Earlier quoted context omitted.
who is the 4th?
Probaby CXMT
What about YMTC?
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
201–210 of 587 posts
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#202The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
I've had a RAM stick fail.
Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.
But I've seen plenty of other failures:
- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.
- One GPU, replaced under warranty.
- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.
- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.
- Several case fans.
Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think everyone is aware now that you don't build a fab by snapping your fingers, and you need to amortise it over many years. The said manufacturers are just out of a massive slump in demand during covid, when they were selling at a loss, and these cycles happened many times in this industry. It is understandable that they don't jump all-in on the AI bandwagon, which, god knows where it is going and for how long. I…
Yes when there are large fixed costs to expanding production, that will happen more slowly, after determining that the high demand isn't just a short term spike. It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).
I'm not super familiar with farming, but I'm pretty sure there is an upper bound on how much wheat you can plant dictated by the amount of land you own.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#204500% 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
What is also interesting is no one predicted this in 2022-2025 as LLMs were gaining widespread use. It just suddenly happened--"boom!" memory shortage in mid 2025 to early 2026,and it caught everyone by surprise. It was understood that the biggest bottleneck was "compute", not the memory. Even experts, such as popular AI bloggers, industry leaders, and top podcasters failed to anticipate this. No one on twitter eithe…
Sam Altman laying claims on 40% of the world’s RAM wafer production is what took everyone by surprise. The supply shortage likely would have ramped up more slowly otherwise.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#205I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell o…
The way I understand it is, these fabs have massive overheads so not selling is not an option. It is also relatively easy to pivot production from enterprise to consumer. Now if they all start doing that at the same time to stay in business during the down cycle, an oversupply in consumer chips is possible.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Memory fab build out times are years not months. The existing ones already run 24/7. If these companies could pull more supply out of thin air they would, but they cannot.
Would they? Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more. OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup…
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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#207Earlier 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.
who is the 4th?
Intel is also looking into returning to making RAM, but it's probably the Chinese that will enter the market faster
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 work The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand. But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply. So, th…
> In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand. Why would they? And you claim to have historic examples where they did?
Generally speaking, if demand stays high, and existing suppliers don't increase supply, the high prices create an incentive and opportunity for new market entrants to increase the supply.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#209The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I built my machine in 2022 with 64GB of memory and upgraded to a 4090 at MSRP in 2023 so at this point I'm good but I fear the back end of the bathtub curve. I currently expect to have to hold on until 2029 and at that point the mobo and CPU will be 7 years old, and the GPU almost 6.
I’m running PCs with 13 and 15 year old motherboards/CPUs/RAM. I wouldn’t worry about seven years.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#210There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.