Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

idc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 107 posts

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#61

Post by walterbell »

krackers wrote: post #53
kllrnohj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it an opportunity for Apple? They are a customer of Samsung and Micron RAM modules just like everyone else is. They aren't in any unique position other than their user base is already used to paying extreme markup for RAM. Now whether Apple just eats the cost in their profit margin or charges even more for RAM remains to be seen.

Their supply chain prowess likely means they have already secured contracts for 2026 (and maybe even 2027), so they will not be affected by the price hike. But maybe they'll still use it as an opportunity to bump prices and rake in free profit, who knows.

Apple reportedly negotiated a 50% price increase in memory supply for 2026, down from a higher price given to other OEMs.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#62

Post by hackable_sand »

duped wrote: post #56
Youden wrote: post #45

"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…

It's not a zero sum game because silicon wafers are not a finite resource. Industry can and will produce more.

Neither are paperclips.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#63

Post by schlaus_kwab »

TrackerFF wrote: post #26

Imagine a future where a resourceful computer will be unobtanium, because AI companies decided to outbid consumers. Your PC will be just powerful enough to work as a terminal, with all the heavy lifting done by cloud compute data centers. Every functionality be will subscription-based. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

[dead]

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#64

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I don't really get the panic. This is the same as the pandemic, just for different reasons. A change in demand is causing supply shortages and price hikes. But the demand will eventually swing back as the current demand is completely unsustainable. AI demand will crumble, prices will bottom out, and companies who bet big on AI & RAM will end up going into big layoffs triggering another recession and a huge market crash. We literally just went through all this, it can't be a surprise.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#65

Post by tom_ »

TrackerFF wrote: post #26

Imagine a future where a resourceful computer will be unobtanium, because AI companies decided to outbid consumers. Your PC will be just powerful enough to work as a terminal, with all the heavy lifting done by cloud compute data centers. Every functionality be will subscription-based. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

I'm struggling to picture how we get there from here? There's a huge pile of second hand PCs available, and almost all of them are massively more powerful than necessary for terminal purposes only.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#66

Post by tokioyoyo »

duped wrote: post #56
Youden wrote: post #45

"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…

It's not a zero sum game because silicon wafers are not a finite resource. Industry can and will produce more.

If industry has a bit of fear that the demand will slow down by the time they can output meaningful amount of chips, then probably not. Time will show.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#67

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Youden wrote: post #45

"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…

> I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-efficient software?

If the consumer market can't get cheap RAM anymore, the natural result is a pivot back to server-heavy technology (where all the RAM is anyway) with things like server-side rendering and thin clients. Developers are far too lazy to suddenly become efficient programmers and there's plenty of network bandwidth.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#68

Post by krupan »

Youden wrote: post #45

"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…

This is a temporary problem driven by the AI bubble. It's going to hurt until the bubble pops, but when that happens other things are going to hurt

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#69

Post by xocnad »

treebeard901 wrote: post #58
Youden wrote: post #45

"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…

Code the AI will produce will solve the memory usage problems which is itself a result of lazy or poor human coders.

Nice assertion. Perhaps you meant that AI could be directed towards less memory intensive implementations. That would still have to be directed by those same lazy/poor coders because the code the AI is learning from is their bad code (for the most part).

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#70

Post by cedws »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #27

Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered. The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of…

Not sure that OpenAI's move was a very good one, they've just created a lot of enemies for themselves. I see comments all over the internet about AI slop making RAM expensive. It's going to eat into the profits of a lot of companies. People will be willing for this insanity to end.
Post reply on HN