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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#281

Post by srmatto »

afavour wrote: post #176
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…

> I don't understand the distinction you are making. It's pretty simple. In a correctly regulated market the sellers are in competition with each other so there is a limit to how much they can increase prices, since they'll just lose business to their competitor. In a poorly regulated market that allows competitors to collude with each other to raise prices by the same amount, they'll inflate prices much further.

Real history here on this subject is the LCD panel price fixing scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT-LCD_(Flat_Panel)_Antitrust...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#282

Post by XorNot »

jcbrand wrote: post #208
HWR_14 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes everyone took Econ 101.

Now what do you think happens when developing new supply is substantially constrained by lead times?

Coz a whole lot less of you have ever dealt with manufacturing logistics.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#283

Post by hahahaa »

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…

Google: Cartel

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#285

Post by shibapuppie »

empiricus wrote: post #234
shibapuppie wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most" No? It goes to the buyer with the deepest pockets.

it is probable that you don't get the deepest pockets by wasting money. anyone that pays so much for memory means they expect to get even bigger value from that.

"It is probable"

So RAM manufacturers will turn down company B's $2M offer for company A's $1M offer because company A "needed it more"?

I'm actually done discussing this...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#287

Post by ericd »

davkan wrote: post #46
seanp2k2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan unti…

My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.

Funny, just had an 8 year old 1600W Corsair Titanium efficiency power supply go. Generally very high quality, GaN transistors, all japanese caps, etc etc. It was still under warranty, and Corsair refunded the original price, stand-up company. Too bad 1600W power supplies have apparently inflated ~50% since then, but still.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#288

Post by chmorgan_ »

ncallaway wrote: post #129
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…

> 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…

[dead]

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#289

Post by x0xMaximus »

We had last bought 24TB+ (4x 24 racks, and some miscellaneous) of DDR5 4800 and 6400 last year while finishing a move off of AWS entirely. I tried to be responsible and prioritize a cold and warm spares of all our equipment and over allocation to ensure proper redundancy capacity. At the time it was a hard pill to swallow looking at our budget; but a few months ago we've started to offload some DIMMs on various channels. What went from a cost analysis between a cloud provider, to having to manage transit, circuits, equipment, a IP blocks, etc etc and all the operational obligations that come with it.. it ultimately covering our hosting costs entirely for the next ~18months *at least* (while "only" coming at the cost of having slightly less cold spares sitting in the bottom of our cages).

Given we're all 9004/9005 now, and that (from what I understand) Venice will support 6400. Will hopefully buy back in a glut comes ready for the next bubble. It's been wild, I even posted a small 32GB DDR5-4800 that was not getting recognized for $100 on eBay and it was literally purchased within ~15min of being live.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#290

Post by Hamuko »

mschild wrote: post #178
lvzw wrote: post #147

Earlier 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…

OPEC's aim isn't to keep prices as high as possible. If they go too high, people will start buying electric cars, investing in renewable energy, etc. Basically they want to make oil as expensive as possible while preventing it from getting so expensive that it's disruptive.
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