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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

#251

Post by keyringlight »

chii wrote: post #42
swatcoder wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but from a platform and brand development perspective, there may be smarter strategies. Their interest isn't necessarily in squeezing out the most margin on each unit. If unexpected market conditions let them more or less hit their original margin targets but get far more units installed in homes, that could be much better for them in the long term. There's a lot we can't know as outsiders, at the moment.

> that could be much better for them in the long term. i agree. Valve's money machine is with the steam platform, rather than any hardware sales - breaking even on hardware is sufficient imho. Valve's existential threat is from microsoft closing off windows somehow (or extracting rent...like a store!). Therefore, pushing steam machines which can be run without windows, is both business expansion as well as an insuran…

I'd wonder how much Valve has agreed to buy other parts and tooling/manfacturing services. Then they could have scenarios where they have a pile of AMD chips and the rest of the parts, but limited or no VRAM/RAM/NAND to complete the systems so they can be sold, or they've spent a pile of money designing and working with a manufacturer to get to the stage where they can start making batches, but can't get the volume to bring in a real benefit.

Being pragmatic, I wonder if Valve benefit from the health of the PC market, whether they'll also put efforts into helping people get more life out of their existing machines, or individuals/businesses refurbishing to sell on the used market with more confidence. There's already an angle for reducing e-waste with the win10 end of life if it can be tied into installing linux.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#252

Post by ben_w »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #118
pprotas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effo…

> 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.

If a company in A sells a widget W to both the EU and the USA, such that a consumer in the EU and the USA pay the same prices even though the USA has a tariff and Europe doesn't, then the company will make a lot more profit per unit selling all their W in the EU and none in the USA.

I'm not at all sure what's happening at any given moment with the USA's tariffs on anything, given the chaos over there. But let's say W is the set of all things relevant to AI data centres. What this means is that all the data centres are now much cheaper to build in Europe rather than in the USA. Data centres can be put just about anywhere, given they're used over the internet anyway. This means that the companies selling W would have all the demand they want for W in the EU, so they could sell all of their supply of W in the EU, so they could get a higher profit margin on all of it.

I'm not sure how much DC investment money is going to which parts of the world, but I am sure that if all the suppliers stopped shipping to the USA because they could sell as much as they could make everywhere else in the world for more profit (and the same purchaser price after tariffs), I would have heard about it.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#253

Post by K0balt »

gbil wrote: post #227
AndrewDavis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To those who haven't heard how colossal the size of OpenAIs contracts are. 900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

Now thinking of this from the other side, 2 big DRAM producers are taking the risk to dedicate a very big part of their production to AI and if we assume they also have similar deals with other AI companies or big datacenters, what is their risk profile if the AI bubble bursts? Are they viable as companies then ? What is their plan B ?

I think the price increases we are seeing are a direct result of the skepticism about AI scale viability. The big dram houses aren’t increasing capacity, due to the risks you mention.

So demand from other sources has to be suppressed through being priced out in order to meet those supply promises made to OAI in ignorance of their true scale.

This is OAI doing suppliers dirty by making economy distorting moves without transparency, intentionally distorting the market in an effort to hurt competitors.

Yet another example of the “free market” creating destruction for the general public.

As a thought experiment, replace “dram” with “rice” or another essential food stock. Market manipulation such as this is wildly irresponsible, anti-humanity and antithetical to public good. Wars are started over less.

This is an excellent example of the actual alignment of OpenAI as an organization. Yet we are to trust them with leading the way in the alignment of our manque oracles of truth and power?

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#254

Post by tuetuopay »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #56
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…

Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?

That's what HBM is actually. The memory dies are directly next to the GPU die, on the same substrate. The main difference between Apple SoC and GPUs is the former use regular LPDDR while GPUs use HBM.

One of the key points of HBM is that dies are stacked up with many, MANY, more signals and channels. That's how NVIDIA has a memory bandwidth an order of magnitude higher than M4: 550GB/s for the M4 Max, 4.6TB/s for H200. And yes, that's bytes per second, not bits per second.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#255

Post by franga2000 »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #198
franga2000 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely not saying it's a binary can/can't afford situation. The point is that people don't "afford" things equally. I might some need RAM so badly that I'm prepared to take a huge risk and spend half of my paycheck on it. But that doesn't matter because someone else has 3x my paycheck, savings, and investment portfolio and a good credit score. How much money someone can spend on somethong is no indicator of h…

Scarcity is a function of demand. That doesn't change the importance of what I said! In fact, it proves my point. The reason that "some rich bastard" is willing to pay such prices for gpus or ram or anything else is because they expect it to generate revenue for them equal to or greater than the amount they paid for it. How do they generate revenue? By selling a product! Who do they sell the product to? People like y…

Your logic that OpenAI can by proxy afford to buy out the entire world's supply of RAM because consumers value OpenAI products more than other RAM-dependent things assumes that OpenAI's money comes from selling goods or services to those consumers. It doesn't. The overwhelming majority of people pay zero dollars per year on AI services, while almost everyone spends at least a few hundred a year on gadgets that need RAM and other services that run on servers that need it as well.

The money OpenAI is using to starve the rest of us of RAM is coming from pumped up valuation through circular investments, investor FOMO, cheap debt and often straight up gambling. Rich bastards know that they can pump money into the bubble to grow it and hopefully cash out before it bursts. Nowhere in that process did any regular person value AI datacenters over other uses of RAM.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#256

Post by master_crab »

perks_12 wrote: post #222
omgmajk wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked our local apple store website and going from 48gb of ram on a M4 MacBook Pro it's 1500€ to get 128gb. Seems about the same :E

You actually get more, for the 1500€ you don't have to mess with sticks yourself. They solder it directly on your mainboard. If that isn't great service, I don't know what is.

I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. The sarcasm in the comment is pretty obvious.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#257

Post by Aerroon »

PeterStuer wrote: post #174
Aurornis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big news story this cycle is that OpenAI secured two large contracts with two separate DRAM companies at the same time, carefully timing the deals so that neither DRAM company knew about the deal with other. Had either company known about the true demand from OpenAI they would have charged a lot more, but each only saw about half. In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were bo…

You have to wonder whether they realy intend to use the ram, or they just spotted an opportunity to corner an essential market and choke/extort in resale.

I'm wondering this as well. Buying 40% of global production just sounds too much. What kind of user counts would they require for that much compute to pay off? Billions of people? What's the chance they could actually get that many users and charge them money? Zero?

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#258

Post by euroderf »

amarcheschi wrote: post #231
euroderf wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free GPUs for everyone! Bring a truck!

I honestly can't wait to use used gpus as lego bricks similar to what kids in Weimar republic did with cash

My self-training robot army is poised to conquer all. It's merely waiting for parts.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#259

Post by kasabali »

PeterStuer wrote: post #174
Aurornis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big news story this cycle is that OpenAI secured two large contracts with two separate DRAM companies at the same time, carefully timing the deals so that neither DRAM company knew about the deal with other. Had either company known about the true demand from OpenAI they would have charged a lot more, but each only saw about half. In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were bo…

You have to wonder whether they realy intend to use the ram, or they just spotted an opportunity to corner an essential market and choke/extort in resale.

> Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#260

Post by merpkz »

If things go the way they are, I wonder how long until buying a used Playstation 4 (8GB DDR5 RAM) at around 100USD a piece to put Linux on it and use as a server in cluster will become viable thing to do? Bring back console clusters!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

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