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Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

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Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#81

Post by muldvarp »

riskable wrote: post #66

Hopefully this will put pressure on the market to produce much more efficient AI models. As opposed to bigger, then bigger, and then even BIGGER models (which is the current trend). FYI: gpt-oss:120b is better at coding (in benchmarks and my own anecdotal testing) than gpt5-mini. More importantly, it's so much faster too. We need more of this kind of optimization. Note that gpt5-mini is estimated to be around ~150 bi…

> We need more of this kind of optimization.

Who is the "we" in this sentence? The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?

The advantages of LLMs are tiny for software engineers (you might be more productive, you don't get paid more) and the downsides are bad to life-altering (you get to review AI slop all day, you lose your job).

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#82

Post by gruez »

littlestymaar wrote: post #65
gordonhart wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1000 in 2010 is ~$1500 today — kids won't know these prices because the currency has been debased pretty rapidly in recent years.

Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement. (You can have inflation while your currency go up relatively to all the others on the FX market, like what happened to USD in 2022-S1, or you can have massive inflation difference between countries sharing the same currency, like it happened in the Euro Area between 2022 and today).

>Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement.

Not to mention that "debasement" doesn't make sense anymore given that there basically aren't any currencies on the gold standard anymore. At best you could call a pegged currency that was devalued as being debased (with the base being the pegged currency), but that doesn't apply to USD. "debasement" therefore is just a pejorative way saying "inflation" or "monetary expansion".

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#83

Post by bigbadfeline »

walterbell wrote: post #40

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chip-crunch-how-ai-boom-... > spot prices of DRAM, used in various applications, nearly tripled in September from a year earlier.. improving profitability of non-HBM chips has helped fuel memory chipmakers' share price rally this year, with Samsung's stock up more than 80%, while SK Hynix and Micron shares have soared 170% and 140% respectively... industry is going through a classi…

> Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction.

Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.

I guess, you offered the news hoping prices will fall... In terms of real economic analysis there's a lot to say here but let me point at only one of the many entry points of the rabbit hole:

"Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Microsoft and all other AI wannabes are hoarding GPUs and thus RAM, they hope to sell them to you for a price of subscription which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding and trust-like behavior against the public.

The hoarding and inflation economy we live in is a weapon against the public, at the moment, there's no visible force that isn't laboring diligently on the enhancement of that weapon, so the timeline of change is likely to stretch somewhere between far in the future to infinity... just hoping otherwise is futile.

If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.

As I said, this is just scratching the surface, there's a lot more which cannot fit in a single comment.

Edit: actually not. The parent comment was edited after mine, to include a link to MS inadvertently admitting to the hoarding of GPUs and RAM.

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#84

Post by numpad0 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #11
zparky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, DDR5 prices have nearly doubled in less than 2 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5200....

Are those graphs specifically for the US? When I change the country in the top right, it doesn't seem like the graphs are changing, and considering they're in USD, I'm assuming it's US-only? Is the same doubling happening world-wide or is this US-specific, I guess is my question? Edit: one data point, I last bought 128GB of RAM in March 2024 for ~€536, similar ones right now costs ~€500, but maybe the time range is t…

It just means RAMs aren't sold in volume in your area, if you're not feeling it...

[1]: https://kakaku.com/item/K0001448114/pricehistory/ (archive: https://archive.is/CHLs2)

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#85

Post by hexbin010 »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #83
walterbell wrote: post #40

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chip-crunch-how-ai-boom-... > spot prices of DRAM, used in various applications, nearly tripled in September from a year earlier.. improving profitability of non-HBM chips has helped fuel memory chipmakers' share price rally this year, with Samsung's stock up more than 80%, while SK Hynix and Micron shares have soared 170% and 140% respectively... industry is going through a classi…

> Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction. Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing. I guess, you offered the news hoping prices will fall... In terms of real economic analysis there's a lot to say here but let me point at only one of the many entry points of the rabbit hole: "Microsoft CEO says t…

> the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines.

This makes me so angry.

The private companies told governments they want money and the governments replied "sure we'll just steal it from citizens and lie and sell it as a tax, no problem. We'll just go hard on the net zero excuse lol" ??

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#86

Post by sapiogram »

jonas21 wrote: post #77
654wak654 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best we're getting is probably a stop to the price raises, but no price cuts. Kids will continue to grow up not knowing a $600 flagship GPU or a $1000 gaming PC.

For $50, kids these days can buy a Raspberry Pi that would have run circles around the best PC money could buy when I was a kid. Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build. I find it hard to pity kids who can't afford the absolute latest and greatest when stuff that…

> Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build.

RTX 5060 is slower than the RTX 2080 Ti, released September 2018. Digital Foundry found it to be 4% slower in 1080p, 13% slower in 1440p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ob40dZ3JU

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#87

Post by Havoc »

tuhgdetzhh wrote: post #12

I bet some are already buying the highest capacatiy DDR5 DIMMs in bulk to later put them on eBay in the upcoming major DRAM shortage.

I’ve been selling unused ddr4 on eBay. It’s not as profitable as one would think tbh even with elevated demand. Only making a profit on the ones I initially acquired 2nd hand

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#88

Post by gruez »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #83
walterbell wrote: post #40

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chip-crunch-how-ai-boom-... > spot prices of DRAM, used in various applications, nearly tripled in September from a year earlier.. improving profitability of non-HBM chips has helped fuel memory chipmakers' share price rally this year, with Samsung's stock up more than 80%, while SK Hynix and Micron shares have soared 170% and 140% respectively... industry is going through a classi…

> Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction. Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing. I guess, you offered the news hoping prices will fall... In terms of real economic analysis there's a lot to say here but let me point at only one of the many entry points of the rabbit hole: "Microsoft CEO says t…

>Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.

Where does it say it was funded by $150B of public loans?

>which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding

All investment resembles "speculative hoarding'. You're pouring money into a project now with the expectation that it'll pay off in decades.

> and trust-like behavior against the public.

???

>If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.

Datacenters are actually associated with lower electricity costs in the US

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/10/30/the-data-...

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#89

Post by [deleted] »

bob1029 wrote: post #36
tehjoker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lower prices are ok if they are selling more units, the question is whether the price point * units is Pareto optimal overproduction means unsold units which is very bad, you pay a cost for every unsold unit underproduction means internal processes are strained, customers are angry, but a higher price per a unit... can you increase the price by more than you are underproducing?

If we want to engage with game theory here, I would argue that overproduction is a much safer bet than underproduction from the perspective of Samsung, et. al. Underproduction brings additional caveats that manifest as existential risks. For example, encouraging your customers to move to entirely different technologies or paradigms that completely obviate the need for your product in the first place. If you leave a b…

[deleted]

Re: Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

#90

Post by bigbadfeline »

muldvarp wrote: post #81
riskable wrote: post #66

Hopefully this will put pressure on the market to produce much more efficient AI models. As opposed to bigger, then bigger, and then even BIGGER models (which is the current trend). FYI: gpt-oss:120b is better at coding (in benchmarks and my own anecdotal testing) than gpt5-mini. More importantly, it's so much faster too. We need more of this kind of optimization. Note that gpt5-mini is estimated to be around ~150 bi…

> We need more of this kind of optimization. Who is the "we" in this sentence? The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software? The advantages of LLMs are tiny for software engineers (you might be more productive, you don't get paid more) and the downsides are bad to life-altering (you get to review AI slop all day, you lose your job).

> The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?

This is already a fact and it's set in stone - making AI cheaper won't change anything in that regard. However, a cheaper AI will allow the laid-off software engineers to use models independently of those firing them, and even compete on an equal footing.

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