, at least not at this stage. OTOH, their propietary models might be thoughly optimized and we can't know, because they're still bound by supply contracts to buy the same amount of hardware nevertheless.

Catloafdev 18d ago

I fear that, whenever consumer-facing supply finally starts to return, the opportunity cost will be priced in. Consumer RAM may end up being nearly as pricey as HBM for a while, and I don't see any reason why it would ever go back down on it's own, unless there are entirely new fab processes that don't meaningfully overlap HBM.

uejfiweun 18d ago

This article is certainly a bit light on details. I'd prefer some more fine-grained and thorough analysis when it comes to this. Like, honestly, I'd have learned more by just asking Claude.

belZaah 18d ago

This assumes the current demand will continue. Which is unlikely given the order of magnitude difference between capex by the Big Folks and the revenue generated by that capex. Given they now need to fund this spend from money markets, they are likely to be told off pretty soon. Feds go “ooh” and Google goes “aah”.

alanfranz 18d ago

What kind of article is that? No explanation, no thoughts, just an empty "trust me bro" prediction from a website that usually publishes consumer hardware reviews. And the article doesn't even appear in their homepage. And the author is somebody from a company that "provides you with quality RAM" Flagged. How did this even get to HN ?