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

Post by sowbug » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 11:35 PM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #39

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.

Post by sharts » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 11:43 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…

Post by philipkglass » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 11:47 PM UTC

fpoling wrote: post #38

automatic6131 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by XorNot » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 12:00 AM UTC

testartr wrote: post #23

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…

why do you think allocating hardware to gamers is proper usage? maybe AI cures cancer, or at least writes some code

Post by octoberfranklin » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #65

fpoling wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.