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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#341

Post by pjc50 »

paganel wrote: post #321
energy123 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.

> either in a free market o Then why all the anti-coal mining diktats coming down from Brussels?

Large Combustion Plant Directive: coal incompatible with both traditional air quality measurements and CO2 emissions.

Renewables deployment is happening fast. Grid upgrades are not. Batteries .. it depends.

Even nuclear darling France has set solar records: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/15/france-germany-set-da...

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#342

Post by throwaway2037 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #82
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. Are the Netherlands a large proportion of global datacenters?

Is that relevant? The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.

High-level, I would agree with you. One thing that blows me away: I think I read that Northern Virginia, USA has the highest data center density in the world. Mostly it is due to demand from US gov't, military, and spy agencies (like NSA). How did they do it? In mainstream media, I don't see any news about a stressed power grid in this area. I guess the US gov't carefully coordinated with local power providers to continuously upgrade their power grid? This is a real question. It makes no sense to me. No shilling/trolling here.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#343

Post by throwaway2037 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #103
estimator7292 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that relevant? The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.

What the grid looks like in different countries is very different. The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables, which is an inconvenience for adding capacity because that's around where you have to start really dealing with storage in order to add more. In most other places the percentage is significantly less than that and then you can easily add more of the cheap-but-intermittent stuff because a cloudy da…

    > The Dutch power grid is already almost 50% renewables
I was a bit stunned when I read this. Your estimate is very close for 2025 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth...

I calculate about 43.5% was solar or wind. What is way crazier is the "bend in the curve" of production sources in the last 10 years. Look here at how fast solar and wind is growing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netherlands_electricity_g...

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#344

Post by throwaway2037 »

jaeyson wrote: post #223
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add a more local hurdle as well, the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. That is, memory capacity is reserved for datacenters yet to be built, but this will do weird things if said datacenter const…

That year 2030, man I'm feeling weird on that timeline in general...

I know that you comment is midly off topic, but I am going through the same out of body experience each time I see a major project announces an opening date of 2030 or later.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#345

Post by rimliu »

moffkalast wrote: post #68
zeristor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn’t help if another one goes bankrupt that’ll only make things worse.

Sounds like they're too big to fail, maybe we should bail them out to reinforce that they will get rewarded for making bad decisions.

That's only sound is it not. If you take away the hype - nothing critical actually depends on LLMs. You can remove them all today, and nothing bad would happen.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#346

Post by close04 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #237
formerly_proven wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM and to a lesser degree storage are notorious for their feast and famine cycles (Well that and collusion)

The problem in this case seems to have sprung from a lack of collusion. Altman reportedly approached Samsung and SK independently to strike deals for a large chunk of both companies' production. Neither party apparently knew he was negotiating with the other. If they had actually been communicating or colluding with each other, they would have put the screws to him, making it harder for OpenAI to assert control over…

> Neither party apparently knew he was negotiating with the other.

I don’t buy it that two of the largest manufacturers of DRAM in the world, from the same country, didn’t know this. Even of you ignore each company’s intelligence teams, that’s also the job of the country’s internal intelligence services, to make sure they know what all companies are doing and then make it so they have the best leverage to gain as much as possible. Both companies would have known “somehow” and played hardball.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#347

Post by throwawayffffas »

imtringued wrote: post #55
cco wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That card only had 16GB of memory; its memory bandwidth was 1TB/s.

You're saying this in a world where AMD's highest end consumer GPU in 2026 is also limited to 16 GB.

7900XT has 20GB and you can still get some unused ones.

R9700 has 32GB and is cheaper than most NVidia consumer GPUs, even though it's a "pro".

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#348

Post by ponector »

thelastgallon wrote: post #295

It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels. From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.

>> Cars used to super cheap before covid

Have they really ever been cheap? Also Tesla 3 is cheaper now, Yaris is still cheap as well.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#349

Post by fransje26 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #303
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.

> This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand RAM is built on a foundation of sand.

I laughed.
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