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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

291–300 of 587 posts

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#291

After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...

If it makes you feel better. The US government looks like it might start removing some of the 28k troops that are stationed in South Korea over this. No reason to keep them in a country that enables this sort of behavior.

Do you have a source for this being the reason they might remove some troops?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#292
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the chinese are spinning up fabs as we speak?

DDR4, and from some comments I have seen around here of only marginally acceptable reliability. It may still take a few years if until they have all the production processes fully under control.

I thought CXMT is selling DDR5 now?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#293

What do I read to quickly get a grasp of how economics works, from a high level perspective?

200 pages https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3028.Economics_in_One... There are free PDFs if you don't want to buy it.

Seems solid rec. For lazy person, I think a couple of things that will give you quick intuition for present affairs are:

* The Fifth Discipline - read the beer game chapter and AI summaries for the rest, helps build intuition for chained systems

* Chip War - a quick read but AI summaries will suffice, helps build knowledge for semiconductor industry orientation

* The Goal - classic business book on just-in-time, useful to overturn standard human reactions. read if you're a quick reader, AI summary otherwise

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#294
post #63
post #59

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It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.

My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.

Aris Mpitziopoulos at cybenetics.com

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#295
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More importantly that did take subterfuge: there's no way a contract that large would've been agreed to by both manufacturers if they knew the other was signing it.

The actual deals were hours apart and secret for that reason.

It's hilarious watching the conspiracy theorists do their usual thing when there was an actual conspiracy, it was perpetuated by the inner circle of a US company and announced and publicized in full once it had achieved its goal.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Willing to enter a private trade with you if you're actually willing to put up the money

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Sometime in the next few years" is not anywhere near narrow enough of a window to start putting shorts on stock prices.

OP sounds way too confident about the general direction so Im calling him out to take some action on his "insight"

Buying out of money puts with expiration a few years out on AI adjacent stocks should do the trick

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 performa…

Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.

> software grows more demanding over time.

Nah. Adding more features to software doesn’t make software run slower. The problem is that software developers only optimise enough to make it run fast on our own computers. Because we keep getting new computers, we get lazier over time and software gets slower.

Electron is the most obvious example of this sort of thing, but examples are everywhere once you start looking.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#299
post #246
post #240

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Which reversed in about 6 months and now eggs are are their lowest prices in nearly a decade.

The same thing will happen with RAM. A glut will come eventually. It might take a year, maybe two.

We can dream. I would do unspeakable things with 512GB of RAM.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#300

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…

Feel free to spin up a fab and undercut the current prices, I'd certainly appreciate it! I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.

If you did, then the big manufacturers would just sell a competitive product, at a loss if necessary, until you are driven out of business.
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