Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The RAM shortage could last years

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 536 posts

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#251

Post by diego_sandoval »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

Did OpenAI's order actually kickstart the "panic" over RAM?

Are they really such a big RAM buyer?

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#252

Post by c22 »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #251
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

Did OpenAI's order actually kickstart the "panic" over RAM? Are they really such a big RAM buyer?

Apparently...

> OpenAI’s rapid growth, fueled by the success of ChatGPT and other AI products, led to a landmark agreement in October to purchase 900,000 DRAM wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix—amounting to roughly 40% of global supply. This surge in demand, coupled with limited manufacturing capacity, sent prices for memory kits skyrocketing. [0]

[0]: https://peq42.com/blog/openai-canceling-many-large-purchase-...

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#253

Post by Mawr »

nilkn wrote: post #224

As an aside, recently I wanted to refresh my gaming PC, but the price shock and general lack of availability of buying components individually made it seem hardly worth it, so I just kept deferring the project. Then, mostly by chance, I saw that my local Microcenter had some pre-builts for sale, and I ended up picking one up for The last time I built a gaming PC was upwards of a decade ago, and at that time the preva…

> and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built

That's still the case, and always will be — with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline.

Beyond that, the chance they've chosen good components and haven't tried to screw you over on less flashy ones like the motherboard and power supply is low.

That's not to say it's literally impossible to ever find a good deal. You very well might have. Doesn't change anything though.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#254

Post by edg5000 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #159
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they gradually increase production capacity then prices stay high for 10+ years (or for as long as it takes for demand to crash) because a gradual increase in production takes that long for them to add enough capacity for current demand. If they add enough capacity to meet current demand quickly then if demand crashes they still have billions of dollars in loans used to build capacity for demand that no longer exi…

do we have evidence of RAM manufacturers going bankrupt? do we have evidence that the increased capacities after the mentioned past shortages went unused or were operated at a loss?

as a starting point, asianometry has some good videos on this

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#255

Post by onion2k »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #251
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

Did OpenAI's order actually kickstart the "panic" over RAM? Are they really such a big RAM buyer?

They ordered 40% of the global RAM production for 2025/26. It was a non-binding agreement that either side could easily withdraw from but they're essentially trying to buy about half of all the RAM.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#256

Post by locknitpicker »

LastTrain wrote: post #247

Something I haven’t been able to reconcile: If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software? This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

> If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down.

Supposedly AI drives down the cost of producing software,not the "price".

> How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software?

Currently, the cost of AI is between $20/month and around $200/month per developer.

I think the huge billions you're seeing in the news are the investment cost on AI companies, who are burning through cash to invest in compute infrastructure to allow both training and serving users.

> This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

Who knows? What I know is that I need >64GB of RAM to run local models, and that means most people will need to upgrade from their 8Gb/16GB setup to do the same. Graphics cards follow mostly the same pattern.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#257

Post by repeekad »

LastTrain wrote: post #247

Something I haven’t been able to reconcile: If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software? This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

Analyst says it would require a new $35/month subscription for every iPhone user, or a new $180/month for every Netflix subscriber.

Claude Max subscriptions have gone up, but do you think every Netflix user will pay for one?..

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#258

Post by buccal »

raydev wrote: post #230
brikym wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's happening. Cursor 3 moved to rust. A lot of people are using Zed (rust) instead of vscode.

It won't be "happening" until Slack, Teams, and Discord leave Electron behind. They are the apps that need to be open 24/7.

Teams works similarly in browser tab and "natively". Slack was similar if I remember correctly.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#259

Post by lmm »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #212
lmm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about 300Mb, where is that going to move the needle for you? And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language then 300Mb is a price more than worth paying. Likewise if the alternative is the app never getting started, or being single-platform-only, because the available build systems suck too bad. There ought to be a short one-liner that anyone can run to get easily installable "binaries" for their PyQt a…

There's a world of difference between using a memory safe language and shipping a web browser with your app. I'm pretty sure Avalonia, JavaFX, and Wails would all be much leaner than electron.

The people who hate Electron hate JavaFX just as much if not more, and I'm not sure it would even use less memory. And while the build experience isn't awful, it's still a significant amount of work to package up in "executable" form especially for a platform different from what you're building on, or was until a couple of years ago. And I'm pretty sure Avalonia is even worse.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#260

Post by DosUser88 »

brikym wrote: post #225
rekabis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well And hopefully kill Electron. I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.

It's happening. Cursor 3 moved to rust. A lot of people are using Zed (rust) instead of vscode.

Are you sure about Cursor? I haven't seen anything about that, I think it's still based on VSCode/electron.
Post reply on HN