[HN Gopher] Samsung's 60% DRAM Price Hike Signals a New Phase of...
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Samsung's 60% DRAM Price Hike Signals a New Phase of Global Memory
Tightening
Author : redohmy
Score : 48 points
Date : 2025-11-15 02:45 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.buysellram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.buysellram.com)
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| All I can say is,
|
| - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of
| market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated
| just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it
| will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every
| single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do
| things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane
| for a GPU.
|
| - I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming
| laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not
| having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years
| respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the
| worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI,
| and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too.
| And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and
| they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are
| obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more
| expensive.
| Retric wrote:
| This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate
| resources and you run out of resources.
|
| You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot
| markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power.
| Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all
| had excess because it's not obvious when to join and when to
| stop.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Usually companies run out of resources _before_ they screw up
| global prices in massive markets.
|
| If it was a couple billion dollars of memory purchasing
| nobody would care.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Usually companies run out of resources before they screw
| up global prices in massive markets.
|
| It happens more often than you might expect.
|
| The Onion Futures Act and what led to it is always a fun
| read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
| epistasis wrote:
| It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no
| election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the
| Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have
| sway in them.
|
| There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much
| forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.
|
| The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives
| following the mandates of their board, all because there's a
| few CEOs who were _REALLY_ worked up about it and there was a
| decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive
| class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.
|
| Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better
| decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in
| the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded
| age with a few barons running things, because we have made the
| rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market
| economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making
| power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from
| that.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| If you get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich you
| are -- because that's how assets work -- it turns into an
| exponential, runs away, and concentrates power until
| something breaks.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break
| up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually
| participate in markets.
| epistasis wrote:
| This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our
| current administration is largely a result of Silicon
| Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or
| mergers and IPOs.
|
| Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust
| is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is.
| Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's
| better at it.
|
| Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation
| strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You
| can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self,
| and greater returns to the rest of society.
| fpoling wrote:
| I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company
| size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1
| billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing
| amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power
| law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian
| distribution of company sizes.
| logancbrown wrote:
| Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for
| EU innovation.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally
| planned economy.
|
| The only saving grace is that it can die and others will
| scoop up released resources.
|
| When country level planned economy dies, people die and
| resources get destroyed.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market
| failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype -
| promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the
| corner.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| There is a way, and if anyone tells you we have to go full
| Hitler or Stalin to do it they are liars because last time we
| let inequality cook this hard FDR and the New Deal figured
| out how to thread the needle and proved it could be done.
|
| Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics
| on tap at the moment.
|
| Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course,
| but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this
| amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get
| very serious very quickly and we have to start making better
| decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure?
|
| There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new
| game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid,
| concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on
| raised funds.
|
| Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate
| as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with
| almost no friction, presumably because it helped us
| economically outcompete the adversary during the Cold War.
| Broadly, we're now afraid of having any kind of brake or
| dampener on investments and we are more afraid of
| inefficiency and corruption if the government were to
| intervene than we are of speculation or exploitation if it
| doesn't.
|
| In democratically regulated capitalism, there are levers to
| pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before
| it were to get out of control, but the arguments against
| pulling them remain more thoroughly developed and more
| closely held than those in favor of them.
| fabian2k wrote:
| They're treating it as a "winner takes it all"-kind of
| business. And I'm not sure this is a reasonable bet.
|
| The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if
| you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie.
| I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but
| I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.
| sixothree wrote:
| What's odd about this is I believe there does exist a winner
| takes all technology. And that it's AR.
|
| The more I dream about the possibilities of AR, the more I
| believe people are going to find it incredibly useful. It's
| just the hardware isn't nearly ready. Maybe I'm wrong but I
| believe these companies are making some of the largest
| strategic blunders possible at this point in time.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why would AR be particularly likely to have a single
| winnner?
| testartr wrote:
| why do you think allocating hardware to gamers is proper usage?
|
| maybe AI cures cancer, or at least writes some code
| ptero wrote:
| For example: allocating the resources to only few industries
| deprives everyone else: small players, hobbyists, gamers,
| tinkerers from opportunities to play with their toys. And
| small players playing with random toys is a source of
| multiple innovations.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > resources can be massively misallocated just because some
| small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in
| massive returns
|
| That's basically what the rich usually do. They command
| disproportionate amount of resources and misallocate them
| freely on a whim, outside of any democratic scrutiny, squeezing
| incredible number of people and small buisness out of
| something.
|
| Whether that's a strength of the system or the weakness, I'm
| sure some rearch will show.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| how is that market failure??? this is literally market of
| supply and demand at its core
| shiandow wrote:
| It's not exactly a new type of failure. It's roughly equivalent
| to Riccardian rent, or pecuniary externalities for the general
| term. Though I suppose this is a speculative variant, which
| could be worse somehow.
| neilv wrote:
| If we're going to see retailers price-gouging on DDR5, maybe
| people will be willing to buy slightly older gear with DDR4 (and
| corresponding motherboard and CPU).
|
| Especially for systems for which the workloads are actually bound
| by GPU compute, network, or storage.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I just snagged an Asrock Rack mobo (X570), 5900x and 128gb ecc
| ddr4 for $680. Felt like a steal with how memory prices are
| going these days, ECC to boot.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I'm still on DDR4 but I hope this price gouging will be over by
| the time I need to finally upgrade :( I have a Ryzen so I did
| upgrade to the latest AM4 generation.
| wmf wrote:
| DDR4 will be just as expensive because it's made in the same
| fabs.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm thinking second-hand and new-old-stock, with less demand
| for it.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Nope, second hand is already evaporating.
|
| 2 months ago there were a load of second gen xeon scalable
| servers on offer. Now every one of them has had the ram
| stripped out and its just the chassis on offer.
|
| Fabs are not wasting their time on DDR4 now.
| sbarre wrote:
| I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and
| prices have literally gone up by 2.5x..
|
| 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the
| same 2x64GB set..
|
| I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Damn I bought a whole computer with 128GB RAM & 16-core Ryzen
| CPU for PS325 a few months ago.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Ordered some servers 6 months ago ~12k USD per unit.
|
| Same order, same bill of materials, 17.5K USD per unit today.
|
| That is roughly a 5.5k increase for 768GB of DDR5 ECC memory
| and the 4 2tb nvme ssds.
| loeg wrote:
| > I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it
| sucks.
|
| Years, or when the AI bubble pops, whatever comes first.
|
| Similar situation with QLC flash and HDDs btw.
| phoboslab wrote:
| I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I
| bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB
| (DDR4-2800).
|
| It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware
| development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices
| staying roughly the same.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so
| when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their
| inventories.
|
| There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these
| AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its a bit of a shame these AI GPUs don't actually have
| displayport/hdmi output ports because they would make for nice
| cheap and powerful gaming GPUs with a lot of VRAM, they would
| potentially be really good graphics cards.
|
| Will just have to settle for insanely cheap second hand DDR5
| and NVMe drives I guess.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year
| or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump
| their inventories.
|
| Their inventories are not what consumers use.
|
| Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server DDR5
| motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically
| incompatible, and the voltages are different. And the memory
| for GPUs is normally soldered directly to the board (and of the
| GDDRn family, instead of the DDRn or LPDDRn families used by
| most CPUs).
|
| As for GPUs, they're also different. Most consumer GPUs are
| PCIe x16 cards with DP and HDMI ports; most hyperscaler GPUs
| are going to have more exotic form factors like OAM, and not
| have any DP or HDMI ports (since they have no need for graphics
| output).
|
| So no, unfortunately hyperscalers dumping their inventories
| would be of little use to consumers. We'll have to wait for the
| factories to switch their production to consumer-targeted
| products.
|
| Edit: even their NVMe drives are going to have different form
| factors like E1.S and different connectors like U.2, making
| them hard for normal consumers to use.
| benjojo12 wrote:
| The problem is that it is not entirely clear that the
| hyperscalers are buying DDR5, instead it seems that supplies
| are being diverted so that more HBM/GDDR wafers can be
| produced.
|
| HBM/GDDR is not necessarily as useful to the average person as
| DDR4/DDR5
| wnevets wrote:
| Haven't these memory companies been caught price fixing multiple
| times over the years? Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the
| entire reason for these absurd prices?
| avidiax wrote:
| Does anyone know if the increase in prices in high-end RAM will
| affect lower end RAM used in embedded devices, e.g. LPDDR4?
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