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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

#51

Post by jdswain »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #38
datakan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…

I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever? I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common. If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI ag…

I too have an M1 Pro and it does everything I need to do. I bought it in 2023, so it's 'only' 3.5 years old now.

Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#52

Post by nullsmack »

Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#53

Post by bpye »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #4

Storage has more than doubled as well. The same SSD (4TB M.2) I bought in September 2025 for £229 is now £500. I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...

Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now.

The possibility that these fail does concern me.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#54

Post by Legend2440 »

happyPersonR wrote: post #35
phonon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them

>even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend

According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour.

The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#55

Post by mk_stjames »

I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market.

The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.

So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.

I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#57

Post by stuxnet79 »

tedggh wrote: post #56

I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.

While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here.

It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#59

Post by milesvp »

davkan wrote: post #46
seanp2k2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan unti…

My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.

It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#60

Post by greggoB »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #57
tedggh wrote: post #56

I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.

While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell o…

My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices.

I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.

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