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Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#111

Post by mike_d »

HenryMulligan wrote: post #97
walterbell wrote: post #39

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram... On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other…

Sounds like OpenAI might be trying their hand at TPUs, like what Google has. They are one of Google's biggest advantages in AI right now. It would also give them insurance against Nvidia being everybody's hardware supplier.

This actually points the opposite direction, to doubling down on commercial GPUs.

NVIDIA recently told their board partners that they will need to source their own RAM and will not be bundling it with chips anymore.

If there is a supply crunch on DRAM, commercial GPU production lines will start having idle downtime. That is literally the worst possible thing that can happen to a company that has invested heavily in tooling and they will negotiate at or below cost production runs to fill the gaps if a customer can bring their own DRAM to the table.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#112

Post by renewiltord »

Got real lucky. I was trying to negotiate a guy down on RAM. I wanted a server without as much RAM. In the end, I had to take the 768 GB. It only cost $1k more than 192 GB at the time. Unfortunately I can’t really sell off the excess because I need to substitute down the RAM modules to fill all 12. Ah well.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#113

Post by Semaphor »

darkstar_16 wrote: post #107
Semaphor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

July: 172,38 € for a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €

I've been meaning to get more components for a diy NAS since atleast the last year and just been pushing it lazily. I'm literally kicking myself now when I actually started looking up deals for this black friday.

Check used RAM. I've been reading those are still often fine, pricewise

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#114

Post by phito »

snek_case wrote: post #47
swatcoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads. Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be sh…

You can buy old rackmount servers on ebay for relatively cheap and used them as desktop PCs AFAIK (though they can be on the noisier side).

... and paying it back in power use

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#115

Post by mike_d »

zarzavat wrote: post #62
ctoth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different Wouldn't this be ... collusion? Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something. OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into…

No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal. OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.

What?? Replace DRAM with peaches or table legs and you have the exact example they give you during management training to explain implicit collusion.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#118

Post by AdieuToLogic »

pprotas wrote: post #101
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What specifically happened in June to set this off? Tariffs implemented by this administration: "Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of greater price pressures to come. The Fed will wa…

Why did European prices have the same increase then?

> Why did European prices have the same increase then?

Where do Europeans get their DRAM from?

If it is the same handful of companies the US gets their DRAM from, then why would Europeans pay any less? Because the EU is not engaging in the same asinine trade war?

Sounds good in theory, but in practice those same few companies can set prices for markets outside the US to be at/near US prices. It doesn't take much effort for manufacturers to set their prices at or near those of their competitors and rely on an implicit mutually assured destruction[0] understanding.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#119

Post by pixelfarmer »

wkat4242 wrote: post #13
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would already have contracts in place.

For a while, yes. But I'm sure they will want to sell it for longer than a year or so. Even Samsung is running into this issue now: their own internal foundry is refusing to give them a long term contract now so the S26 series will become more expensive. If this happens to Samsung, what leverage will a player like Valve have?

> Even Samsung is running into this issue now [...]

These large corpos are so greedy to the point they harm themselves. I remember something similar with Amazon, where the Amazon shop had to redo the whole architecture from some microservice setup back to a monolithic approach because they used AWS and paid these weirdly structured prices like everyone else. Which made running a monolithic architecture under such constraints inherently cheaper. Not sure what the resulting compounded business cost for this "endeavor" was, but more often that not such things are never accounted for, so they don't show up as an issue.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#120

Post by platevoltage »

pprotas wrote: post #101
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What specifically happened in June to set this off? Tariffs implemented by this administration: "Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of greater price pressures to come. The Fed will wa…

Why did European prices have the same increase then?

I'm sure if they didn't keep the prices somewhat similar, you would have a bunch of people in Europe selling RAM to Americans.
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