Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#301

Post by Aurornis » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

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 ?

> what is their risk profile if the AI bubble bursts?

Exactly. This is why they’re not scrambling to invest in additional capacity. If these memory manufacturers went all in on new capacity it would take years to build out. If the bubble bursts, or even if it doesn’t burst and just tapers off back to normal demand, they would be in a bad position with excess manufacturing capacity that isn’t paying off.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#302

Post by immibis » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #271

jack_pp wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never gonna happen. Cash has no intrinsic value exccept maybe for use in fire / toiler paper. GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value. Their price might go down 50-75% but never 99%

> GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value. What is the instrinsic value of one of millions of GPUs, if the world only needs 15-20% of them?

About fifty teraflops.

That's the meaning of intrinsic calor - the device can do what it can do, regardless of market conditions. Today it has the value of fifty teraflops, and tomorrow it still does, unless it breaks. However, intrinsic value cannot be measured in dollars.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#303

Post by kasabali » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

deltoidmaximus wrote: post #287

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anyone want to buy a 2x16 GB DDR4-3200 kit that only fails memtest86 some of the time?

Have you tried underclocking or loosening the timings?

my experience is if even memtest86 fails the memory is truly borked.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#304

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

CraigJPerry wrote: post #149

Aurornis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing" First come first serve must means enterprising individuals would buy as much as they could afford and then immediately relist it on Facebook Marketplace for the actual market rate. Thinking that retailers could keep RAM prices low and also keep it in stock for you is irrational.

>> Thinking that retailers could keep RAM prices low and also keep it in stock for you is irrational. Not a claim i made

[deleted]

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#305

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #300

jorvi wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"prevent overcapacity" is just a fancy way of saying "we prefer to gouge consumers at little risk to us." Hopefully the Chinese manufacturers ram(p) up rapidly and spike Hynix and Samsung with heavily undercut prices.

> prevent overcapacity" is just a fancy way of saying "we prefer to gouge consumers at little risk to us." No it’s not. Memory business has been cyclical for years. Over expansion is a real risk because new manufacturing capacity is very expensive and takes a long time to come online. If they could make new manufacturing come online quickly they would do it and capture the additional profit of more sales.

Additional profit? They're making a lot more money right now than if they had more supply.

The risk of overexpansion is real but I really doubt they want to expand much in the next couple years. They don't have to worry about being undercut by small competitors so they can enjoy the moment.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#306

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #250

Aurornis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap The retail price of a product is a function of the market rate at the intersection of supply and demand. The price paid for inventory on the shelf doesn’t matter. It works both ways. If retailers bought a lot of RAM at high prices and then the market suddenly dropped, they could have to sell it at a loss. Some people get irrationally…

technically the house analogy isn't that good because there are lots of people who won't sell below what they bought for, even if there are no buyers at this price anymore. the house eventually sells if the seller is forced to sell, but price in such cases isn't necessarily 'correct' either. more liquid markets make better examples.

[deleted]

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#307

Post by ortusdux » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

Some stores are going to a 'market price' system because the are tired of constantly printing new price tags.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984629/ram-is-so-expensive-...

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#308

Post by Aurornis » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #250

Aurornis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap The retail price of a product is a function of the market rate at the intersection of supply and demand. The price paid for inventory on the shelf doesn’t matter. It works both ways. If retailers bought a lot of RAM at high prices and then the market suddenly dropped, they could have to sell it at a loss. Some people get irrationally…

technically the house analogy isn't that good because there are lots of people who won't sell below what they bought for, even if there are no buyers at this price anymore. the house eventually sells if the seller is forced to sell, but price in such cases isn't necessarily 'correct' either. more liquid markets make better examples.

> technically the house analogy isn't that good because there are lots of people who won't sell below what they bought for

Just ignore the downside part of the house analogy because it doesn’t apply to this current DRAM situation where prices went up.

The key point is that if you buy something and its value goes up, you’re not going to offer it for sale at the same price you paid for it. You’re going to sell it at market rate.

Everyone does this, including retailers. It elicits angry cries of “gouging” from people who want to believe retailers are the cause of the high prices and be angry at them, but the market is big. It’s supply and demand.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#309

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #268

K0balt wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The big dram houses aren’t increasing capacity, due to the risks you mention. Except they are > SK hynix to boost DRAM production by a huge 8x in 2026, still won't be enough for RAM shortages > It's also not just SK hynix that is boosting DRAM production capacity, with both Samsung and Micron rapidly increasing their respective DRAM production numbers. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/109011/sk-hynix-to-boost-dram...

Note to self don't trust tweak town.

That's such an impossibly big number for that timeline. The actual news is they're ramping up their newest node, which they were doing anyway, and which was a small percent of their total production.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#310

Post by immibis » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

m-schuetz wrote: post #240

Snoozus wrote: post #121

Maybe it's time we make a simple web page 100KB again? Is there some kind of CDN minification, adblocking and compression service? Maybe even server side rendering of websites? Then a smartphone would work fine with 1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy.

The majority of space is usually ads and I doubt websites want to reduce that.

Apple could make it happen. For some reason when an iPhone won't load something, people blame the thing instead of the phone. If they made Safari show an error page when a page used more than 256MB of RAM, suddenly the problem would disappear overnight.