Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 587 posts

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#111

Post by cm2187 »

1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply.

Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to bid for the limited supply. Sucks for other buyers, on the other hand it ensures demand destruction, i.e. that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most, other buyers will delay their purchase and do with what they have.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#113

Post by solarengineer »

cm2187 wrote: post #111
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

"that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most" - I would say that the limited supply goes to the buyer who can afford to pay higher than others. Someone may need the memory more, but may not have the deeper pockets to pay for it like NVidia and Apple might.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#114

Post by imjonse »

magic_hamster wrote: post #109
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun. I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is. Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.

If it's a highly profitable footgun why not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#202...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#115

Post by minraws »

magic_hamster wrote: post #109
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun. I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is. Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.

Just to be clear the big Memory giants are famous for their price fixing historically speaking.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#116

Post by cm2187 »

luma wrote: post #107
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.

You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#117

Post by wlesieutre »

magic_hamster wrote: post #109
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun. I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is. Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.

> To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.

When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#119

Post by minraws »

cm2187 wrote: post #111
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

In an absolutely free market? sure. But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution and to be able to create a demand excess.

They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.

You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?

The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#120

Post by ReptileMan »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #47
seanp2k2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

Somewhat hard to short non public company, don't you think?
Post reply on HN