Memory prices have always been a racket. In the good old days news of a memory factory burning periodically raised the memory prices. Nowadays price fixing cartels don’t need something so elaborate.
Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
321–330 of 449 posts
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Aside, $203 USD back then would be about $276 USD after inflation. Not a primary effect, but contributory.
Also need to account for the dollar decline vs other currencies (which yes is possibly somewhat factored into dollar inflation so you'd have to do the inflation calculation in Euros then convert to dollars accounting for the decline in value).
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside, $203 USD back then would be about $276 USD after inflation. Not a primary effect, but contributory.
I think that goes to show that official inflation benchmarks are not very practical / useful in terms of buckets of things that people actually buy or desire. If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...
> If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...
A house is $500,000
A GPU is $500
You could put GPUs into the inflation bucket and it wouldn’t change anything. Inflation trackers count cost of living and things you pay monthly, not one time luxury expenses every 4 years that geeks buy for entertainment.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dram alternates between feast and famine; it's the nature of a business when the granularity of investment is so huge (you have a fab or you don't, and they cost billions -maybe trillions by now). So, it will swing back. Unfortunately it looks like maybe 3-5 years on average, from some analysis here: https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html (That's just me eyeballing it, feel free to do the math)
I am so glad both top rated and majority of comments on HN finally understands DRAM industry instead of constant DRAM is a cartel that is why things are expensive. Also worth mentioning DRAM and NAND's profit from Samsung is what keep the Samsung Foundry fighting TSMC. Especially for those who thinks TSMC is somehow a monopoly. Another things to point out which is not mentioned yet, China is working on both DRAM and…
DRAM manufacturers have literally been convicted of price fixing in the past why do you have to white knight for them?
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#325Earlier 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…
> There's too much group-think in the executive class. I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets. > we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed We give the military far too much money in the USA.
Diversity is good for populations. If you have a tiny pool of individuals with mostly the same traits (in this case I mean things like culture, education, morality, ethics, rather than class and race - though there are obvious correlations) then you get what some other comments are describing as being effectively centralized planning with extra steps, rather than a market of competing ideas.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll just get a different form of power concentration. Do you think the Soviet Union didn't have power concentration in individuals? Of course it did, that's why the general secretary of the party was more important than the actual heads of state and government.
Do you think I’m proposing anything like the Soviet system?
No? I'm saying that power concentration is pretty much unavoidable. The question is more about what they can do with that power. I suspect that people getting more power through wealth in the modern world is better than people concentrating power through politics.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#327I'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 $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
Yeah you are not alone here being annoyed. I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc... Those price increases are not normal at all. I understand that most of it still comes from market demands but this is also skewing the market now in unfair manners. Such increases smell of criminal activity too.
> I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc...
You want to penalize companies for buying things and penalize companies for selling things are market rate?
There are a lot of good examples through history about how central planning economics and strict price controls do not lead to good outcomes. The end result wouldn’t be plentiful cheap RAM for you. The end result would be no RAM for you at all because the manufacturers choose to sell to other countries who understand basic economics.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#328I'm especially annoyed that this is most likely intentional. (Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and…
Nice try! You got it next time
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#329I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ 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.
Interesting that Samsung put their prices up 60% today, and a retailer who bought their stock at the old price feels compelled to put their prices up 2.5x. When the AI bubble bursts we can get back to the old price
The cost of inventory on the shelves basically doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the market rate.
If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices, so there wouldn’t actually have been weeks of low retail RAM prices for everyone.
Every once in a while you can catch a retailer whose pricing person missed the memo and forgot to update the retail price when the announcement came out. They go out of stock very rapidly.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, the argument ended in some sort of stroke there. Kinda curious how the story
There’s 3 or 4 places where the commenter just glitches out. Sounds like they’re using a transcription tool or something
It’s telling that the comment is highly upvoted (as I write this comment, anyway) despite being incoherent and incomplete in multiple places. I guess being generically angry and complaining about popular targets like OpenAI is an easy way to earn upvotes from visitors who don’t actually read, just scan comments for keywords and vibes.