Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening • Hacker News Board

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#31

Post by phoboslab » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800).

It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#32

Post by scotty79 » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:19 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #8

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all becau…

Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy.

The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources.

When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#33

Post by tonyhart7 » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

how is that market failure??? this is literally market of supply and demand at its core

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#34

Post by sixothree » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #21

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

They're treating it as a "winner takes it all"-kind of business. And I'm not sure this is a reasonable bet. The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie. I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.

What's odd about this is I believe there does exist a winner takes all technology. And that it's AR.

The more I dream about the possibilities of AR, the more I believe people are going to find it incredibly useful. It's just the hardware isn't nearly ready. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe these companies are making some of the largest strategic blunders possible at this point in time.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#35

Post by wnevets » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

Haven't these memory companies been caught price fixing multiple times over the years? Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for these absurd prices?

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#36

Post by shiandow » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

It's not exactly a new type of failure. It's roughly equivalent to Riccardian rent, or pecuniary externalities for the general term. Though I suppose this is a speculative variant, which could be worse somehow.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#37

Post by avidiax » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

Does anyone know if the increase in prices in high-end RAM will affect lower end RAM used in embedded devices, e.g. LPDDR4?

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#38

Post by fpoling » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

automatic6131 wrote: post #26

epistasis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all becau…

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#39

Post by PaulKeeble » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

hypeatei wrote: post #18

Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.

Its a bit of a shame these AI GPUs don't actually have displayport/hdmi output ports because they would make for nice cheap and powerful gaming GPUs with a lot of VRAM, they would potentially be really good graphics cards.

Will just have to settle for insanely cheap second hand DDR5 and NVMe drives I guess.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#40

Post by cesarb » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 10:34 PM UTC

hypeatei wrote: post #18

Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.

> Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories.

Their inventories are not what consumers use.

Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server DDR5 motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically incompatible, and the voltages are different. And the memory for GPUs is normally soldered directly to the board (and of the GDDRn family, instead of the DDRn or LPDDRn families used by most CPUs).

As for GPUs, they're also different. Most consumer GPUs are PCIe x16 cards with DP and HDMI ports; most hyperscaler GPUs are going to have more exotic form factors like OAM, and not have any DP or HDMI ports (since they have no need for graphics output).

So no, unfortunately hyperscalers dumping their inventories would be of little use to consumers. We'll have to wait for the factories to switch their production to consumer-targeted products.

Edit: even their NVMe drives are going to have different form factors like E1.S and different connectors like U.2, making them hard for normal consumers to use.