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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#131

Post by veqq »

minraws wrote: post #119
cm2187 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#132

Post by luma »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
luma wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity.

This was not created by the manufacturers.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#133

Post by dist-epoch »

minraws wrote: post #119
cm2187 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs

That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#134

Post by florakel »

preg_match wrote: post #87
datakan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…

I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.

Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)

Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#135

Post by aeturnum »

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

FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#137

Post by senderista »

aeturnum wrote: post #135
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

FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.

There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#138

Post by jldugger »

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…

> I don't understand the distinction you are making.

20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.

etc

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#139

Post by dist-epoch »

solarengineer wrote: post #113
cm2187 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gamers may need the memory more, but AI labs can use the memory more productively

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#140

Post by t-writescode »

dist-epoch wrote: post #133
minraws wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.

Then perhaps we’re seeing one of the downsides of that. When 0->1 is prohibitively expensive, existing players can continue to raise prices *very* high because cost-of-entry is extreme, until it’s not sufficiently extreme.

And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.

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