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Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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211–220 of 423 posts

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#211

I asked ChatGPT if it can generate a bunch of RAM for me. He says this is some kind of famous joke or something. (I’m sorry I couldn’t resist)

"Downloading RAM" is more feasible than people think. The seek time of a consumer-grade hard disk is said to be on the order of 10 ms. That's roughly the latency of a very high quality FTTH connection. Meaning that if you run a HDD rather than an SSD, a swap file in the cloud could potentially be faster than a local one (especially when you consider multiple reads/writes that could be done in parallel). It's not exac…

Someone managed to boot a machine from a file system on Google Drive.

https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#212
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference that strikes me with the .com bubble is that I don't remember the .com companies having sustained multi-billions losses / cash burn. They were not profitable but this is quite different. If (or when) the music stops, won't OpenAI go bust immediately? That's quite a counterparty risk those companies are taking.

OpenAI is ten years old, dotcom companies were 2-3 years old. Some dotcom-boom companies that survived also had sustained multi billion dollar losses afair - Amazon and Uber for example.

Uber was founded half a decade after the dot com bubble.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

July: 172,38 € for a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €

I've been meaning to get more components for a diy NAS since atleast the last year and just been pushing it lazily. I'm literally kicking myself now when I actually started looking up deals for this black friday.

Same here, I was waiting for DDR5 to come down in prices to upgrade from 32 -> 128gb. Could have done it for 200-300€ a few weeks ago, now I'm just sad.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#215
post #87

I just checked my go-to stores in Europe. Holy shit. I bought a 5200-speed 16GB DDR5 kit in October for 55 eur. Now it's selling for 240 eur. The 6000-speed model is now 390 eur.

Starting to make Apple's RAM upsell prices look competitive...

I just checked our local apple store website and going from 48gb of ram on a M4 MacBook Pro it's 1500€ to get 128gb. Seems about the same :E

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#216
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big news story this cycle is that OpenAI secured two large contracts with two separate DRAM companies at the same time, carefully timing the deals so that neither DRAM company knew about the deal with other. Had either company known about the true demand from OpenAI they would have charged a lot more, but each only saw about half. In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were bo…

One difference that strikes me with the .com bubble is that I don't remember the .com companies having sustained multi-billions losses / cash burn. They were not profitable but this is quite different. If (or when) the music stops, won't OpenAI go bust immediately? That's quite a counterparty risk those companies are taking.

I believe we'd have to tease out what proportion of that cash burn is essential to keep serving compute to customers (which I assume to have profitable unit economics), versus what percentage is optional datacenter buildouts that could be paused in this situation.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#218

I don't understand this. I'm looking at prices on some Asian store fronts and it's nowhere even remotely near these. I'm looking at DDR5-6000 2x16 for about $130, with no apparent limits. Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?

Yeah, that's the spot market price, small sellers are more nimble, big platform sellers however probably feel the need to price in supply risks.

Shouldn't be recycled chips too, as those were always older gens. I bought one ddr3 dirt cheap and no issues.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did European prices have the same increase then?

> Why did European prices have the same increase then? Where do Europeans get their DRAM from? If it is the same handful of companies the US gets their DRAM from, then why would Europeans pay any less? Because the EU is not engaging in the same asinine trade war? Sounds good in theory, but in practice those same few companies can set prices for markets outside the US to be at/near US prices. It doesn't take much effo…

> If it is the same handful of companies the US gets their DRAM from, then why would Europeans pay any less?

... because tariffs are paid for by the buyer?

Importing memory from Korea to the US means the importer had to pay a tariff. Importing memory from Korea to Europe means the importer does not have to pay a tariff. The company selling the memory gets exactly the same amount of money in either case.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To those who haven't heard how colossal the size of OpenAIs contracts are. 900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

At that point even if the AI bubble bursts you have a solid business as a RAM scalper

You mean OpenAI will profit selling their RAM stocks if the AI bubble bursts? I doubt it honestly. If the AI bubble bursts, then global demand will collapse altogether crashing the value of HW.
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