> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
The margins on memory for Apple were so absurd that they should have more ability to eat up the costs, if they wanted to. I'm assuming they would, to the extent that they're a device company more so than a service company yet.
I don't think Apple ever adjusts the price of existing products, for better (eating the cost of part shortages) or worse (over-charging for old parts). The real test will be what they do with upcoming products.
Altman should be jailed for this. Single-handedly crashing consumer spending in an entire sector of the economy. At the very least for the reason that that was supposed to happen _after_ they had the AI in hand to supplant majority white collar labor, not before.
This is a dystopia no one really thought about. A handful of people anointed to spend borrowed money on a (so far unprofitable) quest to destabilize the world's economy, alienate the working class and make everything we've enjoyed the past 15-20 years a luxury.
The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.
No? Lots of philosophers and writers thought about the problems that happen when capital concentrates to the level that individuals can move nations.
It’s like a whole fucking genre.
What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys
I am not convinced by this whole AI water scare. Doesn't the water just evaporate? It's not a finite resource like oil.
If the problem is that these companies are creating an externality by straining the local water supply, then maybe we should simply tax water more where appropriate? I don't think any sort of shame will be effective.
For the past decade water has been mismanaged in inefficient farming practices, like bad irrigation practices or production of alfalfa to feed foreign livestock. We also waste a ton of water on our big dumb lawns. "cooling datacenters" doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Fresh water is a finite resource. It replenishes extremely slowly in certain forms. Like ground water. Lakes and rivers can run dry if you pull too much from them, see: Iran. AI data centers are making the problem of overuse worse. We were already pulling too much water in areas. With these data centers, some places that didn't have a problem are starting to.
Yes? Reports are that OpenAI is buying unfinished memory kits which they have no capacity to complete. It appears that OpenAI is just buying them to remove them from the market and damage their competitors. In United States, that used to be considered against the law if we were actually enforcing such things.
Since COVID, this has been the norm for any industry that requires chips.
Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.
I doubt this is to create artificial scarcity. Especially when OpenAI is the biggest player thought to be able to build AGI first and that it is now backed by the US & the Saudis.
The US Government, Saudis, consumer/private investors apparently or at least the one that can build the most economically useful AI. I myself believe Google is most likely.
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
But OpenAI legitimately needs HBM. Amazon in this instance doesn't need food and is doing purely to create artificial scarcity. If OpenAI were to actually not use the HBM then it could mean something.
That's the whole problem: it's unlikely that OpenAI will actually use all of that HBM. It seems probable that they are using it to create artificial scarcity for their competitors.
IANAL, but yes, I believe it can nullify the claim. Bumping into someone on the sidewalk is only battery if the prosecution demonstrates intent to harm.
Yeah it would definitely still be a problem, but history shows that life finds a way. Even if everyone has to eat nothing but planted potatoes from any patch of grass that one can lay eyes on.
What history has taught us is that life finds a way by staying together and each person having their function within society, only some of which is growing or producing food.
Simple: they create value for the right people. Namely, politicians who get their donations, and a generation that, despite not having enough children to grow the economy organically, doesn't want to work any... er... wants to retire.
Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.
So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.
> they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return
maybe not a popular opinion but, this is the original sin imo; putting retirement/pension on the market makes for so many perverse incentives to keep things growing at any cost...
you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.
And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.
I find it fascinating that he's had the benefit of the doubt for soooo long.
This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.
1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market.
2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence.
3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.
If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.
In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.
Yes, and I actually think it's a symptom of advanced societal decay that you think this is somehow an unreasonable proposition.
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
> Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?
(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)
That contract had little to do with this but I get why it's an easy, neatly packaged, personified scapegoat.
The ram price appreciation began 3 months before October 1st and his contract was about future capacity that has nothing to do with the current equilibrium price in consumer DRAM.
A surprising amount of people are gleefully happy to have their perceived enemies put in jail or worse even if and especially if there was no legitimate justification for it.
A lot of people on HN dislike Tim Cook for various reasons and many would literally “sacrifice” him just to get Apple to stop being so anti-consumer.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
Eh my (anemic) work laptop from 2019 probably won't get replaced for an extra year because my employer won't authorize the big laptop order at inflated prices.
I'm aware that the US is changing, but in the past, we had an idea that you don't go to jail unless there was a specific crime that you could be charged with.
This "crime" would be written down somewhere in what we called a "law", that would state penalties, with "maximum" sentences.
And, to forestall your comments, one of our other traditions was that you applied these rules even to lying sons of bitches (which Altman is).
I'm pretty sure this clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, no? Altman is intentionally sabotaging the global electronics supply chain using their existing market dominance to prevent competitors from being able to operate.
And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.
Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?
Since it clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, it will be easy for you to find case law that demonstrates that, alongside credible sources stating that OpenAIs actions are prosecutable that make that case.
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
I believe it depends on which parties are responsible for the criminal antitrust violations. Is it the manufacturers abusing monopoly power, or is it OpenAI abusing monopsony power?
I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
Clarifying because I think the downvoters maybe misunderstood the nature of my question: I meant, in the opinion of the parent commenter should the principals of Samsung etc. be jailed? I wasn’t taking a position myself, just asking what they thought.
You should look up the monopsony provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, as well as the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 which prohibits predatory price discrimination schemes. Scam Alt-Man should be paying the same price for RAM as us plebes, if the DOJ wasn’t derelict in its duty to enforce antitrust law.
It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.
mo·nop·so·ny /məˈnäpsənē/ a market situation in which there is only one buyer.
It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.
Like monopolies, monopsony power exists on a spectrum. For example, Walmart exercises extreme monopsony power over suppliers, despite not being the only retailer in town.
I feel like I got the last chopper out of 'nam buying my G.Skill 256GB 6000MT/s kit when I did. I paid $780 in July and now it's listed at.. $2700, over 300% higher. That and buying a bunch of sticks for some Tyan boards I got on a whim last year with some engineering samples I got working on them.
A year ago, Framework-branded memory for DIY laptops cost, IIRC, 2x Amazon for equivalent specs (not the same modules—the ADATA ones that Framework puts their stickers on are theoretically available retail but in practice complete unobtanium in most countries). Not Apple pricing, but they definitely have some margin to eat into.
Literally bought 96GB (4x24GB) of DDR5 5600Mhz (edit: RDIMM ECC) just 5 days ago, fearing the prices would go up even more moving forward. Paid 1500 EUR for it in total :/ Southern Europe FWIW.
Yikes, I hadn’t realized this was that big of a problem. The same exact G.skill z5 64Gb ram I bought 4 years ago is well on its way to being double the price. Does this have more to do with Crucial ending consumer product lines or tariffs?
And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.
What do you mean by this? From everything I can find points towards other companies winding down DDR4 production because of China's cheaper DDR4 production lines.
> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring. - https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
Every one seems so focused on that one company supposedly had "fake demand" just to ruin it for competitors, while the supply also seemingly is being suppressed, and no one seems to be talking about that. To me that seems like a much bigger deal, because then the market can't even restore the supply...
The toilet paper thing didn't really happen though because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
Did we live through the same pandemic? At least where I live, there was shortages for weeks, and scarce for months.
There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.
In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.
Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.
Perhaps a quantity below "a single company causes enough of a spike in global demand that it'll have demonstrable impact in nearly every single industry"
And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.
I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
> I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position
No. I’m genuinely curious, because I agree with you about how critical these components are. I ask because it doesn’t seem to me like the answers are immediately straightforward and wanted to hear serious replies to those questions.
How much is too much? It’s like porn: you know it when you see it.
Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply.
Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.
> The toilet paper thing didn't really happen [...]
Yes, it did.
> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)
I literally had a friend mail us a crate of TP in our time of need. Thankfully they had access to industrial suppliers.
Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.
The end of Crucial is a symptom, not a cause. Crucial is merely Micron's factory brand. Nothing is stopping OEMs like G.Skill or Kingston from buying DRAM chips from Micron and putting them on consumer RAM sticks.
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.
They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.
They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.
And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.
There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.
It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.
I think maybe long-term the effect of Korean companies no longer daring to reuse old machines to produce DDR4 because of US retribution is the bigger cause of that.
Repeating this weird claim won't make it true. DDR4 isn't going to come back into fashion, even during a DRAM shortage. Demand for DDR4 can't increase meaningfully when no current-generation processors can use it, and older-generation processors aren't seeing any increase in production or sales. DDR4 is not a substitute good for the RAM that's in short supply.
He's confused about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because they're afraid China would be the eventual buyer (via proxies) and they'd be inadvertently in violation of US sanctions , so instead of selling they just locked down the old machinery to gather dust instead.
And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been slowly but steadily increasing long before this crisis, after the crisis DDR4 prices have also tripled just like DDR5 prices, even in the used market. So regardless of whether it's a real demand or panic response, the effect is still real on people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems. These people who probably just wants to update RAM in their systems in the hope that it'd help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years while bracing the impact. Had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.
> meaningfully when no current-generation processors can use it
... You don't seriously believe no one is using DDR4 today, right? Sure, they may no be developing new chipsets or whatever, but large swaths of the PC population will still be on DDR4 for the foreseeable future, especially now with these prices.
What is this estimation based on? I'd think once the bubble pops pricing would start to return to normal levels and the general consensus seems to think the bubble won't last that long.
"once the bubble pops" people probably won't be interested in buying RAM.
If you would have asked me 5 years ago this wouldn't even become a bubble. I'm still amazed it did. It really taught me how much of the modern economy is just grift.
In my opinion we are witnessing the market influences of a new type of public-private "Phoebus cartel" except at a total global scale where anti-terrorism laws require pricing businesses and individuals out of owning their own compute forcing them to rent compute from multinational hyperscaler cloud businesses who are integrated with military intelligence operations. Computing technology after all is a weapon of mass destruction and the peaceful are being punished for the non peaceful. It is too dangerous for governments around the world to allow individuals to posses the immense power of computing technology. Call me chicken little but we are witnessing the end of publicly available private general computing. Market changes influencing cost effectiveness analysis to favor public cloud is a deliberate goal to secure national critical infrastructure. I also think this coincides with the limits of MOSFET scaling and RISC-V permissive licensing. My only credentials for this is 15+ years working in fintech I&O for a US Fortune 500 company.
It certainly feels like we are being squeezed from all sides. I think the push to require ID verification for websites is also part of the plot - it all feels too coordinated, like governments all over the world have the same exact agenda to destroy our privacy. At some point you will have to verify your ID to use any computer system, and it will act just as a terminal to the cloud.
I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.
What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.
Anti terrorism laws will compel society into smart cities, continuous attestation of very high confidence subject/applicant identity. It is the only way to accomplish the mission. You can see it has already happened with "Know Your Customer" rules in banking. Mobile banking adds continuous "Know Where Your Customer Is". As our digital twins are distilled from social media via age verification this adds "Know What Your Customer Has Done". Then as we interact with AI chatbots with very high confidence identity this adds "Know What Your Customer Is Thinking". The fusion of these data points will enable our digital twins to be simulated into "Is My Customer A Terrorist" and then we will all have to deal with the quality and reliability of these systems. There will also be an unprecedented opportunity to optimize banking and marketing. The only problem I see is consent of the people however this is what we have collectively decided as a society long ago with United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953) allowing the state to ultimately not require our consent or even awareness of its actions. Without having all the information it is impossible to come to any rational conclusion. We are out of the loop! Total Digitization is happening for better or for worse.
I thought Apple would get around and improve their memory prices with time, I guess it's the opposite: all manufacturers are now becoming Apple given these raises.
They are not becoming Apple. They are updating the prices of their components to the underlying market costs. Framework lets you replace the memory modules.
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
I bought a couple of terabytes of RAM and now I feel like one of those crypto-whales haha. It's just sitting there in the corner. One was a lucky one, too, because I tried to negotiate a guy to sell me a system with less RAM but he wouldn't discount it much. Now it pays for most of the cost of the damn thing.
These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
You don't NEED to fill the 12 ram slots. My personal 1U has an Epyc 9124 and only 4 of the 12 ram slots filled. I figured, ram will only get cheaper with time so I can fill the remaining 8 slots in the future. Turns out I was wrong, but regardless, the server runs fine on 4 sticks.
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
Placed an order from Lenovo on November 21st - 96gb of RAM in that machine, it still hasn't shipped yet - am wondering if/when they will try to "renegotiate" the deal... (supposed arrival date on that system is 01/02/2026)
From what I've read, he's tied up RAM manufacturers through 2029. That's a lot of quartely earnings reports for many firms in the economy where they watch consumer spend come to a screeching halt.
As with all Ponzi schemes OpenAI will eventually go bankrupt, yet it continues to receive money from the unwary. I wonder how the research division at Disney feels about what their bosses have done...
But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.
They bought unfinished components and have no ability to finish them. They're now waste just sitting on shelves and by the time we could do this and get them into production lines, they'll be obsoletd by DDR6.
Yeah, that is my main worry - that whatever they ordered is actually unusable for normal people once they go bankrupt, so there is not only nothing to auction of to the creditors, but also nothing to alleviate the shortage in the short term.
Now I'm curious: does this situation classify as force-majeure for a major firms? "Hey, you know, actually our entire consumer base just disappeared overnight. Crazy, huh?". And will various governments have to intervene to save them when/if that happens.
Not taking into account that they all be busy handing money to openAI, at least someone somewhere has to notice that something is very wrong.
Given that major memory manufacturers are abandoning consumer RAM production to focus on HBM for AI data centers, can we make a prediction that HBM prices will eventually fall enough to make it viable for consumer hardware?
It's not like Framework is choosing to do this just to screw consumers, their suppliers are raising the prices on them, so those increases have to pass through to the consumers.
There's an errant thing at the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if this ram shortage could revive the ram dimm as a concept as so many manufacturers were adopting the soldered-ram approach. I'm sure though this won't come to pass
The price difference in terms of manufacturing cost is immaterial. But if people can't afford a machine with 32GB anymore then they're going to suffer one with 8GB knowing from the outset that it's not enough and then have a strong preference for the ability to upgrade it later when prices come back down or they get more money.
Thank you for sharing this. Their point about the 128GB desktop mainboard being a bargain while their prices remain low rings true. I bought one a couple weeks ago because I've been wanting to build a beefy, efficient home server and I think this might be the last window of affordability for quite a while.
That might be just fine - there have been shortages the past few years and recovery again, and if someone is looking for their next device for the next few years it should be possible within reason.
Nope. Check again. All the manufacturers are switching to HBM, the market will be flooded with useless soldered on memory that nobody can use outside of running local inference.
I upgraded my laptop from 32gb to 64gb (should have gotten 96gb) over the summer and I'm considering the same for the leftover 32gb - fear of not having spares in case of defects holds me back though.
I started thinking about it last spring, been slowly finding the ideal setup over time. Finally bit the bullet just like 5 days ago, fearing it's about to become worse rather than better, but it hurt as much anyway :/
What's wild is OpenAI doubling down on hyperscaling when it's obvious that the gains from pre-training are coming to an end. They seem determined to just go out in flames...
This is a "the horse might sing" situation for the whole market that focused on breakthrough-level results (AGI, ASI, or even just "not going off the rails after the third response").
The thing is, it seems like they are planning to force everyone else out of the market. Acquire all the RAM they can possibly get, leave none for the competition, pray to survive the entire mess.
It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.
And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
Perhaps we can call this type of maneuver, "The Sam Altman": Your expensive business's mid-term outlook not looking so good? Why not use all that cash/credit to corner the market in some commodity in order to cripple your perceived competition?
He's not the first one though. The crypto miners used to do the same (I distinctly 'member first GPUs, then HDDs, then ordinary RAM being squoze by yet another new shitcoin in less than a year), and Uber plus the food delivery apps are a masterclass in how to destroy competition with seemingly infinite cash.
> In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
You can't, it doesn't have any video output port per the product brief [1].
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
This is a huge Hail Mary... IMO they'd be better served slowing down the training pipeline, becoming profitable now, hiring a bunch of scientists and figuring out the next AI technology.
Oh, both Uber and AirBnB did get dinged by the courts - but it took them years and the damage was already done, on top of that the fines were laughable.
We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.
> all the memory chips and energy. And GPUs of course.
Yes and no and yes.
AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.
The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.
It seems the only thing that could break this is the off chance that the SCOTUS rules that the tariffs are illegal and/or Congress strips the Presidency of the power they gave it in utters incompetence many decades ago.
I’m thinking with sufficient pressure by all tech interested people it could become an issue in the midterms and even force Trump to sign agreements not to tariff RAM by Korean producers who could ramp up production.
Frankly, I wouldn’t even be surprised if we start seeing RAM smuggling. In not sure of drug prices, but would smuggling RAM not be at least just as profitable, especially without the high profile and risk?
DDR4 fab capacity should have stayed constant as DDR5 was brought online.
The mechanism that powers that is usually the top tier brands selling their used fab equipment to China who then keep mass producing the legacy DRAM while fabs in Korea are converted to manufacture the new standard.
Instead all of those machines have been warehoused because Korean firms fear US sanctions/punitive tarifs if they were to offload that equipment to China.
So what has happened is DDR4 capacity has actually shrunk massively when it shouldn't have, DDR5 capacity was only barely meeting demand and then huge deals were cut that cornered the market.
Tarifs wouldn't help DDR5 a huge amount but without them DDR4 would be dirt cheap right now.
Late-stage capitalism in action. We have companies that are so insanely rich (despite losing equally insane amounts of money) that they can single-handedly corner worldwide markets for critical components in a brazen attempt to hurt the competition, and nobody will do a single thing about it.
Yes, we're just hitting the limits of current manufacturing not some fundamental limit like the availability of raw materials. Either demand will wane and the prices will go down, or manufacturing will scale up and prices will go down, eventually. That "eventually" does some work, but it's not remotely a case of "a point of no return".
In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, because we'll make more of it and get better at producing it than we would have without the demand spike. I.e. Wright's Law in action - which is usually pretty good at producing the long term direction of prices of products like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
Correct if I'm wrong, but without any new entrants, the market effectively cornered by a few players and high demand from data centers, how will the prices come down? Just like the GPU prices post COVID and bitcoin demand, how will there be any incentive to bring down consumer prices? The only scenario I can think of is chinese firms catch up and swoop in to corner the market.
If demand stays high existing firms will increase capacity to make more money, and then will compete against eachother on price to sell their new extra capacity. They'll do the same to prevent new firms (in other counties or not) from having an opportunity to come into the market and undercut them.
An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless.
GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.
They'll come down some day, but between the massive ai co purchases, and how long Micron says it will take to bring up new production capacity... most estimates I've seen are that it stays high (or grows higher still) until at least 2028.
The situation is really sticky, since allegedly fabs are anxious to ramp up production, fearing the AI bubble will burst and they will be left with useless stock. So the usual supply chasing demand doesn't apply here and we might wait for a really long time...
https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/12/05/exclusive-memory-...
> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.
https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
Dell now charges more for RAM than Apple for some models: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-now-beats-dell-at...
The margins on memory for Apple were so absurd that they should have more ability to eat up the costs, if they wanted to. I'm assuming they would, to the extent that they're a device company more so than a service company yet.
I don't think Apple ever adjusts the price of existing products, for better (eating the cost of part shortages) or worse (over-charging for old parts). The real test will be what they do with upcoming products.
I can't find specific examples, but I'm almost certain they have at some points in the past adjusted pricing of upgrades mid-cycle.
Apple raised iPad Pro prices in 2017 by $50 to address NAND memory chips price hikes from the vendors: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/ipad-pro-price-increase.html
Apple also raised iPad Pro prices when OLED screens were introduced.
That's a new product, not a raise of he existing product as is discussed.
Altman should be jailed for this. Single-handedly crashing consumer spending in an entire sector of the economy. At the very least for the reason that that was supposed to happen _after_ they had the AI in hand to supplant majority white collar labor, not before.
This is a dystopia no one really thought about. A handful of people anointed to spend borrowed money on a (so far unprofitable) quest to destabilize the world's economy, alienate the working class and make everything we've enjoyed the past 15-20 years a luxury.
How so?
The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.
No? Lots of philosophers and writers thought about the problems that happen when capital concentrates to the level that individuals can move nations.
It’s like a whole fucking genre.
What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys
a dystopian world in which computer memory is sort of expensive, god save us
"Sort of expensive" doesn't really convey the true state of affairs, i.e. memory prices have jumped 300% or more.
Memory today
Water tomorrow
This is the natural consequence of letting individual psychos control more money than most world economies.
I am not convinced by this whole AI water scare. Doesn't the water just evaporate? It's not a finite resource like oil.
If the problem is that these companies are creating an externality by straining the local water supply, then maybe we should simply tax water more where appropriate? I don't think any sort of shame will be effective.
For the past decade water has been mismanaged in inefficient farming practices, like bad irrigation practices or production of alfalfa to feed foreign livestock. We also waste a ton of water on our big dumb lawns. "cooling datacenters" doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Fresh water is a finite resource. It replenishes extremely slowly in certain forms. Like ground water. Lakes and rivers can run dry if you pull too much from them, see: Iran. AI data centers are making the problem of overuse worse. We were already pulling too much water in areas. With these data centers, some places that didn't have a problem are starting to.
Fresh water is not a finite resource. You can simply make more by taking sea water and pumping in energy. It's not cheap but it's doable.
perhaps the most hackernews take in this thread.
desalination isn’t just expensive, it’s existentially costly in terms of energy consumption, and I don’t see any dyson spheres in production.
With modern desalination facilities it costs literally on the order of cents per liter. It's an inconvenience at worst in the modern world.
It costs approx 3kwh of energy to desalinate one cubic meter of water.
In the short term (while you build your desalinators), and in local water-stressed regions, it very much is.
Maybe programmers will have to start making their programs efficient again.
Maybe OpenAI's RAM monopoly is what kills Electron.
vibe coders are likely to use electron.
Sam is betting that vibe coders are the future.
Whoever wins, we lose.
Electron is no match for a O(n^3) algorithm.
1. Man creates apps
2. Browser destroys apps
3. Browser creates apps
4. AI destroys browser apps
...
5. AI eats all memory
6. Forth inherits the Earth
Well, uh... There it is.
We’re contemplating jailing people for buying manufactured goods at the market price now?
Yes? Reports are that OpenAI is buying unfinished memory kits which they have no capacity to complete. It appears that OpenAI is just buying them to remove them from the market and damage their competitors. In United States, that used to be considered against the law if we were actually enforcing such things.
Since COVID, this has been the norm for any industry that requires chips.
Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.
Massively over inflating your vehicles to the point they can't move them in the market?
I doubt this is to create artificial scarcity. Especially when OpenAI is the biggest player thought to be able to build AGI first and that it is now backed by the US & the Saudis.
> thought to be able to build AGI first
Who still thinks this?
The US Government, Saudis, consumer/private investors apparently or at least the one that can build the most economically useful AI. I myself believe Google is most likely.
As always, it's the intent that matters.
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
But OpenAI legitimately needs HBM. Amazon in this instance doesn't need food and is doing purely to create artificial scarcity. If OpenAI were to actually not use the HBM then it could mean something.
That's the whole problem: it's unlikely that OpenAI will actually use all of that HBM. It seems probable that they are using it to create artificial scarcity for their competitors.
"needs" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your argument...
"As always, it's the intent that matters."
That's certainly not a universal Legal Standard. If I'm harmed, but you didn't "intend" to harm me, does that nullify my Claim?
Hardly.
IANAL, but yes, I believe it can nullify the claim. Bumping into someone on the sidewalk is only battery if the prosecution demonstrates intent to harm.
Lack of intent doesn’t mean your claim is nullified. “Intent matters” means it’s taken into account when deciding what damages were wrought
Voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, degrees of murder, hate crimes.
> I know people can simply grow their own food
Small thing, but this is not simple or realistic at all. How does someone in an apartment grow enough food for their family?
Yeah it would definitely still be a problem, but history shows that life finds a way. Even if everyone has to eat nothing but planted potatoes from any patch of grass that one can lay eyes on.
What history has taught us is that life finds a way by staying together and each person having their function within society, only some of which is growing or producing food.
They didn't buy "manufactured goods", they reserved 40% of the yearly wafer output for the whole world that haven't even been made yet for themselves.
Then if AI were the only consumer of wafers they would fall short of declaring themselves an illegal monopoly.
The Sherman Antitrust Act has outlawed abuses of monopsony power since 1890.
What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?
Simple: they create value for the right people. Namely, politicians who get their donations, and a generation that, despite not having enough children to grow the economy organically, doesn't want to work any... er... wants to retire.
Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.
So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.
The system is perverse per se,
you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.
And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.
Used to be someone had to crack the whip. Now the workers do it to themselves.
I find it fascinating that he's had the benefit of the doubt for soooo long.
This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.
A gross mischaracterization, really.
1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market. 2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence. 3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.
If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.
People go to prison for market manipulation all of the time.
went to prison.
In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.
Didn't they sign some big contacts to lock in non-market prices?
Yes, and I actually think it's a symptom of advanced societal decay that you think this is somehow an unreasonable proposition.
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
> Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?
(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)
That contract had little to do with this but I get why it's an easy, neatly packaged, personified scapegoat.
The ram price appreciation began 3 months before October 1st and his contract was about future capacity that has nothing to do with the current equilibrium price in consumer DRAM.
Jailed for what? Apple routinely buys out majority of TSMC's production capacity (at the bleeding edge), should Tím Cook go to jail?
A surprising amount of people are gleefully happy to have their perceived enemies put in jail or worse even if and especially if there was no legitimate justification for it.
A lot of people on HN dislike Tim Cook for various reasons and many would literally “sacrifice” him just to get Apple to stop being so anti-consumer.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
Won't someone think of the gamers?
Eh my (anemic) work laptop from 2019 probably won't get replaced for an extra year because my employer won't authorize the big laptop order at inflated prices.
He's just one of the ringleaders of the AI parade. This certainly isn'tjust him, just like the american corruption isn't just donald trump
I'm aware that the US is changing, but in the past, we had an idea that you don't go to jail unless there was a specific crime that you could be charged with.
This "crime" would be written down somewhere in what we called a "law", that would state penalties, with "maximum" sentences.
And, to forestall your comments, one of our other traditions was that you applied these rules even to lying sons of bitches (which Altman is).
Sorry to be old fashioned here.
I'm pretty sure this clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, no? Altman is intentionally sabotaging the global electronics supply chain using their existing market dominance to prevent competitors from being able to operate.
And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.
Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?
Since it clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, it will be easy for you to find case law that demonstrates that, alongside credible sources stating that OpenAIs actions are prosecutable that make that case.
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
Serious question: should the principals of the RAM manufacturers be jailed?
I believe it depends on which parties are responsible for the criminal antitrust violations. Is it the manufacturers abusing monopoly power, or is it OpenAI abusing monopsony power?
I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
The ones that collude to fix prices need to be in jail, yes.
Clarifying because I think the downvoters maybe misunderstood the nature of my question: I meant, in the opinion of the parent commenter should the principals of Samsung etc. be jailed? I wasn’t taking a position myself, just asking what they thought.
You should look up the monopsony provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, as well as the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 which prohibits predatory price discrimination schemes. Scam Alt-Man should be paying the same price for RAM as us plebes, if the DOJ wasn’t derelict in its duty to enforce antitrust law.
It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.
mo·nop·so·ny /məˈnäpsənē/ a market situation in which there is only one buyer.
It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.
Like monopolies, monopsony power exists on a spectrum. For example, Walmart exercises extreme monopsony power over suppliers, despite not being the only retailer in town.
We need to normalize tar & feathering again.
I have 96GB of 6000 MT/s. Pcpartpicker says 64GB kits have quadrupled in price since August. So I'm almost surprised it's only 50%.
I feel like I got the last chopper out of 'nam buying my G.Skill 256GB 6000MT/s kit when I did. I paid $780 in July and now it's listed at.. $2700, over 300% higher. That and buying a bunch of sticks for some Tyan boards I got on a whim last year with some engineering samples I got working on them.
A year ago, Framework-branded memory for DIY laptops cost, IIRC, 2x Amazon for equivalent specs (not the same modules—the ADATA ones that Framework puts their stickers on are theoretically available retail but in practice complete unobtanium in most countries). Not Apple pricing, but they definitely have some margin to eat into.
Literally bought 96GB (4x24GB) of DDR5 5600Mhz (edit: RDIMM ECC) just 5 days ago, fearing the prices would go up even more moving forward. Paid 1500 EUR for it in total :/ Southern Europe FWIW.
I think you got scammed by a local vendor, I got ddr5 2x48gb in europe 6400mhz (non ecc) for 320ish euro.
It's RDIMM ECC DDR5, for a sTR5 system, guess that's why the price difference. Should have mentioned that, my bad.
how many months ago? the RRP on that today is like 1k+: https://www.ldlc.com/en/product/PB00622951.html
globally yah, but local stores are slow to react to changes so as long as the stock doesn't run out you can get a decent deal.
Yikes, I hadn’t realized this was that big of a problem. The same exact G.skill z5 64Gb ram I bought 4 years ago is well on its way to being double the price. Does this have more to do with Crucial ending consumer product lines or tariffs?
It is because OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s production capacity overnight. RAM is like toilet paper during Covid now.
And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.
What do you mean by this? From everything I can find points towards other companies winding down DDR4 production because of China's cheaper DDR4 production lines.
It was brought up in a different HN submission about a week ago, here's the specific quote from the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169499
> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring. - https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
Every one seems so focused on that one company supposedly had "fake demand" just to ruin it for competitors, while the supply also seemingly is being suppressed, and no one seems to be talking about that. To me that seems like a much bigger deal, because then the market can't even restore the supply...
Why would the USA care if Korean makes legacy DDR? You're going to have to give some kind of context to this completely wild statement.
Korea wouldn't make them. They'd sell the machines to China & China would. At least that's what I've seen people say
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253185
The toilet paper thing didn't really happen though because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
Did we live through the same pandemic? At least where I live, there was shortages for weeks, and scarce for months.
There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.
In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.
Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.
How much RAM should they be allowed to buy? Who should decide that?
Perhaps a quantity below "a single company causes enough of a spike in global demand that it'll have demonstrable impact in nearly every single industry"
And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.
I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
> I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position
No. I’m genuinely curious, because I agree with you about how critical these components are. I ask because it doesn’t seem to me like the answers are immediately straightforward and wanted to hear serious replies to those questions.
How much is too much? It’s like porn: you know it when you see it.
Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply.
Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.
> The toilet paper thing didn't really happen [...]
Yes, it did.
> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)
> The toilet paper thing didn't really happen though
It absolutely happened. I was there, I saw it happen. Maybe it didn't happen in your area, but others weren't so lucky.
I literally had a friend mail us a crate of TP in our time of need. Thankfully they had access to industrial suppliers.
Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.
True but office TP isn’t Charmin. So the demand for Scott would go down, but demand for northern quilted and Charmin would go up!
The end of Crucial is a symptom, not a cause. Crucial is merely Micron's factory brand. Nothing is stopping OEMs like G.Skill or Kingston from buying DRAM chips from Micron and putting them on consumer RAM sticks.
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
I just last week sold some DDR5 I bought in April for triple what I paid for it.
> The same exact G.skill z5 64Gb ram I bought 4 years ago is well on its way to being double the price.
The RAM I bought last year has more than tripled. 2x32 DDR5 kits, $240/kit, now $820.
Crucial was shut down so they could focus on selling more ram to hyperscalers. That happened because of the state of things.
Prices are not expected to recover until 2028.
The state of things...meaning AI companies buying up the world's supply of RAM
Yes.
AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.
They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.
They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.
And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.
There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.
It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.
It's like cancer eating at the body.
We need to figure out how AI can use housing and food to complete resource exhaustion. You forgot to include AI water consumption.
It’s all very Orwellian. Consolidation of resources and the eventual result of total control over those.
Lets be honest: Most peoples computing needs have been satisfied in the last decade.
FOMO and Number goes up is the primary issue both with AI and most compute today.
There's so many made up numbers these days that does zero productive work, like FPS, refresh rates, 4k, 8k, 16k.
Bloat is everywhere.
I think maybe long-term the effect of Korean companies no longer daring to reuse old machines to produce DDR4 because of US retribution is the bigger cause of that.
Repeating this weird claim won't make it true. DDR4 isn't going to come back into fashion, even during a DRAM shortage. Demand for DDR4 can't increase meaningfully when no current-generation processors can use it, and older-generation processors aren't seeing any increase in production or sales. DDR4 is not a substitute good for the RAM that's in short supply.
He's kinda right even though he's kinda wrong.
He's confused about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because they're afraid China would be the eventual buyer (via proxies) and they'd be inadvertently in violation of US sanctions , so instead of selling they just locked down the old machinery to gather dust instead.
And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been slowly but steadily increasing long before this crisis, after the crisis DDR4 prices have also tripled just like DDR5 prices, even in the used market. So regardless of whether it's a real demand or panic response, the effect is still real on people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems. These people who probably just wants to update RAM in their systems in the hope that it'd help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years while bracing the impact. Had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.
> meaningfully when no current-generation processors can use it
... You don't seriously believe no one is using DDR4 today, right? Sure, they may no be developing new chipsets or whatever, but large swaths of the PC population will still be on DDR4 for the foreseeable future, especially now with these prices.
What is this estimation based on? I'd think once the bubble pops pricing would start to return to normal levels and the general consensus seems to think the bubble won't last that long.
"once the bubble pops" people probably won't be interested in buying RAM.
If you would have asked me 5 years ago this wouldn't even become a bubble. I'm still amazed it did. It really taught me how much of the modern economy is just grift.
Ultimately this is OpenAI and their (circular) investors doubling down on a US sovereignty wet dream and "too big to fail".
They might pull it off , but hell off a way to bet the economy dominos all on black.
In my opinion we are witnessing the market influences of a new type of public-private "Phoebus cartel" except at a total global scale where anti-terrorism laws require pricing businesses and individuals out of owning their own compute forcing them to rent compute from multinational hyperscaler cloud businesses who are integrated with military intelligence operations. Computing technology after all is a weapon of mass destruction and the peaceful are being punished for the non peaceful. It is too dangerous for governments around the world to allow individuals to posses the immense power of computing technology. Call me chicken little but we are witnessing the end of publicly available private general computing. Market changes influencing cost effectiveness analysis to favor public cloud is a deliberate goal to secure national critical infrastructure. I also think this coincides with the limits of MOSFET scaling and RISC-V permissive licensing. My only credentials for this is 15+ years working in fintech I&O for a US Fortune 500 company.
It certainly feels like we are being squeezed from all sides. I think the push to require ID verification for websites is also part of the plot - it all feels too coordinated, like governments all over the world have the same exact agenda to destroy our privacy. At some point you will have to verify your ID to use any computer system, and it will act just as a terminal to the cloud.
I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.
What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.
Anti terrorism laws will compel society into smart cities, continuous attestation of very high confidence subject/applicant identity. It is the only way to accomplish the mission. You can see it has already happened with "Know Your Customer" rules in banking. Mobile banking adds continuous "Know Where Your Customer Is". As our digital twins are distilled from social media via age verification this adds "Know What Your Customer Has Done". Then as we interact with AI chatbots with very high confidence identity this adds "Know What Your Customer Is Thinking". The fusion of these data points will enable our digital twins to be simulated into "Is My Customer A Terrorist" and then we will all have to deal with the quality and reliability of these systems. There will also be an unprecedented opportunity to optimize banking and marketing. The only problem I see is consent of the people however this is what we have collectively decided as a society long ago with United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953) allowing the state to ultimately not require our consent or even awareness of its actions. Without having all the information it is impossible to come to any rational conclusion. We are out of the loop! Total Digitization is happening for better or for worse.
I thought Apple would get around and improve their memory prices with time, I guess it's the opposite: all manufacturers are now becoming Apple given these raises.
I wonder what Apple's next move will be :-)
EDIT: Spelling
I am wondering myself; this M1 is getting long in the tooth, maybe now is the time to upgrade.
They are not becoming Apple. They are updating the prices of their components to the underlying market costs. Framework lets you replace the memory modules.
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
Have you seen laptop prices these days? Macbooks aren’t even sold at a premium anymore.
And on the flip side Framework laptops have generally been sold at a premium.
I bought a couple of terabytes of RAM and now I feel like one of those crypto-whales haha. It's just sitting there in the corner. One was a lucky one, too, because I tried to negotiate a guy to sell me a system with less RAM but he wouldn't discount it much. Now it pays for most of the cost of the damn thing.
These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
You don't NEED to fill the 12 ram slots. My personal 1U has an Epyc 9124 and only 4 of the 12 ram slots filled. I figured, ram will only get cheaper with time so I can fill the remaining 8 slots in the future. Turns out I was wrong, but regardless, the server runs fine on 4 sticks.
Haha the 'need' is a joke need. Like I need to upgrade my 9654s to the 9755 I have sitting in a box.
Are you actually selling some of the RAM though?
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
1 GB RAM = 1 GB RAM man. I am HODLING!
Haha, if I did sell I'd probably sell on /r/homelabsales which is a much more pleasant place to interact.
Original article from Framework Blog:
https://frame.work/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-naviga...
Placed an order from Lenovo on November 21st - 96gb of RAM in that machine, it still hasn't shipped yet - am wondering if/when they will try to "renegotiate" the deal... (supposed arrival date on that system is 01/02/2026)
At some point it's going to make sense to buy a computer without ram once the lack of ram pushes demand down for all other components.
Maybe this won't last that long given the RAM shortage is apparently a corner attempt by Sam Altman.
From what I've read, he's tied up RAM manufacturers through 2029. That's a lot of quartely earnings reports for many firms in the economy where they watch consumer spend come to a screeching halt.
One has to hope OpenAI goes bankrupt and they flood the market with used RAM sticks at bargain bin price.
Don’t worry, they’ve cozied up for a nice fat bailout if that happens.
As with all Ponzi schemes OpenAI will eventually go bankrupt, yet it continues to receive money from the unwary. I wonder how the research division at Disney feels about what their bosses have done...
But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.
They bought unfinished components and have no ability to finish them. They're now waste just sitting on shelves and by the time we could do this and get them into production lines, they'll be obsoletd by DDR6.
Yeah, that is my main worry - that whatever they ordered is actually unusable for normal people once they go bankrupt, so there is not only nothing to auction of to the creditors, but also nothing to alleviate the shortage in the short term.
Now I'm curious: does this situation classify as force-majeure for a major firms? "Hey, you know, actually our entire consumer base just disappeared overnight. Crazy, huh?". And will various governments have to intervene to save them when/if that happens.
Not taking into account that they all be busy handing money to openAI, at least someone somewhere has to notice that something is very wrong.
Given that major memory manufacturers are abandoning consumer RAM production to focus on HBM for AI data centers, can we make a prediction that HBM prices will eventually fall enough to make it viable for consumer hardware?
It's not like Framework is choosing to do this just to screw consumers, their suppliers are raising the prices on them, so those increases have to pass through to the consumers.
There's an errant thing at the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if this ram shortage could revive the ram dimm as a concept as so many manufacturers were adopting the soldered-ram approach. I'm sure though this won't come to pass
Retail DIMMs are more expensive than soldered RAM so that just makes things worse.
The price difference in terms of manufacturing cost is immaterial. But if people can't afford a machine with 32GB anymore then they're going to suffer one with 8GB knowing from the outset that it's not enough and then have a strong preference for the ability to upgrade it later when prices come back down or they get more money.
Do most people know what the bottlenecks of their computing experience are?
Most people have access to the internet where you can ask people what they recommend if you don't know yourself.
50% won't be enough so they'll need to raise prices again in a month or two.
MacBooks will kill the market because of these memory price hikes
Work is skipping server, desktop, and laptop buys that were planned for 2026. Guess I am going to be fixing and patching a lot more often next year.
I just bought 32gb ram at 650DKK 2 months ago and now the same ram goes for 3200+...
Actual article: https://frame.work/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-naviga...
Thank you for sharing this. Their point about the 128GB desktop mainboard being a bargain while their prices remain low rings true. I bought one a couple weeks ago because I've been wanting to build a beefy, efficient home server and I think this might be the last window of affordability for quite a while.
It seems easier to purchase from hardware vendors that have already locked in their prices for RAM.
like Backblaze was purchasing HDDs from retail store, so will (small) AI providers
That will quickly run dry.
Especially given the arbitrage opportunity that presents.
That might be just fine - there have been shortages the past few years and recovery again, and if someone is looking for their next device for the next few years it should be possible within reason.
Don't worry, on the other side of the AI bubble pop the market will be flooded with used DDR5 sticks from unprofitable datacenters.
Nope. Check again. All the manufacturers are switching to HBM, the market will be flooded with useless soldered on memory that nobody can use outside of running local inference.
The rest of us 'normal' memory plebes are fucked.
I assembled a new 32c/64t 7970X threadripper with 128GB DDR5 and a 16GB RX9070XT over the summer...
This memory situation has me pondering putting it all up on ebay
I upgraded my laptop from 32gb to 64gb (should have gotten 96gb) over the summer and I'm considering the same for the leftover 32gb - fear of not having spares in case of defects holds me back though.
I started thinking about it last spring, been slowly finding the ideal setup over time. Finally bit the bullet just like 5 days ago, fearing it's about to become worse rather than better, but it hurt as much anyway :/
If DDR5 will still be around in two years, you might want to sell half of your RAM now and use those proceeds double it in a couple years?
Or just cash out, that's always great.
What's wild is OpenAI doubling down on hyperscaling when it's obvious that the gains from pre-training are coming to an end. They seem determined to just go out in flames...
What other option do they have?
This is a "the horse might sing" situation for the whole market that focused on breakthrough-level results (AGI, ASI, or even just "not going off the rails after the third response").
So if it "works" out for OpenAI, not only do they have all the ram, power, water but they also have all the jobs.
The thing is, it seems like they are planning to force everyone else out of the market. Acquire all the RAM they can possibly get, leave none for the competition, pray to survive the entire mess.
It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.
And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
Perhaps we can call this type of maneuver, "The Sam Altman": Your expensive business's mid-term outlook not looking so good? Why not use all that cash/credit to corner the market in some commodity in order to cripple your perceived competition?
He's not the first one though. The crypto miners used to do the same (I distinctly 'member first GPUs, then HDDs, then ordinary RAM being squoze by yet another new shitcoin in less than a year), and Uber plus the food delivery apps are a masterclass in how to destroy competition with seemingly infinite cash.
Crypto miners isn't comparable at all. They were buying finished products and immediately putting them into use.
These gambits never work though. In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.....
There's a few historical examples here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market
!RemindMe six months
Of course I'm joking, there are LLMs to check these things now.
> In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
You can play Counterstrike on a H100 if you really want to.
You can't, it doesn't have any video output port per the product brief [1].
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...
[2] https://www.heise.de/news/Nvidias-H100-kommt-im-deutschen-Re...
Just use an AI to describe the Counterstrike scene to you!
That's a funny way of saying you don't know.
This is a huge Hail Mary... IMO they'd be better served slowing down the training pipeline, becoming profitable now, hiring a bunch of scientists and figuring out the next AI technology.
Agree with step 1 here but steps 2 and 4 are a total pipe dream
Was this market manipulation legal? If so, that's crazy..
Oh, both Uber and AirBnB did get dinged by the courts - but it took them years and the damage was already done, on top of that the fines were laughable.
We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.
And we need all of that fast.
Thanks, Sam :<
Horde it, Sam. For old times' sake.
It reminds me of the AI paperclip problem. The AIs are eating all the memory chips and energy. And GPUs of course.
Except its caused by good old bubble capitalism.
> all the memory chips and energy. And GPUs of course.
Yes and no and yes.
AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.
The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.
Ah yes, the abundance ushered in by the "AI era" is overwhelming us all.
Is anyone's salary here projected to go up 53% in 2026?
Great, another thing AI is ruining
It seems the only thing that could break this is the off chance that the SCOTUS rules that the tariffs are illegal and/or Congress strips the Presidency of the power they gave it in utters incompetence many decades ago.
I’m thinking with sufficient pressure by all tech interested people it could become an issue in the midterms and even force Trump to sign agreements not to tariff RAM by Korean producers who could ramp up production.
Frankly, I wouldn’t even be surprised if we start seeing RAM smuggling. In not sure of drug prices, but would smuggling RAM not be at least just as profitable, especially without the high profile and risk?
Hey! … hey, you! You want to have some fun?
Tariffs aren't the problem.
They are indirectly.
DDR4 fab capacity should have stayed constant as DDR5 was brought online.
The mechanism that powers that is usually the top tier brands selling their used fab equipment to China who then keep mass producing the legacy DRAM while fabs in Korea are converted to manufacture the new standard.
Instead all of those machines have been warehoused because Korean firms fear US sanctions/punitive tarifs if they were to offload that equipment to China.
So what has happened is DDR4 capacity has actually shrunk massively when it shouldn't have, DDR5 capacity was only barely meeting demand and then huge deals were cut that cornered the market.
Tarifs wouldn't help DDR5 a huge amount but without them DDR4 would be dirt cheap right now.
Late-stage capitalism in action. We have companies that are so insanely rich (despite losing equally insane amounts of money) that they can single-handedly corner worldwide markets for critical components in a brazen attempt to hurt the competition, and nobody will do a single thing about it.
cc @apple
My question is, will the ram price go down at some point or is it a point of no return?
Yes, we're just hitting the limits of current manufacturing not some fundamental limit like the availability of raw materials. Either demand will wane and the prices will go down, or manufacturing will scale up and prices will go down, eventually. That "eventually" does some work, but it's not remotely a case of "a point of no return".
In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, because we'll make more of it and get better at producing it than we would have without the demand spike. I.e. Wright's Law in action - which is usually pretty good at producing the long term direction of prices of products like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
Correct if I'm wrong, but without any new entrants, the market effectively cornered by a few players and high demand from data centers, how will the prices come down? Just like the GPU prices post COVID and bitcoin demand, how will there be any incentive to bring down consumer prices? The only scenario I can think of is chinese firms catch up and swoop in to corner the market.
If demand stays high existing firms will increase capacity to make more money, and then will compete against eachother on price to sell their new extra capacity. They'll do the same to prevent new firms (in other counties or not) from having an opportunity to come into the market and undercut them.
An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless.
GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.
They'll come down some day, but between the massive ai co purchases, and how long Micron says it will take to bring up new production capacity... most estimates I've seen are that it stays high (or grows higher still) until at least 2028.
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/ram-prices-are-exploding...
Yes, it will go back down eventually.
The situation is really sticky, since allegedly fabs are anxious to ramp up production, fearing the AI bubble will burst and they will be left with useless stock. So the usual supply chasing demand doesn't apply here and we might wait for a really long time...