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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#302
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

I wouldn't even short Bitcoin, and that's been on the way out since the AI rise.

Shorting bitcoin would be a huge mistake IMO. Willing to be on the opposite of that trade as well!

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.

There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.

I have some bad news about how closely Econ 101 resembles the real world…

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against

OP is blatantly overconfident on his "prediction", so I called him out. Looks like I struck a nerve with some people.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#305

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...

I was facing a similar situation when I upgraded my system about a year and a half ago. I wanted to upgrade from 32GB RAM to 64GB. The kit (DDR5 6000) was $179. I knew that I might want to add an additional 64GB later on, so I had to decide if I should wait for prices to drop further.

I decided to get the extra RAM. Boy am I glad now. If I thought this was just a temporary spike, I would be tempted to sell the extra memory (I don't really need it yet), but I don't see prices falling anytime soon.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

I'm not OP, but; shorting requires careful timing. Because the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, I don't short.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#307
post #111

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

I don't understand the distinction you are making. 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 works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

They fixed prices in the past and now they have an easy cover, like egg producers had with eggs after the cull a few years ago

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to spin up a fab and undercut the current prices, I'd certainly appreciate it! I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.

If you did, then the big manufacturers would just sell a competitive product, at a loss if necessary, until you are driven out of business.

CXMT is about to reel in Apple as a customer and I don’t see Samsung doing a whole lot about it.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#309
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.

I've had a RAM stick fail. Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE. But I've seen plenty of other failures: - Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data. - One GPU, replaced under warranty. - One AIO water cooler,…

I have about 24TiB of RAM on the servers at work. We have had two sticks fail (both soon after purchase) in the last 10 years.

After the second, HP replaced all that we had from that batch.

HDDs fail every 3-6 months, there's a lot of them (3-4PB).

One PSU.

One CPU/motherboard. (I let the HP engineer handle that one.)

One NVMe drive.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also caused by the FREE market - consolidation, all markets tend to consolidate around a few companies due to economy of scale. The fix is regulation - we are going to have NOT-FREE-MARKET electricity, NOT-FREE-MARKET water supply, .... for vital services. I'm not talking about you, it's funny to see anti-regulation HN complain about a FREE MARKET working as such. Suddenly it's not so fun where you are at the…

Everybody needs electricity and water, but nobody needs more RAM except for companies. And they can pay for it.

> but nobody needs more RAM except for companies.

I'm amazed you could write this in apparent seriousness.

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