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Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

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Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#81

Post by christophilus »

We’ll see. The current situation is an anomaly caused in part by the AI boom generally, in part by the OpenAI shenanigans. This time will pass, and what comes after is hard to know. If the shortages are sustained long enough, innovation will happen. The economics of it will bring new players into the market.

DRAM is a notoriously cyclical market, though, and wise investors are leery of jumping into a frothy top. So, it’ll take a while before anyone decides the price is right to stand up a new competitor.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#82

Post by PostOnce »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #67
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.

Developers would prefer to write good software, the challenge and the craftsmanship are a draw.

However, the customers do not care and will not pay more so the business cannot justify it most of the time.

Who will pay twice (or five times) as much for software written in C instead of Python? Not many.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#83

Post by Lutzb »

pixl97 wrote: post #30
kubb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-fi will never materialize. But the ones passionate about it are so desperate for the faux future that they won't be able to tell when they're being duped. Just wait until the next great collapse, a disaster big enough to force change. Hopefully we'll have the right ideas lying around at the time to restructure our social communication system. Until then, it's slow decline. Embrace it.

Sci-fi has materialized, we're living in it now. The problem is it's the dystopia edition.

As someone succinctly put it: The future is here, it is just very unevenly distributed.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#84

Post by bongodongobob »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #37
bongodongobob wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's fueled by huge misinformation campaigns. It's going to kill art, put us all out of the job, uses 1.5 million gallons per query, pollutes water, will kill the electric grid, etc. These seem to be the most popular uninformed lines of thinking.

I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are really poor in quality and can be emotionally driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who get surprisingly aggressive if you say anything remotely negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these tools. Particularly how they are trained and d…

I live near the Great Lakes. Data center proposals are popping up and people think they are going to drain lake michigan. They think they will consume more power than the entire state consumes right now. Idiot yokels are chasing away what could be an absolute boon for our economy. But they'd rather have papermills and make cardboard boxes.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#85

Post by Forgeties79 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #84
Forgeties79 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are really poor in quality and can be emotionally driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who get surprisingly aggressive if you say anything remotely negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these tools. Particularly how they are trained and d…

I live near the Great Lakes. Data center proposals are popping up and people think they are going to drain lake michigan. They think they will consume more power than the entire state consumes right now. Idiot yokels are chasing away what could be an absolute boon for our economy. But they'd rather have papermills and make cardboard boxes.

I don’t know the specifics of your region’s deal but the massive AI center deal Louisiana negotiated with facebook is absolutely awful. All it’s going to do is drive up energy costs for the residents and give very little in return, and that’s under the ideal situation in which it actually pans out like they’re expecting it to.

They also don’t care about the communities they are impacting in the slightest. https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#86

Post by TrackerFF »

antonkochubey wrote: post #42
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.

“Heavy lifting” here being running 108 MB of JavaScript to render shopping cart of an online store, correct? Or consuming 2 GB of RAM to have Teams running in the background doing nothing? Yeah, if we got rid of that as a result of RAM shortages, that’d be great.

You are absolutely correct that much of modern software is extremely bloated. So maybe a silver lining is that less memory for the next couple of years will also force developers to produce leaner software. Electron apps being the first in line.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#88

Post by Kodiack »

zozbot234 wrote: post #49
hinkley wrote: post #34

One of the things I’ve been hoping for every time a new EC2 instance comes out is for them to unpin the memory:core ratio a bit. I don’t expect they have enough r# and c# users to completely balance things out so what they’re really doing is selling people more CPUs to get the memory they need. It would be nice if it were creeping up generation to generation. But if this keeps up I fear the opposite.

The best way of "unpinning" those ratios for many ephemeral workloads is to use Lambda/FaaS, not EC2.

For many ephemeral workloads, sure, but that comes at the expense of generally worse and less consistent CPU performance.

There are plenty of workloads where I’d love to double the memory and halve the cores compared to what the memory-optimised R instances offer, or where I could further double the cores and halve the RAM from what the compute-optimised C instances can do.

“Serverless” options can provide that to an extent, but it’s no free lunch, especially in situations where performance is a large consideration. I’ve found some use cases where it was better to avoid AWS entirely and opt for dedicated options elsewhere. AWS is remarkably uncompetitive in some use cases.

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#89

Post by blibble »

kubb wrote: post #51
IAmGraydon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they can't even utilize what they bought!

It feels like abuse. They shouldn't be able to get away with such trickery.

stockpiling solely in order to deprive your competitors of a commodity is anti-competitive and illegal

Re: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

#90

Post by IAmGraydon »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #55
IAmGraydon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they can't even utilize what they bought!

You do know that they can hire semiconductor packaging companies to put together memory modules the same way they bought the DRAM wafers, right?

Sure thing. Are they? And also, why would they do that? Do you think OpenAI wants to enter into the DRAM manufacturing business? Or were they looking for a way to take as much supply away as possible - paying for the wafers instead of finished DRAM?
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