The RAM shortage could last years • Hacker News Board

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#41

Post by saidnooneever » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

kubb wrote: post #24

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…

I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years. There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment. They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they wan…

love that theres virtually infinite capital there. meanwhile in the rest of the world there is virtually no food.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#42

Post by torginus » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:49 AM UTC

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…

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange.

If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#43

Post by mcwhy » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:49 AM UTC

Renaud wrote: post #13

jeff_vader wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until China invades Taiwan.. (ok, it's not too likely, but what if?)

I think RAM shortages would be the least of our problems… Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU. We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…

the scientists will switch sides with minimal issues, like they did after WWII

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#44

Post by xbmcuser » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

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…

I am betting the pendulum swings faster to the other side to excess capacity as all the construction lies of Altman fall through with financiers waking up the the fact they can't build the infrasctructure as fast nor make any profits on that infrastructure that will get built.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#45

Post by gck1 » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:52 AM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #18

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…

Memory makers did get themselves into this situation by selling all wafers for empty promises and alienating everyone but OpenAI tbh. I do hope they end up holding the bag once again, cause after covid and the cartel thing they don't seem to ever learn their lesson on how to have the tiniest amount of integrity.

While we're giving away bags, I'd like HDD manufacturers to get some too.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#46

Post by VladStanimir » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:54 AM UTC

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #33

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…

The people who fucked over consumers are left holding the back that they sold us out over? Oh no!

They won't be, prices are high because they are refusing to build capacity for demand that may evaporated by the time they are done. They are holding back and building only enough so when the bubble pops they will be fine.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#47

Post by ehnto » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

tuetuopay wrote: post #28

fouc wrote: post #3

I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of Google's TurboQuant[0] introduced 26 days prior. Given that TurboQuant results in a 6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches and up to 8x boost in speed, this optimization is already showing up in llama.cpp, enabling significantly bigger contexts without having to run a smaller model to fit it all in memory. Some people thought it might significantly improve the R…

The net effect won’t be a memory use reduction to achieve the same thing. We’ll do more with the same amount of memory. Companies will increase the context windows of their offerings and people will use it. That is the sad reality of the future of memory.

I am not convinced that more context will be useful, practical use of current models at 1mil context window shows they get less effective as the window grows. Given model progress is slowing as well, perhaps we end up reaching a balance of context size and competency sooner than expected.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#48

Post by torginus » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:57 AM UTC

kubb wrote: post #24

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…

I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years. There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment. They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they wan…

China already has a well developed DRAM industry, as DRAM is somewhat easier than logic, and can tolerate a much higher defect rate. The industry will figure this out.

Another point is I often see the money argument - like country X has more money, so they can afford to do more and better R&D, make more stuff.

This stuff comes out of factories, that need to be built, the machinery procured, engineers trained and hired.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#49

Post by sph » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

I fear the author and most commenters are not aware of the law of demand and supply. If there is demand for consumer RAM, there will be supply for consumer RAM. It just takes time and risk-assessment to scale up operations.

We have RAM shortage now, we will have very cheap RAM tomorrow. It’s not like production is bottlenecked by raw materials. Chip companies just need to assess if the demand by AI companies will last so it’s better to scale up, or perhaps they should wait it out instead of oversupplying and cutting into their profits.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#50

Post by cco » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

torginus wrote: post #42

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…

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange. If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that t…

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