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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#331

Post by throwaway219450 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #3

The 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.

If you bought RAM new, it should be warrantied. Most sticks are essentially lifetime support, but you’ll get a refurb. I definitely wouldn’t buy secondhand now, unless it was a very good deal. Corsair won’t honor transfers unless you’re somewhere that legally forces them to.

GPU probably not a terrible idea to pay the $20 for those aftermarket insurance plans. Do they even pay out though?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#332

Post by redbell »

z_rho_one wrote: post #175

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...

In short, this is how life is designed. Nobody can ever predict with a 100% accuracy what will come in the future.

If Laszlo Hanyecz knew that, after 10 years, 1 BTC will exceed $50K, he wouldn't trade his 10,000 Bitcoins (~$41) for two pizzas!

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#333

Post by whattheheckheck »

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

Demand and manufacturers not increasing capacity.

Eventually someone will manufacture more to undercut

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#334

Post by whattheheckheck »

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…

Can you list out the precise "cartel" company, their supply chains and the board of directors, their financial and political ties?

Lot of unsubstantiated claims with low fidelity meme evidence

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#335

Post by TacticalCoder »

empiricus wrote: post #239
paulpauper wrote: post #191

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…

I think Leopold of "situational awareness" fame predicted this, tried to make it widely known on podcasts and x, and still started billions worth of hedge funding based on this.

> I think Leopold of "situational awareness" fame predicted this, tried to make it widely known on podcasts and x, and still started billions worth of hedge funding based on this.

Ironically enough it's because of its bet on RAM companies that all of Situational Awareness' publicly trading stocks got bought by the highest bidder (Citadel) when the (leveraged) shit hit the proverbial fan and Situational Awareness created a hole of tens of billions.

Situational Awareness was not forced to sell its share in Anthropic for, by contract, investors in Situational Awareness have no right to force the sale (before this month of September I think) of shares in companies not publicly trading yet.

Citadel bought those RAM stocks right at the end of July, during the dip. Amazing timing for for example MU bounced back from $746 back to above $1000 (now around $950).

Now Situational Awareness may still do exceptionally well: they've got $5 billion or so left in Anthropic AIUI.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#336

Post by spystath »

nullbyte wrote: post #97
jayd16 wrote: post #32

Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?

CXMT is a memory fab that just opened in China. They achieved a 90% yield on DDR5. Hopefully that could ease up the supply squeeze.

It's very unlikely to have any meaningful effect. CXMT DRAM will also be hoovered up the moment it hits the market at the same inflated prices. Even if they had the capacity (they don't) why flood the market when you can just print money?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#337

Post by colechristensen »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #333
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

Demand and manufacturers not increasing capacity. Eventually someone will manufacture more to undercut

The problem is the scaling cycles for demand and supply are at different timescales. It takes a lot longer to build capacity than these bubbles take to form and pop and there is a SIGNIFICANT history of silicon manufactures scaling during a bubble then going bankrupt because their increased capacity never had the chance to make them any money.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#338

Post by rjh29 »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #267
rossant wrote: post #265

Really happy I got a new PC last year with 128 GB of RAM, 4 TB SSD, and an RTX 5090. This would have been prohibitively expensive now.

Congrats. Happy for you. Nice. Yeah, I built mine in 3090 times and told myself I'd upgrade every 2-3 GPU generations. I do have 128G ram and I'm thankful for that but I'm definitely not on the same upgrade schedule any more.

I have 32GB and an aging 5800X3D and I have not had any issues running games yet. Honestly would love to know what games need more powerful RAM/CPU outside of stuff like Flight Simulator, or running at 160fps without framegen.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#339

Post by vlovich123 »

arcfour wrote: post #327
WheatMillington wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most Everything else you said is accurate, but this is not. Supply will go to those most able to pay, not those who need it the most. It is not a moral allocation, which your language implies.

Nobody really "needs" RAM immediately though, like a heart or a lung or something.

That’s a bold statement to make in the 21st century when nearly everything is run on computers, including cars, planes, hospital networks, etc etc.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#340

Post by Tanoc »

lvzw wrote: post #147
ncallaway wrote: post #129

Earlier 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…

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.

There are several Chinese fabs that they could contract out production to. In fact that's exactly what Apple tried to do, before the U.S. government went full protectionist and added the two memory manufacturers to the banned imports list. There's also the Texas Instruments fab that's underutilized right now. The extra capacity exists, it's just Micro and SK Hynix are throwing their money around to stifle anything that could jeopardize their spike in profits that are historic not only for their industry, but for manufacturing as a whole.
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