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32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

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Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#131

Post by giancarlostoro »

gvalkov wrote: post #99

The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on. Spec-ing and buying servers has become…

I still believe that Mark Zuckerberg would have been smarter investing all his AI funding into just making RAM fabs. Would probably have printed easy cash. Instead he's burning cash on making IG / FB less secure because of his in-house AI.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#135

Post by chadgpt3 »

varispeed wrote: post #43
whizzter wrote: post #35

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

> that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.

isn't that literally all output an LLM generates?

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#136

Post by chadgpt3 »

danaris wrote: post #85
mgfist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fab for high end memory costs $20B and 5 years to build. It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money

It will only happen if the bottom doesn't fall out of the market for AI datacenters in the next few months.

It's coming up on a year since the crisis started and at every single point it's been "next few months"

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#137

Post by ambicapter »

randusername wrote: post #93

I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this. Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news? I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more sec…

Memory makers are reluctant to increase fabrication (high cost of capital and boom/bust cycle leads to bankruptcies being common in the industry), and the memory required for AI (HBM) requires more of the production inputs than other types of RAM, thus squeezing regular DDR RAM even more. Long-form article describing this in more detail: https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#138

Post by [deleted] »

otherme123 wrote: post #59
ecshafer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government needs to get out of the way. Micron announced a memory fab in Syracuse in 2023. It took 3 years, 20,000 pages of "environmental review", deals with the government on amount of union contracts during building, etc. for them to break ground in 2026 for a 2030 opening date. In any reasonable world, a 2023 announcement should have broke ground in 2023.

OTOH, a celulose factory near me, built in the 1950's, got their permits fast and with little regard to environment. FF three decades, and their entire surroundings are destoyed for everyone else. Trials go nowhere, because they have all authorizations needed (and a lot of political leverage because they are the main employer in the region). Careful fast-tracking business that have zero incentives to avoid externaliz…

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