[HN Gopher] Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of...
___________________________________________________________________
Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory
tightening
Author : redohmy
Score : 430 points
Date : 2025-11-15 02:45 UTC (7 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
| Aerroon wrote:
| The problem is that memory manufacturing is hard enough
| that there are essentially 3 major companies that do it
| globally: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
| an0malous wrote:
| > This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate
| resources and you run out of resources.
|
| Except that these corporations will almost certainly get a
| bail out, under the auspices of national security or some
| other BS. The current admin is backed by the same VCs that
| are all in on AI.
| 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.
| sharts wrote:
| a better approach might be to farming out shares to
| stakeholders. that seems a lot more dynamic and self-
| correcting than periodic taxation battles after the fact
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration,
| if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be
| the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax
| unrealized capital gains just as election season was
| kicking into high gear.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| IMO Khan was by far the best we've had in at least 2
| decades. Her FCC even got a judge to rule to break up
| Google! The biggest downside Khan had was being attached
| to a 1 term president. There's just not that many court
| cases against trillion dollar companies you can take from
| investigation to winning the appeal on in 4 years
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| All true, and I'm not making a value statement about
| whether her influence was good or bad. However, Khan only
| threatened the oligarchs' companies, while Harris point-
| blank threatened their _fortunes._
|
| Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel
| and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't
| do it a month before an election.
| jordanb wrote:
| The oligarchs hated Kahn with the intensity of a thousand
| burning suns. If you listened to All In all they were
| doing is ranting about her and Gary Gensler.
|
| That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record
| definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she
| could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by
| backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like
| she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without
| upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was
| really popular.
| aerhardt wrote:
| She was largely ineffectual because she was cock-blocked
| by the ruling classes. I lean libertarian-capitalist and
| still I think this. Although it's not a settled debate in
| the classic liberal or libertarian traditions, there are
| plenty of arguments in them against the excessive
| concentration of power.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Sorry, how did she stand in the way of IPOs? She was
| against the larger players providing easy off-ramps to
| smaller players but I don't recall anything about IPOs.
| Indeed, Figma's IPO is precisely because she undid the
| pending Adobe / Figma merger if I recall correctly.
| epistasis wrote:
| You're right, IPOs were not blocked by this. I wish I
| could still edit to add a correction!
| 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.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European
| standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low
| today either
| Terr_ wrote:
| Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam
| certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and
| if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have
| big compensation "expenses" for executives.
|
| The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on
| individual income.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| The sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential"
| part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax
| rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's
| revenue tax).
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Set limits so the top cant earn more than x times the
| lowest paid in the company then.
| steve_b wrote:
| Companies would then outsource their low-paying jobs to
| other companies.
| esseph wrote:
| They already do
| Hikikomori wrote:
| So make that count then.
| silon42 wrote:
| revenue, obviously, but maybe it would scale with
| employee numbers... if you have lots of employees, you
| get taxed less.
| thfuran wrote:
| So the policy goal is to minimize revenue per employee?
| philipkglass wrote:
| This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory
| fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income
| each year or they can't keep going. There are no little
| Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on
| leading process nodes.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| Nonsense, it would force vertical _de-_ integration.
|
| Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have
| to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even
| described his vision of the industry that way.
|
| Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large
| chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's
| laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming
| from the fab. You have to buy your masks from the fab
| (heck they aren't even allowed to leave the fab so do you
| really own them?). And on and on.
|
| For the record I don't agree with the "exponential" part,
| but otherwise this is an underappreciated and powerful
| technique.
| philipkglass wrote:
| In another comment you proposed a sane version of the
| parent proposal. I wouldn't have commented if fpoling had
| originally floated that scheme. I was mainly objecting to
| drastically increasing taxes "once a company starts to
| earn above, say, 1 billion" without regard for the
| minimum viable scale of different businesses.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Chip fabs used to be like book publishers;
|
| I can still make a book like that in my basement. People
| do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like
| that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now.
|
| These things DO NOT SCALE... you cant have 10,000 people
| running printing presses in their basement to crank out
| the NYT every day. A modern chip fab has more in common
| with the printer for the NYT than it does with what you
| can crank out in your garage.
|
| Let's look at TSMC's plant in AZ. They went and asked
| intel "hey where are you sourcing your sulfuric acid
| from. When they looked at the American vendors TSMC asked
| intel "how are you working with this". Intels response
| was that it was the best they could get.
|
| It was not.
|
| TSMC now imports sulfuric acid from Taiwan, because it
| needs to be outrageously pure. Intel is doing the same.
|
| Every single part, component, step and setup in the chain
| is like that. There is so much arcane knowledge that loss
| of workers represents a serious set back. There are
| people in the production chain, with PHD's, who are
| literally training their successors because thats sort of
| the only option.
|
| Do you know who has been trying the approach you are
| proposing? China. It has not worked.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/asianometry probably the best
| rough and ready education you can get on the industry.
| kasabali wrote:
| > Do you know who has been trying the approach you are
| proposing? China. It has not worked.
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/asianometry probably the best
| rough and ready education you can get on the industry.
|
| I would take anything from that channel regarding China
| with a pinch of salt.
| 15155 wrote:
| > I can still make a book like that in my basement.
| People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips
| like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now.
|
| You can absolutely manufacture a convincingly-
| professional, current-generation book in your basement
| with a practically-small capital investment.
|
| You cannot manufacture a convincingly-professional chip
| (being generous: feature size and process technology from
| the last two decades) in your basement without a 6-7
| figure capital expenditure, and even then - good luck.
| therealcamino wrote:
| Complexity of the fab processes is isn't what the parent
| was talking about. They're talking about the major
| changes in the relationship between fabless semiconductor
| companies and commercial foundries.
|
| The complexity of actual fabrication was always, and
| still is, entirely within the foundry. But in the early
| days of that model, designs could be more easily handed
| off at the logical level, leaving the physical design to
| back end companies, which makes designs much more
| portable between foundries. (The publisher analogy.)
| What's changed is that the complexity of physical design
| has exploded, and you can't make the handoff at nearly as
| high a level, and there is much more work that depends
| directly on the specific process you are targeting. Much
| more work at the physical level falls to the fabless semi
| companies. So it is much more work to retarget a design
| to a different foundry or process.
| AnthonyMouse 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.
|
| This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be
| different about it.
|
| The first is that the threshold for a given industry
| doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as
| a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market
| share should be a thing companies _don 't_ want,
| regardless of whether it's a $100 trillion industry or a
| $100 million one.
|
| And the second is that taxes create a perverse incentive
| for the government. You absolutely do not want the
| government to have even more of a financial incentive to
| sustain and create more of the companies of that size.
| What you want is to have fewer of them.
|
| So, what you want is a rule that if a company has more
| than 15% market share, the entire general public is
| allowed to sue them into bankruptcy for the offense of
| market consolidation. Which also removes the problem
| where they buy off the government prosecutors, because if
| they commit the offense then _anybody_ can sue them.
| chii wrote:
| > anybody can sue them.
|
| who bears the costs of this suit?
|
| And who determines what makes for a good market share
| size to be the threshold?
|
| And by having such a rule, an industry that would have
| higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able
| to (but you wouldn't know). It's a bad set of policy
| imho.
|
| A better way would be for gov't to increase competition
| by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the
| bottleneck to competition. If a company, such as AWS, is
| getting a lot of marketshare, but their profit margins is
| still high, then the gov't should incentivize competition
| by funding or giving loans to businesses that want to
| compete with AWS.
|
| However, if AWS's profit margins, even at high market
| share, remains very low (e.g., amazon's commerce side),
| then there's no need for the gov't to "step in" at all,
| as there would be no incentive for any competitor to try
| enter the market due to low margins.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > who bears the costs of this suit?
|
| The goal is to not have it happen, because the company is
| going to see that they're only slightly below the
| threshold and voluntarily split themselves into smaller
| pieces and buy themselves a safety margin because if they
| don't everybody knows the lawsuits are going to vaporize
| them once they exceed the threshold.
|
| > And who determines what makes for a good market share
| size to be the threshold?
|
| Anything in the vicinity of 5%-15% would be fine.
|
| > And by having such a rule, an industry that would have
| higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able
| to (but you wouldn't know).
|
| This is extremely rare and the circumstances where it
| happens aren't a mystery. It's when entering the market
| has extremely high fixed costs but then the unit cost of
| usage is negligible, e.g. it costs a huge amount of money
| to install water and sewer but then the incremental cost
| of someone washing their hands is insignificant.
|
| For those things you either have the government do them,
| or if it's a private company then it's a regulated
| utility which is completely banned from anything that
| even vaguely resembles vertical integration as the price
| of being allowed to have more than the threshold amount
| of market share.
|
| > A better way would be for gov't to increase competition
| by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the
| bottleneck to competition.
|
| The problem is generally caused by the incumbents
| capturing the government and then enacting rules that
| inhibit rather than increase competition. That's why you
| need anyone to be able to initiate the lawsuit, so they
| can't capture the government department which is supposed
| to be thwarting them because then it's the entire public.
| chii wrote:
| > so they can't capture the government department
|
| so why not solve this issue directly? Transparency,
| auditing and public awareness etc are needed to prevent
| regulatory capture. Public apathy are the reason why it
| is currently "easy" to do capture regulators.
|
| The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone in
| the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit
| (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more
| profit. So unless the law suit enables the accuser to
| wholesale take a piece of that company as private
| property from the owners - which no law currently would
| allow nor have precedents for - why would anyone expend
| private money for a public good?
|
| And in any case, i don't the apathy going away, even if
| the law suit was free. Because currently, the same apathy
| is allowing regulatory capture in the first place. So
| solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the
| solution.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Transparency, auditing and public awareness etc are
| needed to prevent regulatory capture. Public apathy are
| the reason why it is currently "easy" to do capture
| regulators.
|
| It's mostly easy because the people doing it are good at
| lying. When they create a rule it isn't called the
| "mandate this company's product rule" or the "increase
| fixed costs to lock out smaller competitors rule", it's
| sold as a safety measure or consumer protection or some
| other pretext, even though the effect is to raise costs
| to the benefit of the companies getting the money or
| exclude competitors to the benefit of the incumbents.
|
| Or they simply don't prosecute antitrust violations, and
| then there is nothing to audit because there is nothing
| happening, meanwhile people are kept distracted with
| other things.
|
| > The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone
| in the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit
| (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more
| profit.
|
| It does net them more profit. The premise is that having
| more than the threshold amount of market share is a
| strict liability antitrust violation, which allows any
| customer or prospective customer (i.e. anyone) to sue
| them for it. The person who files the lawsuit _would_ get
| the money, the same as someone who sues a company for
| pollution or fraud.
|
| The point of letting people sue you for polluting or
| fraud or, in this case, market consolidation, isn't to
| make plaintiffs rich, it's to deter the thing you don't
| want companies to do. The goal isn't to have a lot of
| lawsuits, the goal is to have companies not _want_ the
| market to consolidate and actively prevent it because if
| it happens they 'll get sued.
|
| > So solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the
| solution.
|
| Apathy is cyclical. People don't care until the problem
| gets bad enough, then they care enough to demand change
| and make it go away for a while, then they stop caring
| until it gets bad enough again.
|
| But you don't want people to have to die or get severely
| abused before the problem gets addressed. What you want
| is to change the structure of the system to prevent it
| from getting that bad to begin with, by making sure that
| the power to nip the problem in the bud (i.e. stop market
| consolidation at 5% or 15% instead of 50% or 90%) is held
| by someone who will actually exercise it, which can be
| accomplished by granting that power to everyone affected,
| which in this context is each and every member of the
| public.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > And the second is that taxes create a perverse
| incentive for the government. You absolutely do not want
| the government to have even more of a financial incentive
| to sustain and create more of the companies of that size.
| What you want is to have fewer of them.
|
| That's not really a convincing argument. The government
| is the body for setting up the economic rules, it is not
| bound by it. The government doesn't have revenue or
| profit. Money is created by the government, it doesn't
| have a value yet. The direct financing of actions through
| taxes is not done for the government, but a way for the
| government to project the costs of the governmental
| action into the economy. Sure, there are a lot of idiots
| now-a-days, that think a state should work like a
| business and make profits, but they are misled.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Samsung lost a large percentage of market share to their
| competitors in the last couple years, so I'm pretty sure
| they already have to participate in markets.
|
| Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yea when I think of DRAM I think of SK Hynix and Micron
| with Samsung far behind.
| 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.
| xpe wrote:
| > Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of
| centrally planned economy.
|
| This is confused. Here is how classical economists would
| frame it: a firm chooses how much to produce based on its
| cost structure and market prices, expanding production
| until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. This is price
| guided production optimization, not central planning.
|
| The dominant criticism of central planning is trying to set
| production quantities without prices. Firms (generally)
| don't do this.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Company prices resources within itself completely
| arbitrarily. How much the hour of work of an employee A
| is worth with the company and and how much using
| paperclip costs has no relation how much these things
| actually cost in the real money. Once they are acquired
| by company they are utilized not according to their value
| but to central plans instead. This way paperclip might
| get vastly overvalued and scarce while hour of work can
| be vastly undervalued and wasted.
| xpe wrote:
| To make sure we're on the same page... In economics,
| "central planning" refers to a system where a central
| authority (typically the state) makes comprehensive
| decisions about production, investment, and resource
| allocation across an entire economy, replacing market
| mechanisms. This is associated with command economies
| like the Soviet Union's Gosplan system.
|
| And of course I will grant firms use hierarchical
| coordination mechanisms internally (managers allocate
| resources by command rather than prices).
|
| I suppose my angle here is to be clear that firms are
| typically a kind of hybrid entity: they mix various
| coordination mechanisms (prices and hierarchy). This
| makes them quite different from centrally planned
| economies.
| xpe wrote:
| > Company prices resources within itself completely
| arbitrarily.
|
| I wouldn't phrase it this way -- to me, this implies
| unpredictability and/or a lack of rationale. Perhaps you
| simply mean "internal managers at companies do not
| necessarily price resources using market mechanisms"
| which I would agree with.
|
| Many fields of study give insight to the various kinds of
| distortions that arise from human psychology and
| negotiation, etc.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > This is confused. Here is how classical economists
| would frame it: a firm chooses how much to produce based
| on its cost structure and market prices, expanding
| production until marginal cost equals marginal revenue.
| This is price guided production optimization, not central
| planning.
|
| That's the case in a healthy competitive market. Once you
| have a monopoly or an oligopoly, you get into central
| planning territory.
| xpe wrote:
| Ok, but recall the context (see above): I'm saying one
| can understand how firms operate without making a
| connection to central planning (setting production
| targets and investment decisions from the top-down
| without prices).
|
| Economists have concepts and models for monopolies and
| oligopolies -- and the way they operate are quite
| different from the practice of central planning.
|
| I'm talking from within the frame of economic concepts,
| and I'm striving to use words as understood in the field.
| At times I value metaphorical thinking, but here in the
| case of economics, we don't need to bend words when other
| fitting concepts are readily available and battle-tested.
|
| An example: If someone calls corporate consolidation
| "central planning," they've lost the ability to analyze
| it properly. The relevant questions for oligopolies
| (strategic behavior, barriers to entry, tacit collusion)
| are completely different from central planning questions
| (calculation problems, information aggregation, incentive
| alignment).
|
| When technical fields have already solved a conceptual
| problem through careful definition and model building,
| importing loose metaphorical language degrades analytical
| clarity.
|
| If you want to point to or propose a different model than
| the usual economic dogma, I'm all ears, by the way.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I agree, that this discussion isn't based on proper
| economic terms, but on laymen understanding.
|
| The claim isn't that it is exactly like central planning
| like a state, but very similar through the view on the
| whole society. You have a powerful caucus, no longer
| bound by reality (competition), making decisions, that
| they think are good, which effectively set the pace for
| the whole economy field. Whether this caucus formed
| through rigged elections or by inheritance of companies
| isn't all that relevant. It would be quite a different
| story, if the state would enforce its monopoly on
| (political) power and governing, but it refuses to do so
| now-a-days.
|
| > The relevant questions for oligopolies (strategic
| behavior, barriers to entry, tacit collusion) are
| completely different from central planning questions
| (calculation problems, information aggregation, incentive
| alignment).
|
| The observation on these oligopolies, that are now larger
| than some states is, that they seem to lack in their
| strategic reasoning and are more built on vibes of their
| leader, which is subject to blindness due to sycophants,
| much like in an authoritarian regime. Also they tend to
| treat the whole market as their internal planning
| problem.
|
| > but here in the case of economics, we don't need to
| bend words when other fitting concepts are readily
| available and battle-tested.
|
| I think a majority of commenters on HN are not as well-
| versed in Economics as you, so would value elaboration on
| modern monopolies. I think they differ a bit from
| classical monopolies in their amount of ties to the
| government and interference into elections. Not that
| lobbying isn't typical for monopolies, but modern
| monopolies seem to not need to lobby anymore, but simply
| do and dictate.
| sharts wrote:
| how is this centralized planning? It's a corporate decision
| making operating in a free market to optimize for what
| majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are
| owned by few).
| xpe wrote:
| I think the implied thought (?) is there is a similarity
| between central planning and oligopoly bandwagoning. To my
| eye, the causes and dynamics are different enough to
| warrant bucketing them separately.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Your parenthetical is how. It's not completely centralized,
| but it is being decided by a very small number of people.
| yunnpp wrote:
| A free market where the government participates with
| billions in investment and tax cuts, yes.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It's centralized vs. decentralized not public vs. private.
| A centralized private planning committee is still
| centralized.
| kace91 wrote:
| The funniest thing is that somehow the executive class is
| even more out of touch than they used to be.
|
| At least before there was a certain common baseline derived
| from everyone watching the same news and reading the same
| press. Now they are just as enclosed in their thought bubbles
| as everyone else. It is entirely possible for a tech CEO to
| have a full company of tech workers despising the current
| plan and yet that person being constantly reinforced by
| linkedin and chatgpt.
| Loughla wrote:
| The out of touch leader is a trope that I'm willing to bet
| has existed as long as we've had leaders.
|
| I remember first hearing the phrase "yes man" in relation
| to a human ass kisser my dad worked with in like 1988.
|
| It's very easy to unknowingly surround yourself with
| syncophants and hangers on when you literally have more
| money than some countries. This is true now and has been
| true forever. I'm not sure they're more out of touch, as
| much as we're way more aware?
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's more than the fact they are surrounded by
| sycophants. It's also that, despite the mythology the
| executive-worship-industry tries to paint, CxOs and board
| members of companies are just not very creative or
| visionary people. They largely spend their time looking
| at their peers and competitors for hints about what they
| should be doing. And today, those hints all are "do AI".
| They're not sitting down and deriving from first
| principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their
| buddies steering other companies and they're all saying
| AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too.
| nine_k wrote:
| Sounds quite a bit like stock market. The more sober and
| cynical of them see fads as fads, irrational but powerful
| movements, and ride the waves, selling to a greater fool.
| mk89 wrote:
| > They're not sitting down and deriving from first
| principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their
| buddies steering other companies and they're all saying
| AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too.
|
| I think you're underestimating a bit. We _must_ implement
| AI because _they_ were able to sell it so good that they
| got billion $ investors (see all the money coming from
| Qatar /saudi arabia etc). That's a lot of money coming in
| that allows to innovate/etc.
| ryandrake wrote:
| But that thing they all were peddling and getting
| investors over _could be anything_! For a while it was
| "blockchain." Everyone had to do blockchain because
| everyone was doing blockchain, and investors were giving
| you money if you say blockchain. I wonder what it will be
| once the AI bubble bursts.
|
| I swear that every 5-10 years, corporate CEOs all get
| together in a secret meeting where they all agree on the
| next buzzword technology. They invite Harvard Business
| Review and the tech press to give them their marching
| orders. Then, finally, the white smoke comes forth from
| the chimney indicating the next bubble buzzword has been
| chosen, and the industry goes bananas over it for 10
| years for no reason.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| But there wasn't really a bubble crash from blockchain,
| or did I miss something.
| nine_k wrote:
| Out-of-touch leaders existed for millennia. The
| "Emperor's New Clothes" tale was published in 1837 as a
| reproduction of a much older folk take. Sima Qian
| criticizes out-of-touch lords and emperors in his book
| about ancient history, written in 1th century BC. Maybe
| there is even older evidence.
| ryandrake wrote:
| No surprise, the CxO class barely lives in the same
| physical world as us peasants. They all hang out together
| in their rich-people restaurants and rich-people galas and
| rich-people country clubs and rich-people vacation spots,
| socializing with other rich-people and don't really have a
| lot of contact with normal people, outside of a handful of
| executive assistants and household servants.
| gruez wrote:
| >It is a weird form of centralized planning [...]
|
| It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not
| centralized at all.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| And there's no planning
| themafia wrote:
| > There's too much group-think in the executive class.
|
| I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail."
| It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that
| they're all no longer hedging their bets.
|
| > we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly
| distributed
|
| We give the military far too much money in the USA.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > We give the military far too much money in the USA.
|
| ~ themafia, 2025
|
| (sorry)
|
| On a more serious note the military is sure a money burning
| machine, but IMHO it's only government spending, when most
| of the money in the US is deliberately private.
|
| The fintech sector could be a bigger representation of a
| money vacuuming system benefiting statistically nobody ?
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's around 3.4% GDP. That puts us in the top 10% or so
| worldwide, but it's not ridiculously high. It's on a
| similar level as countries such as Morocco and Colombia,
| which aren't known for excessive military spending. It's
| still kind of high for a country with no nearby enemies,
| but for the most part, US military spending is large
| because the US economy is large.
| themafia wrote:
| It's around 16% of the total federal budget. To be fair
| about 1/3 of "military spending" is actually Salaries,
| Medical, Housing and GI/Retirement costs.
|
| It's also the case that none of the CIA, NSA or DHS
| budgets show up under the military, even though they're
| performing some of the same functions that would be
| handled by militaries in other countries.
|
| We also have "black appropriations." So the total of the
| spending on surveillance and kinetic operations is often
| unknowable. Add to this the fact the Pentagon has never
| successfully performed an audit and I think people are
| right to be suspicious of the topline "fraction of GDP"
| number.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Just want to point out that the NSA is part of the DoD.
| (Or DoW now)
| themafia wrote:
| This is true; however, their agency budget is not part of
| the DoD's budget and is not included in the reported
| "total" for DoD.
|
| At least not in the data set I use:
|
| https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/agency
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think the number is probably much higher than we think
| - there is probably a ton of not so obvious spending on
| research and development.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| Military spending is a type of wealfare for the wealthy
| it is one of the only forms of public or government
| spending that doesn't crowd out private investors, the
| way public housing or publicly funded hospitals do. The
| high military spending and the contractor class often
| vote more conservative than typical for their demographic
| and economic peers It's been high since WW2, with maybe a
| slight drop in the late 70s. The current stat of "3.4
| times gdp" ignores the fact that a large part of our
| national debt is from the military and war budgets. I saw
| a statistic in the mid 1990s that if we had kept our
| military budget at inflation adjusted levels equal to
| 1976 our debt would have gone to zero as early as 1994.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Our national debt is from our unwillingness to raise
| taxes to balance the budget. Federal spending is somewhat
| high historically, but not absurdly so. Relative to the
| economy, it's at about the same level as it was in the
| 1980s. Measured as a percentage of GDP, the current
| military budget is the lowest since before the Second
| World War, aside from a brief period at the end of the
| 1990s where it was slightly lower.
|
| Comparing budgets by adjusting for inflation doesn't make
| any sense. A budget that served a country of 218 million
| in 1976 would, when adjusted for inflation, serve a
| country of 218 million in 2026. Percentage of GDP is what
| you want to look at.
| Aerroon wrote:
| But federal spending has been historically high ever
| since like the New Deal.
|
| Budget-to-GDP ratio in the US is close to 40%. (On that
| note, you should really consider federal + state combined
| rather than just federal.)
|
| In early 1900s this same ratio was around 5-10%.
|
| It has been increasing pretty much everywhere during the
| 20th century. It has made me wonder whether much of the
| prosperity we've seen and felt might not be a result of
| this ever-increasing percentage. Essentially we're
| spending more and more and that makes it feel like we're
| progressing faster than we are. Eventually it's going to
| have to stop though and I dread what happens when we do.
| themafia wrote:
| We nearly _doubled_ the budget during COVID. The
| differences are obvious:
|
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59946
| wat10000 wrote:
| The New Deal was 90+ years ago. At some point it stops
| being abnormally high and becomes just how things are
| done.
|
| I don't see why we'd eventually have to stop this level
| of spending. The _debt_ is unsustainable, but that 's a
| policy choice to keep taxes too low for the level of
| spending we've chosen.
| lotyrin wrote:
| Diversity is good for populations. If you have a tiny pool
| of individuals with mostly the same traits (in this case I
| mean things like culture, education, morality, ethics,
| rather than class and race - though there are obvious
| correlations) then you get what some other comments are
| describing as being effectively centralized planning with
| extra steps, rather than a market of competing ideas.
| wat10000 wrote:
| This is why I think taxes on the very wealthy should be so
| high that billionaires can't happen. The usual reasons are
| either about raising revenue or are vague ideas about
| inequality. It doesn't raise enough revenue to matter, and
| inequality is a fairly weak justification by itself.
|
| But the power concentration is a strong reason. That level of
| wealth is incompatible with democracy. Money is power, and
| when someone accumulates enough of it to be able to
| personally shake entire industries, it's too much.
| Aerroon wrote:
| You'll just get a different form of power concentration. Do
| you think the Soviet Union didn't have power concentration
| in individuals? Of course it did, that's why the general
| secretary of the party was more important than the actual
| heads of state and government.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Do you think I'm proposing anything like the Soviet
| system?
| Aerroon wrote:
| No? I'm saying that power concentration is pretty much
| unavoidable. The question is more about what they can do
| with that power. I suspect that people getting more power
| through wealth in the modern world is better than people
| concentrating power through politics.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I don't think it's unavoidable. I don't see why you
| couldn't have a relatively weak government that's
| otherwise pretty laissez-faire besides taxing the hell
| out of extreme wealth. And a strong government doesn't
| have to have extremely powerful individuals. Power can be
| divided, and representatives are ultimately accountable
| to the people.
|
| What you're saying basically boils down to: kings are
| inevitable, might as well choose them by economic success
| instead of the more old-fashioned approaches. I reject
| the first part.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > I'm saying that power concentration is pretty much
| unavoidable.
|
| It's avoidable by formalizing the execution of power. The
| head of state is very powerful, but he can't create laws
| or anything. That all needs to be done be the parliament,
| which is several hundred people.
| aianus wrote:
| Someone needs to allocate capital, might as well be someone
| that has done it successfully in the past.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > But the power concentration is a strong reason.
|
| A centralized authority capable of so severely restricting
| the economic freedom of the most powerful people implies a
| far greater concentration of power than the one you're
| fighting against. You're proposing to cure the common cold
| with AIDS.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Why? We already tax people. This would be a difference of
| degree, not of kind.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > A centralized authority capable of so severely
| restricting the economic freedom of the most powerful
| people implies a far greater concentration of power
|
| Yes. That's the idea. Make the largest concentration of
| power an elected body auditable by the commons and whose
| actions are formalized by a bunch of rules, that they can
| choose, but still need to stick to.
| est31 wrote:
| Centralized planning is needed in any civilization. You need
| some mechanism to decide where to put resources, whether it's
| to organize the annual school's excursion or to construct the
| national highway system.
|
| But yeah in the end companies behave in trends, if some
| companies do it then the other companies have to do it too,
| even if this makes things less efficient or is even hurtful.
| We can put that onto the human factor, but I think even if we
| replaced all CEOs with AIs, those AIs would all see the same
| information and make similar decisions on those information.
|
| There is pascal's wager arguments to be had: for each
| individual company, the punishment of not playing the AI game
| and missing out on something big is bigger than the
| punishment of wasting resources by allocating them towards AI
| efforts plus annoying customers with AI features they don't
| want or need.
|
| > 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.
|
| The usa has rid itself multiple times of its barons. There is
| mechanisms in place, but I am not sure that people really are
| going to exercise those means any time soon. If this AI stuff
| is successful in the real world as well, then increasing
| amounts of power will shift away from the people to the
| people controlling the AI, with all the consequences this
| has.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Exactly. So instead of electing the people who will allocate
| the resources, the people who are successful in one thing are
| given the right to manage the resources for whatever they
| wish and they can keep being very wrong for very long time
| when other people are deprived from the resources due to the
| mismanagement and can't do anything about it.
|
| In theory I guess this creates a demand that should be
| satisfied by the market but in reality it seems like when the
| wealth is too concentrated in the hands of the few that call
| all the decision the market is unable to act.
| drysine 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.
|
| No, it's pure capitalism where Atlas shrugged and ordered
| billions worth of RAM. You might not like it but don't call
| it "centralized planning" or "Soviet era".
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind
| of freight train before it were to get out of control
|
| Care to share some keywords here?
| thfuran wrote:
| Taxes and/or regulatory approval processes.
| thfuran wrote:
| We don't really seem to be shying away from government
| corruption.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| A tax on _scale_.
|
| Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that.
|
| If a big company and a few small companies all have identical
| costs for producing a product, society is better served by
| having it produced by the few small companies than the one
| big company.
|
| Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient
| for taxation.
|
| Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political
| football, and will be fought over, just like the Fed prime
| interest rate. But it's a single scalar instead of a whole
| executive branch department and a hundred kilopages of
| regulations like we have in the antitrust-enforcement
| clusterfuck. Which makes it way harder to pull shenanighans.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If a big company and a few small companies all have
| identical costs for producing a product, society is better
| served by having it produced by the few small companies
| than the one big company.
|
| Why? That's exactly the circumstances where the mere
| potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police
| the big company's behavior. You get lower costs (due to
| economies of scale) and a very low chance of
| monopolization. so everyone's happy. In the case of this
| DRAM/flash price spike, the natural "small" actors are fabs
| slightly off the leading edge, that will be able to retool
| their production and supply these devices for a higher
| profit.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| _the mere potential for small companies to pop up is
| enough to police the big company 's behavior._
|
| If that were true, "you're in Amazon's kill zone"
| wouldn't be something VC's say to startups. And yet, they
| do say that.
| Ray20 wrote:
| And yet, startups exist.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| because they stay out of the kill zone
| refurb wrote:
| > If a big company and a few small companies all have
| identical costs for producing a product, society is better
| served by having it produced by the few small companies
| than the one big company.
|
| How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products,
| resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the
| opposite of "society is served better".
|
| We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.
| lenkite wrote:
| By the time a company becomes a monopoly, it is immensely
| powerful - politically and monetarily - getting rid of it
| or splitting it up is near impossible. Monopoly laws are
| near impossible to apply as the corporation has
| sufficient money and influence to turn politicians into
| servile puppets.
|
| Best to nip corpos before they gain more revenue than a
| nation state and become "too big to fail".
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| > > all have identical costs
|
| > Costs will be higher
|
| Read it again, please.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >society is better served by having it produced by the few
| small companies than the one big company.
|
| well, assuming the scale couldn't be used for the benefit
| of society and not to milk it dry. but yes probably the
| best that can have a reasonable chance at success,
| eventually, maybe.
| 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?
| sixothree wrote:
| While the technical features are what attract me, I'm
| convinced what most people are going to be interested in
| are social features.
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| What do you think happens when the majority of consumers are
| priced not only out of bread, but also circuses?
| natebc wrote:
| History has told us it won't be good for the lords when
| that happens.
| XorNot wrote:
| Or you could look at reality where it generates fake social
| media posts s lot and we could all ask, why is this valuable?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Unless I get all the resources I want, when I want, all at
| low prices, the market has obviously failed.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Yes, except unironically. A market that cannot efficiently
| serve the vast majority of the population is a failed
| market.
| hakfoo wrote:
| Gamers at least _enjoy_ their GPUs and memory.
|
| The tone from the AI industry sounds more like a dependent
| addict by comparison. They're well past the phase where
| they're enjoying their fix and into the "please, just another
| terawatt, another container-ship full of Quadros, to make it
| through the day" mode.
|
| More seriously, I could see some legitimate value in saying
| "no, you can't buy every transistor on the market."
|
| It forces AI players to think about efficiency and smarter
| software rather than just throwing money at bigger wads of
| compute. This might be part of where China's getting their
| competitive chops from-- having to do more with less due to
| trade restrictions seems to be producing some surprisingly
| competitive products.
|
| It also encourages diversification. There is still no non-
| handwavey road to sustainable long-term profitability for
| most of the AI sector, which is why we keep hearing answers
| like "maybe the Extra Fingers Machine cures cancer."
| Eventually Claude and Copilot have to cover their costs or
| die. If you're nVidia or TSMC, you might love today's huge
| margins and willing buyers for 150% of your output, but it's
| simple due diligence to make sure you have other customers
| available so you can weather the day the bubble bursts.
|
| It's also a solid PR play. Making sure people can still
| access the hobbies they enjoy is an easy way to say you're on
| the side of the mass public. It comes from a similar place to
| banning ticket scalping or setting reasonable prices on
| captive concessions. The actual dollars involved are small
| (how many enthusiast PCs could you outfit with the RAM chips
| or GPU wafer capacity being diverted to just one AI data
| centre?) but it makes it look like you're not completely for
| sale to the highest bidder.
| 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
| amelius wrote:
| yeah but the demand is based on empty promises
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| You are overthinking things
| TinkersW wrote:
| OpenAI appears to have bought the DRAM, not to use it, as
| they are apparently buying it in unfinished form, but
| explicitly to take it off the market and cause this massive
| price increase & squash competition.
|
| I would call that market manipulation(or failure if you
| wish)--in a just society Sam Alton would be heading to
| prison.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It is the market working as expected, but it still failed to
| allocate money diversely.
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| New type? Lol.
|
| It's a classic 'tulip bubble'.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Not even. Tulips were non-productive speculative assets. NFTs
| were what the tulip was. The AI buildout is more like the
| railroad mania in the sense that there is froth but
| productive utility is still the output.
| lazide wrote:
| Tulips also grew and could be bred.
|
| The actual underlying models of productive output for these
| AI tools is a tiny fraction (actually) of the mania, and
| can be trivially produced at massive quantity without the
| spend that is currently ongoing.
|
| The big bubble is because (like with tulips back then),
| there was a belief in a degree of scarcity (due to apparent
| novelty) that didn't actually exist.
| fragmede wrote:
| Just like the beautiful woman who's luxury bag purchase
| she doesn't actually need, we can sit here and judge her
| for it, but at the end of the day it's not our money
| she's buying Louis Vuitton with, and we're not the one
| she's going home with.
| lazide wrote:
| Non sequitur of the day?
|
| Anyone who owns shares in US companies (most people here)
| both are 'going home with' the companies involved, and
| are buying 'the bags'.
|
| Not to mention all the people buying the bonds used to
| fund the whole AI data center buildout, which is a ton of
| probably pension funds and old folks planning for
| retirement (also probably more than a few
| millionaire/billionaires!).
| fragmede wrote:
| Not to blame the victim, but if you're not in control of
| how _you_ spend _your_ money, that 's really on you.
| Don't try and put that on someone else.
| lazide wrote:
| Hahah, if you think anyone even knows how much of their
| money got spent on this, you're living in fantasy land.
| christophilus wrote:
| Markets are voting machines in the short term and weighing
| machines in the long term. We're in the short term popularity
| phase of AI at the moment. The weighing will come along
| eventually.
| parineum wrote:
| > where resources can be massively misallocated
|
| It's a little ironic but to call this a market failure due to
| resource misalocation because prices are high when high prices
| is how misalocation is avoided.
|
| I'm a little suspicious that "misalocation" just means it's too
| expensive for you. That's a feature, not a bug.
| noosphr wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| We have been living on the investment of previous centuries and
| decades in the West for close to 40 years now. Everything is
| broken but that didn't matter because everything that needed a
| functioning physical economy had moved to the East.
|
| AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century that needs
| the sort of infrastructure that previous industrial revolutions
| needed: namely a ton of raw power.
|
| The bubble is laying bare just how terrible infrastructure is
| and how we've ignored trillions of maintenance to give a few
| thousand people tax breaks they don't really need.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century
|
| Is it?
| abalashov wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know about that.
| incompatible wrote:
| Why not follow the time-honoured approach and put the data
| centres in low-income countries?
| noosphr wrote:
| Because you only do that once the tech has been comodatized
| and you have wrung all the benefit for your country that
| you can.
|
| The British didn't industrialise Indian for a reason.
| lenkite wrote:
| The British _deindustrialized_ India.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-
| industrialisation_of_India
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I assume they don't have good enough power infrastructure.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Bridges can be used for decades, your brand new GiGaAiFaRm
| will be fully deprecated by 2030 already.
|
| All the infrastructure will be useless when the data centers
| move to the next city/state offering a tax cut.
| noosphr wrote:
| A power line can be used for a century.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Sure, if you have something worth powering at the end of
| it.
| noosphr wrote:
| The same is true of all infrastructure from roads to
| water pipes.
|
| You are being obtuse for the sake of AI doomerism.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Going to be awesome tho when OpenAI et al fail because the
| market is going to be flooded with cheap parts.
| haunter wrote:
| Or not cause inflation, rising cost of living etc. People
| said the same about crypto GPUs but it never really happened
| in the end. Those cheap pre-LHR RTX cards never really
| entered the picture.
| abalashov wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This resonates deeply, especially to someone born in the USSR.
| lovich wrote:
| > 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.
|
| As someone who advocates that we only use capitalism as a tool
| in specific areas and try to move past it in other, I'll defend
| it here to say that's not really a market anymore when this
| happens.
|
| Hyper concentration of wealth is going to lead to the same
| issues that command economies have where the low level capital
| allocations(buying shit) isn't getting feedback from everyone
| involved and is just going off one asshole's opinion
| xpe wrote:
| > ... 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.
|
| Technically speaking, this is not a market failure. [1] Why?
| Per the comment above, it is the individuals that are acting
| irrationally, right? The market is acting correctly according
| to its design and inputs. The market's price adjustment is
| rational in response. The response is not necessarily fair to
| all people, but traditional styles of neoclassical economic
| analysis deaccentuate common notions of fairness or equality;
| the main goal is economic efficiency.
|
| I prefer to ask the question: to what degree is some particular
| market design serving the best interest of its stakeholders and
| society? In democracies, we have some degree of choice over
| what we want!
|
| I say all of this as a person who views markets as mechanisms
| not moral foundations. This distinction is made clear when
| studying political economic (economics for policy analysis)
| though I think it sometimes gets overlooked in other settings.
|
| If one wants to explore coordination mechanisms that can handle
| highly irrational demand spikes, you have to think hard. To
| some degree, one would have to give up a key aspect of most
| market systems -- the notion of one price set by the idea of
| "willingness to pay".
|
| [1] Market failure is a technical term within economics meaning
| the mechanism itself malfunctions relative to its own
| efficiency criteria.
| elorant wrote:
| Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC
| industry will take a huge hit.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't know if the term console even makes sense any more.
| It's a computer without a keyboard and mouse. And as soon as
| you do that, it's a PC. So I don't see how this makes any
| sense or will ever happen.
| yunnpp wrote:
| Actually, a console is worse than a PC. It's main reason
| for existence is to enforce DRM on the user to protect
| copyright/IP.
| fooey wrote:
| console ram isn't magically cheaper
| phito wrote:
| Consoles are increasingly becoming PCs, so I don't see this
| happening
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's maybe new to you (you're one of today's lucky 10,000!),
| but this kind of market failure has been going on since at
| least the south sea bubble and tulip mania, if not all the way
| back to Roman times.
| layoric wrote:
| This happens when you get worse and worse inequality when it
| comes to buying power. The most accurate prediction into how
| this all plays out I think is what Gary Stevenson calls "The
| Squeeze Out" -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUKaB4P5Qns
|
| Currently we are still at the stage of extraction from the
| upper/middle class retail investors and pension funds being
| sucked up by all the major tech companies that are only focused
| on their stock price. They have no incentive to compete,
| because if they do, it will ruin the game for everyone. This
| gets worse, and the theory (and somewhat historically) says it
| can lead to war.
|
| Agree with the analysis or not, I personally think it is quite
| compelling to what is happening with AI, worth a watch.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Just like some of the crypto booms and busts if you time it
| right this could be a good thing. Buy on a refresh cycle when
| AWS dumps a bunch of chips and RAM used or refurbished (some
| places even offer warranty which is nice).
|
| And if the market crashes or takes a big dip then temporarily
| eBay will flood with high end stuff at good prices.
|
| Sucks for anyone who needs to upgrade in the next year or two
| though !
| refurb wrote:
| > the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind
| of market failure
|
| I see people using "market failure" in weird ways lately. Just
| because someone thinks a use for a product isn't important,
| doesn't mean it's a market failure. It's actually the opposite
| - consumers are purchasing it at a price they value it.
|
| Someone who doesn't really need 128GB of ram won't pay the
| higher cost, but someone who does need it will.
| immibis wrote:
| The market failure results from those people having way more
| money than logic and economic principles dictate they should. A
| person would normally have to make a lot of good decisions in a
| row to get that much money, and would be expected continue
| making good decisions, but also wouldn't live long enough to
| reach these extreme amounts. However, repeated misallocation by
| the federal government over the last several decades (i.e.
| excessive money printing) resulted in people getting repeatedly
| rewarded for making the right kind of bad economic decisions
| instead.
| rr808 wrote:
| Prices going up 2-3x is not market failure, its just another
| commodity cycle. If it went up 10-100x you might have a point.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| There is a reason why there used to be market regulation and
| breaking up of monopolies. We are now-a-days trying out changes
| to the stable state from centuries, because that would be so
| yesterday, and will soon find out, why that state was chosen in
| the first place.
| 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 $680. Felt like a steal with how memory prices are
| going these days, ECC to boot.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I'm still on DDR4 but I hope this price gouging will be over by
| the time I need to finally upgrade :( I have a Ryzen so I did
| upgrade to the latest AM4 generation.
| wmf wrote:
| DDR4 will be just as expensive because it's made in the same
| fabs.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm thinking second-hand and new-old-stock, with less demand
| for it.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Nope, second hand is already evaporating.
|
| 2 months ago there were a load of second gen xeon scalable
| servers on offer. Now every one of them has had the ram
| stripped out and its just the chassis on offer.
|
| Fabs are not wasting their time on DDR4 now.
| neilv wrote:
| Nice that people are recognizing that they don't need
| DDR5 for most workloads. I have some DDR4 that I'm not
| currently using, so I just posted it for sale. :)
| abanana wrote:
| I've just looked up the current price of 2x8GB DDR4 I bought
| from CCL back in June for a basic PC for my mother. Was PS34,
| now PS75. That's nuts. Interesting to know the old stuff
| currently has value though.
| sbarre wrote:
| I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and
| prices have literally gone up by 2.5x..
|
| 128GB used to be 400$ 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.
| secondcoming wrote:
| new?
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Aside, $203 USD back then would be about $276 USD after
| inflation. Not a primary effect, but contributory.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Also we're likely comparing RAMs at different speeds and
| memory bandwidth.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| I think that goes to show that official inflation
| benchmarks are not very practical / useful in terms of
| buckets of things that people actually buy or desire. If
| the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts
| (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a
| geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If the bucket that measured inflation included computer
| parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing
| that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy
| higher...
|
| A house is $500,000
|
| A GPU is $500
|
| You could put GPUs into the inflation bucket and it
| wouldn't change anything. Inflation trackers count cost
| of living and things you pay monthly, not one time luxury
| expenses every 4 years that geeks buy for entertainment.
| dboreham wrote:
| Also need to account for the dollar decline vs other
| currencies (which yes is possibly somewhat factored into
| dollar inflation so you'd have to do the inflation
| calculation in Euros then convert to dollars accounting for
| the decline in value).
| bombcar wrote:
| Olds remember the years around '95 when RAM stayed the exact
| same price per megabyte for what seemed a decade.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I paid about GBP 20K for the 192MB RAM in a Sun SPARC 5
| workstation in 1995. That's maybe $27K USD in 1995 dollars.
| Gulp.
| bombcar wrote:
| There is or was a website that would let you plug in an
| Apple computer, and then tell you what you'd be worth if
| instead you'd bought Apple stock.
|
| I put my G4 PowerBook into it once, and then vowed never
| to look at it again.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I bought a bunch of hard drives in 2021 (16TB Seagate Exos)
| that are now $50-$100 more expensive. It's depressing.
| Roark66 wrote:
| Well, I've experienced both to some degree in the past. The
| previous long time with very similar hardware performance was
| when PCs were exorbitantly expensive and commodore 64 was the
| main "home computer" (at least in my country) over the latter
| 80s and early 90s.
|
| That period of time had some benefits. Programmers learned to
| squeeze absolutely everything out of that hardware.
|
| Perhaps writing software for today's hardware is again
| becoming the norm rather than being horribly inefficient and
| simply waiting for CPU/GPU power to double in 18 months.
|
| I was lucky. I built my am5 7950x Ryzen pc with 2x48gb ddr5 2
| years ago. I just bought 4x48gb kit a month ago with an idea
| to build another home server with the old 2*48gb kit.
|
| Today my old g.skill 2x48gb kit costs Double what I paid for
| the 4x48gb.
|
| Furthermore I bought two used rtx3090 (for AI) back then. A
| week ago I bought a third one for the same price... ,(for
| vram in my server).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
|
| But you're cherry picking prices from a notable period of
| high prices (right now).
|
| If you had run this comparison a few months ago or if you
| looked at averages, the same RAM would be much cheaper now.
|
| We're just consuming a lot of DRAM in general.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| If the sticker price stayed the same since 2016, it got about
| 35% cheaper due to inflation.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'm still on DDR3 :)
| minkeymaniac wrote:
| Doubled in the last 4 months
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM
|
| Upgraded by adding 64GB.. last Friday I sold the 32 GB I took
| out for what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
| incompatible wrote:
| Time to start scouring used-PC sales to reclaim the RAM and
| sell it for a profit?
| chii wrote:
| but why wouldn't that used-PC simply increase in price due
| to the components becoming more expensive?
| hattmall wrote:
| Information asymmetry
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Have you not noticed the domain of the submitted article?
| Others are way, way ahead on that already.
|
| (Including the submitter. In their comment history is "
| _Tip: You can sell used server RAM or desktop modules
| through BuySellRam to recover value from old hardware._ "
| at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800881 and all of
| the submissions of this domain are from this user:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buysellram.com )
| Aurornis wrote:
| If you can find used PCs being liquidated with DDR4 RAM
| that is fast enough for a modern build, then you might.
|
| Old RAM that comes out of the PCs being sold at fire sale
| prices isn't really in demand though. Even slower DDR4
| grades aren't seeing much demand.
| ajb wrote:
| Dram alternates between feast and famine; it's the nature of a
| business when the granularity of investment is so huge (you
| have a fab or you don't, and they cost billions -maybe
| trillions by now). So, it will swing back. Unfortunately it
| looks like maybe 3-5 years on average, from some analysis here:
| https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html
|
| (That's just me eyeballing it, feel free to do the math)
| addaon wrote:
| Nothing costs trillions.
| chmod775 wrote:
| If you had a trillion dollars you might find some things
| are for sale that otherwise wouldn't be...
| nolok wrote:
| To be fair, nobody HAS a trillion dollar either. They
| have stuff that may be worth a trillion dollar when sold.
| boguscoder wrote:
| Have you seen our debt recently?..
| jbverschoor wrote:
| A waiver is a waiver. The cost is per square mm. It's pure
| supply and demand
| chmod775 wrote:
| No, a _wafer_ is very much not a wafer. DRAM processes are
| very different from making logic*. You don 't just make
| memory in your fab today and logic tomorrow. But even when
| you stay in your lane, the industry operates on very long
| cycles and needs scale to function at any reasonable price
| at all. You don't just dust off your backyard fab to make
| the odd bit of memory whenever it is convenient.
|
| Nobody is going to do anything if they can't be sure that
| they'll be able to run the fab they built for a long time
| and sell most of what they make. Conversely fabs don't tend
| to idle a lot. Sometimes they're only built if their
| capacity is essentially sold already. Given how massive the
| AI bubble is looking right now, I personally wouldn't
| expect anyone to make a gamble building a new fab.
|
| * Someone explained this at length on here a while ago, but
| I can't seem to find their comment. Should've favorited it.
| incrudible wrote:
| > Sometimes they're only built if their capacity is
| essentially sold already.
|
| "Hyperscalers" already have multi-year contracts going.
| If the demand really was there, they could make it
| happen. Now it seems more like they're taking capacity
| from what would've been sold on the spot or quarterly
| markets. They already made their money.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Sure, yes the cost of producing a wafer is fixed. Opex
| didn't change that much.
|
| Following your reasoning, which is common in
| manufacturing, the capex needed is already allocated. So,
| where does the 2x price hike come from if not
| supply/demand?
|
| The cost to produce did not go up 100%, or even 20%
|
| Actually, DRAM fabs do get scaled down, very similar to
| the Middle East scaling down oil production.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| DRAM/flash fab _investment_ probably did get scaled down
| due to the formerly low prices, but once you do have a
| fab it makes sense to have it produce flat out. Then that
| chunk of potential production gets allocated into DRAM
| vs. HBM, various sorts of flash storage etc. But there 's
| just no way around the fact that capacity is always going
| to be bottlenecked somehow, and a lot less likely to
| expand when margins are expected to be lower.
| Yokolos wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. I've seen analyses making the case
| that this new phase is unlike previous cycles and DRAM makers
| will be far less willing to invest significantly in new
| capacity, especially into consumer DRAM over more enterprise
| DRAM or HBM (and even there there's still a significant risk
| of the AI bubble popping). The shortage could last a decade.
| Right now DRAM makers are benefiting to an extreme degree
| since they can basically demand any price for what they're
| making now, reducing the incentive even more.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/storage/perfect-s...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The most likely direct response is not new capacity, it's
| older capacity running at full tilt (given the now higher
| margins) to produce more mature technology with lower
| requirements on fabrication (such as DDR3/4, older Flash
| storage tech, etc.) and soak up demand for these.
| DDR5/GDDR/HBM/etc. prices will still be quite high, but
| alternatives will be available.
| kees99 wrote:
| > produce more mature technology ... DDR3/4
|
| ...except current peak in demand is mostly driven by
| build-out of AI capacity.
|
| Both inference and training workloads are often
| bottlenecked on RAM speed, and trying to shoehorn
| older/slower memory tech there would require non-trivial
| amount of R&D to go into widening memory bus on
| CPU/GPU/NPUs, which is unlikely to happen - those are in
| very high demand already.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| Even if AI stuff does really need DDR5, there must be
| lots of other applications that would ideally use DDR5
| but can make do with DDR3/4 if there's a big difference
| in price
| shevy-java wrote:
| I mean, AI is currently hyped, so the most natural and
| logical assumption is that AI drives these prices up
| primarily. We need compensation from those AI
| corporations. They cost us too much.
| rasz wrote:
| A LOT of businesses learned during Covid they can make more
| money by permanently reducing output and jacking prices. We
| might be witnessing the end times of economies of scale.
| Incipient wrote:
| The idea is someone else comes in that's happy to eat
| their lunch by undercutting them. Unfortunately, we're
| probably limited to China doing that at this point as a
| lot of the existing players have literally been fined for
| price fixing before.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
| autoexec wrote:
| It seems more likely that someone else comes in and
| either colludes with the people who are screwing us to
| get a piece of the action or gets bought out by one of
| the big companies who started all this. Since the rare
| times companies get caught they only get weak slaps on
| the wrist where they only pay a fraction of what they
| made in profits (basically just the US demanding their
| cut) I don't have much faith things will improve any time
| soon.
|
| Even China has no reason to reduce prices much for memory
| sold to the US when they know we have no choice but to
| buy at the prices already set by the cartel. I expect
| that if China does start making memory they'll sell it
| cheap within China and export it at much higher prices.
| Maybe we'll get a black market for cheap DRAM smuggled
| out of China though.
| trhway wrote:
| I think in part it is a system level response to the
| widespread just-in-time approach of those businesses'
| clients. A just-in-time client is very "flexible" on
| price when supply is squeezed. After that back and forth
| i think we'll see return to some degree of supply
| buffering(warehousing) to dampen down the supply
| levels/price shocks in the pipelines.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I thought that, too, but then the Nexperia shitstorm hit,
| and it was as if the industry had learned nothing at all
| from the COVID shortages.
| snuxoll wrote:
| There's not a difference between "consumer" DRAM and
| "enterprise" DRAM at the silicon level, they're cut from
| the same wafers at the end of the day.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Doesn't the same factory produce enterprise (i.e. ECC)
| and consumer (non-ECC) DRAM?
|
| If there is high demand for the former due to AI, they
| can increase production to generate higher profits. This
| cuts the production capacity of consumer DRAM, and lead
| to higher prices in that segment too. Simple supply &
| demand at work.
| matthews3 wrote:
| At the silicon level, it is the same.
|
| Each memory DIMM/stick is made up of multiple DRAM chip.
| ECC DIMMs have an extra chip for storing the error
| correcting parity data.
|
| The bottleneck is with the chips and not the DIMMs. Chip
| fabs are expensive and time consuming, while making PCBs
| and placing components down onto them is much easier to
| get into.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Got it now, thanks!
| crote wrote:
| Conceptually, you can think of it as "RAID for memory".
|
| A consumer DDR5 module has two 32-bit-wide buses, which
| are both for example implemented using 4 chips which each
| handle 8 bits operating in parallel - just like RAID 0.
|
| An enterprise DDR5 module has a 40-bit-wide bus
| implemented using 5 chips. The memory controller uses
| those 8 additional bits to store the parity calculated
| over the 32 regular bits - so just like RAID 4 (or RAID
| 5, I haven't dug into the details too deeply). The whole
| magic happens _inside the controller_ , the DRAM chip
| itself isn't even aware of it.
|
| Given the way the industry works (some companies do DRAM
| chip production, it is sold as a commodity, and others
| buy a bunch of chips to turn them into RAM modules) the
| factory producing the chips _does not even know_ if the
| chips they have just produced will be turned into ECC or
| non-ECC. The prices rise and fall as one because it is
| functionally a single market.
| david-gpu wrote:
| That makes sense, thank you.
| Yokolos wrote:
| Yes, but if new capacity is also redirected to be able to
| be sold as enterprise memory, we won't see better supply
| for consumer memory. As long as margins are better and
| demand is higher for enterprise memory, the average
| consumer is screwed.
| immibis wrote:
| Is there still a difference? I have DDR5 registered ECC
| in my computer.
| Yokolos wrote:
| I mean, the only difference we care about is how much of
| it is actual RAM vs HBM (to be used on GPUs) and how much
| it costs. We want it to be cheap. So yes, there's a
| difference if we're competing with enterprise customers
| for supply.
|
| I don't really understand why every little thing needs to
| be spelled out. It doesn't matter. We're not getting the
| RAM at an affordable price anymore.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Does it matter that AI hardware has such a shorter shelf
| life/faster upgrade cycle? Meaning we may see the ram
| chips resold/thrown back into the used market quicker
| than before?
| dangus wrote:
| Anytime somebody is making a prediction for the tech
| industry involving a decade timespan I pull out my Fedora
| of Doubt and tip my cap to m'lady.
| justin66 wrote:
| > The shortage could last a decade.
|
| Do we really think the current level of AI-driven data
| center demand will continue indefinitely? The world only
| needs so many pictures of bears wearing suits.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| The pop culture perception of AI just being image and
| text generators is incorrect. AI is many things, they all
| need tons of RAM. Google is rolling out self-driving
| taxis in more and more cities for instance.
| justin66 wrote:
| Congrats on engaging with the facetious part of my
| comment, but I think the question still stands: do you
| think the current level of AI-driven data center demand
| will continue indefinitely?
|
| I feel like the question of how many computers are needed
| to steer a bunch of self-driving taxis probably has an
| answer, and I bet it's not anything even remotely close
| to what would justify a decade's worth of maximum
| investment in silicon for AI data centers, which is what
| we were talking about.
| lazide wrote:
| Data center AI is also completely uninteresting/non-
| useful for self driving Taxis, or any other self driving
| vehicle.
| uncletscollie wrote:
| AI is needed to restart feudalism?
| downrightmike wrote:
| No, the 10% best scenario return on AI won't make it. The
| bubble is trying to replace all human labor, which is why
| it is a bubble in the first place. No one is being honest
| that AGI is not possible in this manner of tech. And
| Scale won't get them there.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Maybe we'll get default to ECC in everything with this?
| crote wrote:
| Is this still the case in 2025, though?
|
| In a traditional pork cycle there's a relatively large number
| of players and a relatively low investment cost. The DRAM
| market in the 1970s and 1980s operated quite similarly: you
| could build a fab for a few million dollars, and it could be
| done by a fab which also churned out regular logic - it's how
| Intel got started! There were _dozens_ of DRAM-producing
| companies in the US alone.
|
| But these days the market looks completely different. The
| market is roughly equally divided up between SK Hynix,
| Micron, and Samsung. Building a fab costs _billions_ and can
| easily a year of 5 - if not a decade - from start to finish.
| Responding to current market conditions is basically
| impossible, you have to plan for the market you expect
| _years_ from now.
|
| Ignoring the current AI bubble, DRAM demand has become
| _relatively_ stable - and so has the price. Unless there 's a
| good reason to believe the current buying craze will last
| over a decade, why would the DRAM manufacturers risk
| significantly changing their plans and potentially creating
| an oversupply in the future? It's not like the high prices
| are _hurting_ them...
| lazide wrote:
| Also, current political turbulence makes planning for the
| long term extremely risky.
|
| Will the company be evicted from the country in 6 months? A
| year? Will there be 100% tariffs on competitions imports?
| Or 0%? Will there be an anti-labor gov't in effect when the
| investment might mature, or a pro-labor?
|
| The bigger the investment, the longer the investment
| timeframe, and the more sane the returns - the harder it is
| to make the investment happen.
|
| High risk requires a correspondingly high potential return.
|
| That everyone has to pay more for current production is a
| side effect of the uncertainty, because no one knows what
| the odds are of even future production actually happening,
| let along the next fancy wiz-bang technology.
|
| But people do need the current production.
| darkwater wrote:
| My guess is that they will plummet down when the AI bubble
| bursts.
| ksec wrote:
| I am so glad both top rated and majority of comments on HN
| finally understands DRAM industry instead of constant DRAM is
| a cartel that is why things are expensive.
|
| Also worth mentioning DRAM and NAND's profit from Samsung is
| what keep the Samsung Foundry fighting TSMC. Especially for
| those who thinks TSMC is somehow a monopoly.
|
| Another things to point out which is not mentioned yet, China
| is working on both DRAM and NAND. Both LPDDR5 and Stacked
| NAND are already in production and waiting for yield and
| scale. Higher Price will finally be perfect timing for them
| to join the commodity DRAM and NAND race. Good for consumer I
| suppose, not so good for a lot of other things which I wont
| go into.
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| re: other things, I bet I agree.
| ls612 wrote:
| DRAM manufacturers have literally been convicted of price
| fixing in the past why do you have to white knight for
| them?
| hollerith wrote:
| Most of us who've been on Earth for a while know that
| courts often get it wrong. Even if the particular court
| decision you mention was correct does not mean that price
| fixing is the _main reason_ or the _underlying reason_
| DRAM prices sometime go up.
| lazide wrote:
| They blatantly were doing it, admitted to it, and did it
| again later. What kind of crazy is this?
|
| Is this the 'but he loves me, he wouldn't hit me again'
| of the tech world?
| kbolino wrote:
| Both stories can be true.
|
| The firms can coordinate by agreeing on a strategy they
| deem necessary for the future of the industry, and that
| strategy requires significant capital expenditures, and
| the industry does not get (or does not want) outside
| investment to fund it, and if any of the firms defects
| and keeps prices low the others cannot execute on the
| strategy, so they all agree to raise prices.
|
| Then, after the strategy succeeds, they have gotten
| addicted to the higher revenues, they do not allow prices
| to fall as fast as they should, their coordination
| becomes blatantly illegal, and they have to get smacked
| down by regulators.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > The firms can coordinate by agreeing on a strategy they
| deem necessary for the future of the industry
|
| As long as it doesn't fall into the "collusion"
| prohibitions of the relevant competition law.
|
| > "People of the same trade seldom meet ... but the
| conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or
| in some contrivance to raise prices."
|
| Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
| vee-kay wrote:
| > The firms can coordinate by agreeing on a strategy they
| deem necessary for the future of the industry.. Then,
| after the strategy succeeds, they have gotten addicted to
| the higher revenues, they do not allow prices to fall as
| fast as they should, their coordination becomes blatantly
| illegal..
|
| So said and did the infamous Phoebus cartel, to
| unnaturally "fix" the prices and quality of light bulbs.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
|
| For more than a century, one strange mystery has puzzled
| the world: why do old light bulbs last for decades while
| modern bulbs barely survive a couple of years?
|
| The answer lies in a secret meeting held in Geneva,
| Switzerland in 1924, where the world's biggest light bulb
| companies formed the notorious Phoebus Cartel.
|
| Their mission was simple but shocking: control the global
| market, set fixed prices, and most importantly... reduce
| bulb lifespan.
|
| Before this cartel, bulbs could easily run for 2500+
| hours. But after the Phoebus Cartel pact and actions, all
| companies were forced to limit lifespan to just 1000
| hours. More failure meant more purchases. More purchases
| meant more profit. Any company who refused faced heavy
| financial penalties.
|
| The most unbelievable proof is the world-famous Livermore
| Fire Station bulb in California, glowing since 1901. More
| than 120 years old. Still alive. While our new
| incandescent bulbs die in 1-2 years.
|
| Though the Phoebus cartel was dissolved in the 1930s due
| to government pressure, its impact still shadows modern
| manufacturing. Planned obsolescence didn't just begin
| here... but Phoebus made it industrial.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5uU6nzgO8
| artimaeis wrote:
| The Phoebus cartel didn't collude just to make the light
| bulbs have a shorter lifespan. They upped the standard
| illumination a bulb emitted so that consumers needed
| fewer of them to see well. With an incandescent you have
| a kind of sliding scale of brightness:longevity (with
| curves on each end that quickly go exponential, hence the
| longest lasting light bulb that's so dim you can barely
| read by its light). The brighter the bulb, the shorter
| the lifespan.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Also lightbulb dimmers were a thing back in the day, so
| you could always buy more lightbulbs and lower the
| brightness of each to take advantage of that exponential
| curve in lifespan.
| fullstop wrote:
| Historically, yes. But we haven't had historical demand for
| AI stuff before. What happens when OpenAI and NVIDIA
| monopolize the majority of DRAM output?
| nyrikki wrote:
| I just gave up and built an AM4 system with a 3090 because I
| had 128G of ddr4 udimms on hand the whole build was for less
| than just the memory would have cost for an AM5/ddr5 build.
|
| Really wish that I could replace my old skylake-x system but
| even ddr4 rdimms for an older xeon are crazy now let alone
| ddr5. Unfortunately I need slots for 3xTitan V's for the 7.450
| TFLOPS each of FP64. Even the 5090 only does 1.637 TFLOPS for
| FP64, so just hopping that old system keeps running.
| touisteur wrote:
| If you don't need full ieee-754 double precision, ozaki
| scheme (emulation with tensor cores) might do the trick. It's
| been added (just a little bit) to cublas recently.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Why do we all need 128GB now? I was happy with 32.
|
| Close a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us.
| :-)
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I like to tell people I have 128GB. It's pretty rare to meet
| someone like me that isn't swapping all the time.
| nehal3m wrote:
| I also tell people that. It's not true, but it's free.
| laterium wrote:
| Why did you waste all your money on 32gb when 4gb is enough?
| Why did we all need 32gb?
| nvader wrote:
| Get this. Pen and paper. No need for silicon at all.
|
| You're welcome.
| srean wrote:
| Bloated OS loaded with things the buyer does not need and
| bloated JS ecosystem probably.
| rhdunn wrote:
| It depends on what you are doing.
|
| If you are working on an application that has several
| services (database, local stack, etc.) as docker containers,
| those can take up more memory. Especially if you have large
| databases or many JVM services, and are running other things
| like an IDE with debugging, profiling, and other things.
|
| Likewise, if you are using many local AI models at the same
| time, or some larger models, then that can eat into the
| memory.
|
| I've not done any 3D work or video editing, but those are
| likely to use a lot of memory.
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| Last night, while writing a LaTeX article, with Ollama
| running for other purposes, Firefox with its hundreds of
| tabs, multiple PDF files open, my laptop's memory usage
| spiked up to 80GB RAM usage... And I was happy to have 128GB.
| The spike was probably due to some process stuck in an effing
| loop, but the process consuming more and more RAM didn't have
| any impact on the system's responsiveness, and I could calmly
| quit VSCode and restart it with all the serenity I could have
| in the middle of the night. Is there even a case where more
| RAM is not really better, except for its cost?
| Jyaif wrote:
| > Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better,
| except for its cost?
|
| RAM uses power.
| epolanski wrote:
| It also consumes more physical space. /s
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Not really /s, since it is a limited resource in e.g.
| Laptops.
| zrail wrote:
| On consumer chips the more memory modules you have the
| slower they all run. I.e. if you have a single module of
| DDR5 it might run at 5600MHz but if you have four of them
| they all get throttled to 3800MHz.
| imtringued wrote:
| Mainboards have two memory channels so you should be able
| to reach 5600mhz on both and dual slot mainboards have
| better routing than quad slot mainboards. This means the
| practical limit for consumer RAM is 2x48GB modules.
| drtgh wrote:
| Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the
| mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels,
| but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two
| channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer
| processors had always two channels, with exception of
| Threadriper?).
|
| However this does not make sense, as for more than a
| decade the processors have only grown increasing the
| number of threads, therefore two channels sounds like a
| negligent and deliberately imposed bottleneck to access
| the memory if one use all those threads (Lets say 3D
| render, Video postproduction, Games, and so on).
|
| And if one want four channels to surpass such imposed
| bottleneck, the mainboards that nowadays have four
| channels don't contemplate consumer use, therefore they
| have one or two USB connectors with three or four LAN
| connectors at prohibitive prices.
|
| We are talking about consumer quad-channel DDR4 machines
| ten years old, wildly spread, keeps being competent
| compared with current consumers ones, if not better. It
| is like if all were frozen along this years (and what
| remains to be seen with such pattern).
|
| Now it is rumoured that AMD may opt for four channels for
| its consumer lines due to the increased number of pin
| connectors (good news if true).
|
| It is a bad joke what the industry is doing to customers.
| wtallis wrote:
| > Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the
| mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels,
| but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two
| channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer
| processors had always two channels, with exception of
| Threadriper?).
|
| You need to re-check your sources. When AMD started doing
| integrated memory controllers in 2003, they had Socket
| 754 (single channel / 64-bit wide) for low-end consumer
| CPUs and Socket 940 (dual channel / 128-bit wide) for
| server and enthusiast destkop CPUs, but less than a year
| later they introduced Socket 939 (128-bit) and since then
| their mainstream desktop CPU sockets have all had a
| 128-bit wide memory interface. When Intel later also
| moved their memory controller from the motherboard to the
| CPU, they also used a 128-bit wide memory bus (starting
| with LGA 1156 in 2008).
|
| There's never been a desktop CPU socket with a memory bus
| wider than 128 bits that wasn't a high-
| end/workstation/server counterpart to a mainstream
| consumer platform that used only a 128-bit wide memory
| bus. As far as I can tell, the CPU sockets supporting
| integrated graphics have all used a 128-bit wide memory
| bus. Pretty much all of the growth of desktop CPU core
| counts from dual core up to today's 16+ core parts has
| been working with the same bus width, and increased DRAM
| bandwidth to feed those extra cores has been entirely
| from running at higher speeds over the same number of
| wires.
|
| What _has_ regressed is that the enthusiast-oriented
| high-end desktop CPUs derived from server /workstation
| parts are much more expensive and less frequently updated
| than they used to be. Intel hasn't done a consumer-
| branded variant of their workstation CPUs in several
| generations; they've only been selling those parts under
| the Xeon branding. AMD's Threadripper line got split into
| Threadripper and Threadripper PRO, but the non-PRO parts
| have a higher starting price than early Threadripper
| generations, and the Zen 3 generation didn't get non-PRO
| Threadrippers.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| At some point the best "enthusuast-oriented HEDT" CPU's
| will be older-gen Xeon and EPYC parts, competing fairly
| in price, performance and overall feature set with top-
| of-the-line consumer setups.
| hylaride wrote:
| > Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better,
| except for its cost?
|
| It depends. It takes more energy, which can be undesirable
| in battery powered devices like laptops and phones. Higher
| end memory can also generate more heat, which can be an
| issue.
|
| But otherwise more RAM is usually better. Many OS's will
| dynamically use otherwise unused RAM space to cache
| filesystem reads, making subsequent reads faster and many
| databases will prefetch into memory if it is available,
| too.
| philsnow wrote:
| Firefox is particularly good at having lots of tabs open
| and not using tons of memory. $
| ~/dev/mozlz4-tool/target/release/mozlz4-tool \
| "$(find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/
| -name recovery.jsonlz4 | head -1)" | \ jq -r
| '[.windows[].tabs | length] | add' 5524
|
| Activity monitor claims firefox is using 3.1GB of ram.
| Real memory size: 2.43 GB Virtual memory size:
| 408.30 GB Shared memory size: 746.5 MB
| Private memory size: 377.3 MB
|
| That said, I wholeheartedly agree that "more RAM less
| problems". The only case I can think of when it's not
| strictly better to have more is during hibernation (cf
| sleep) when the system has to write 128GB of ram to disk.
| autoexec wrote:
| In my experience firefox is "pretty good" about having
| lots of tabs and windows open if you don't mind it
| crashing every week or two.
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| I've not had a crash on Firefox in like a decade,
| basically since the Quantum update in like 2016.
| autoexec wrote:
| Try living like I do. I currently have 1,838 tabs open
| across 9 different windows. On second thought, maybe
| don't live like I do...
| Roark66 wrote:
| Having recently updated to 192gb from 96gb I'm pretty happy.
| I run many containers, have 20 windows of vscode and so on.
| Plus ai inference on CPU when 48gb vram is not enough.
| 15155 wrote:
| 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Exactly. I recently doubled my RAM and have now 4GB.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| it's cyclical. just wait 10 years
| thfuran wrote:
| Good advice for the immortal. For everyone else, "do
| something else instead" is more practical.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I think it's somewhat useful long term advice, and I would
| add that parts prices tend to be asynchronous.
|
| Building a PC in a cost efficient manner generally requires
| someone to track parts prices over years, buy parts at
| different times, and buy at least a generation behind.
|
| The same applies to many other markets/commodities/etc...
| indemnity wrote:
| Wow, no kidding. I checked my BOM for the 9950 build I did a
| year ago, RAM price has doubled for the exact same DDR5-6000
| sticks.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Such is life. I suggest finding a less volatile hobby, like
| crocheting.
|
| Actually, the textile market is pretty volatile in the US these
| days with Joan's out of business. Pick a poison, I guess?
| There's little room for stability in a privately-owned-world.
| brenainn wrote:
| My 64gb DDR5 kit started having stability issues running XMP a
| few weeks out of warranty. I bought it two years ago. Looked
| into replacing it and the same kit is now double the price.
| Bumping the voltage a bit and having better cooling gets it
| through memtest thankfully. The fun of building your own
| computer is pretty much gone for me these days.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it
| sucks.
|
| Usually after the companies are fined for price-fixing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Interesting that Samsung put their prices up 60% today, and a
| retailer who bought their stock at the old price feels
| compelled to put their prices up 2.5x.
|
| When the AI bubble bursts we can get back to the old price
| Aurornis wrote:
| The cost of inventory on the shelves basically doesn't
| matter. The only thing that matters is the market rate.
|
| If those retailers didn't increase their prices when the
| price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have
| instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower
| prices, so there wouldn't actually have been weeks of low
| retail RAM prices for everyone.
|
| Every once in a while you can catch a retailer whose pricing
| person missed the memo and forgot to update the retail price
| when the announcement came out. They go out of stock very
| rapidly.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > If those retailers didn't increase their prices when the
| price hike was announced, anyone building servers would
| have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the
| lower prices
|
| But that retailer would have made a lot of money in a very
| short time.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| In the scenario where they don't raise prices, they sell out
| immediately. In the scenario where they do raise prices, it's
| too expensive so you don't buy it. In the scenario where they
| keep prices low, and do a lottery to see who can buy them,
| you don't get picked.
|
| No matter what, you are not getting those modules at the old
| price. There are few things that trip up people harder than
| this exact scenario, and it happens _everywhere_. Concert
| tickets, limited releases, water during crises, hot Christmas
| gift, pandemic GPUs, etc.
|
| Once understood you can stop getting mad over it like it's
| some conspiracy. It's fundamental and natural market
| behavior.
| barrkel wrote:
| I guess I lucked out. I bought a 768GB workstation (with 9995wx
| CPU and rtx 6000 Pro Blackwell GPU) in August. 96GB modules
| were better value than 128GB. That build would be a good bit
| pricier today looks like.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Yeah you are not alone here being annoyed. I think we need to
| penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the
| manufacturers but also AI companies etc...
|
| Those price increases are not normal at all. I understand that
| most of it still comes from market demands but this is also
| skewing the market now in unfair manners. Such increases smell
| of criminal activity too.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up -
| that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc...
|
| You want to penalize companies for buying things and penalize
| companies for selling things are market rate?
|
| There are a lot of good examples through history about how
| central planning economics and strict price controls do not
| lead to good outcomes. The end result wouldn't be plentiful
| cheap RAM for you. The end result would be no RAM for you at
| all because the manufacturers choose to sell to other
| countries who understand basic economics.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think there's a case for banning the sale of services
| well below the marginal cost of supplying that service -
| loss leaders, or "dumping" - when it's done on such a scale
| as AI marketing.
| 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| I wouldn't mind my own offline Gemini or ChatGPT 5. But even
| if the hardware and model were free, I don't know how I'd
| afford the electricity.
| jdprgm wrote:
| A single machine for personal inference on models of this
| size isn't going to idle at some point so high that
| electricity becomes a problem and for personal use it's not
| like it would be under load often and if for some reason
| you are able to keep it under heavy load presumably it's
| doing something valuable enough to easily justify the
| electricity.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| If you can't afford the electricity to afford to run the
| model on free hardware, you'd certainly never be able to
| afford the subscription to the same product as a service!
|
| But anyway, the trick is to run it in the winter and keep
| your house warm.
| sowbug wrote:
| I think you're underestimating economies of scale, and
| today's willingness of large corporations to provide
| cutting-edge services at a loss.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I don't think I am. I don't think economies of scale on
| hardware will drive costs below free, and while
| subscription providers might be willing to offer services
| below the cost of the hardware that runs them, I don't
| think they'll offer services below the cost of the
| electricity that runs them.
|
| And while data centers might sign favorable contracts, I
| don't think they are getting electricity _that_ far below
| retail.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| AI GPUs suck for gaming, I have seen a video from a guy
| playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on a H100 at a whooping 8 FPS!
| That's after some hacks, because otherwise it wouldn't run at
| all.
|
| AI GPUs are stripped away of most things display-related to
| make room for more compute cores. So in theory, they could
| "work", but there are bottlenecks making that compute power
| irrelevant for gaming, even if they had a display output.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| So there aren't actually GPUs, but more like some other
| architecture for CPUs.
| 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.
| arjie wrote:
| I imagine the cost is primarily in the actual DRAM chips on
| the DIMM. So availability of RDIMMs on the market will affect
| DRAM prices anyway. These days lots of motherboards come with
| Oculink, etc. and you can get a U.2 PCIe card for rather
| cheap.
|
| I put together a small server with mostly commodity parts.
| nine_k wrote:
| I bet that friendly Chinese entrepreneurs will sell
| inexpensive E1.S to m.2 adapters, and maybe even PCIe riser
| cards for putting an OAM and a bunch of fans, and maybe even
| an HDMI output. Good hardware won't be wasted, given some
| demand.
| bilegeek wrote:
| Inexpensive, probably not. E1.S isn't just a different
| connector, it's a completely different protocol than PCIe.
| snuxoll wrote:
| > it's a completely different protocol than PCIe.
|
| Wrong. It is still just NVMe over PCIe like every other
| modern SSD form factor.
| bilegeek wrote:
| You're right, I was confusing E.1S and CXL.
| mycall wrote:
| > Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server
| DDR5 motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically
| incompatible, and the voltages are different.
|
| All you need is a fixed-latency, dumb translator bridge where
| the adapter forces everything into a simplified JEDEC-
| compliant mode.
|
| CA/CK Line Translator with a Fixed Retimer as the biggest
| mismatch between RDIMM/UDIMM is the command/address path.
|
| RDIMMs route CA/CK to RCD to DRAM, and the UDIMMs route CA/CK
| to DRAM directly, take the UDIMM CA/CK, delay + buffer +
| level shift it, feed it into a "RCD" like input using a delay
| locked loops (DLL).
|
| Throw in a SPD translator, PMIC and voltage correction, DQ
| line conditioning and some other stuff into a 10-12-layer
| PCB, retimer chips, vrm, and level shifters.
|
| It would cost about $40 million to fab and about $100 per
| adapter but would make bank with all the spare UDIMMs when
| the bubble bursts.
| 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
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| I see it a bit differently. In marketing, companies like
| AppLovin with the Axon Engine and Zeta Global with Athena are
| already showing strong profitability, both in earnings and free
| cash flow. They're also delivering noticeably higher returns on
| ad spend compared to pre-AI tools for their customers. This is
| the area I'm researching most closely, so I can only speak for
| marketing, but I'd love to hear from others seeing similar
| results in their industries.
| 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?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for
| these absurd prices?
|
| We're not, and market dictates that they don't have to talk to
| know to jack up the prices.
|
| This ram price spike is leading Nvidia reporting for this
| quarter: gross margins were 70 percent. It's looking like their
| year over year increase in margins (double) is not because it
| came anywhere close to shipping double the number of units.
|
| Meanwhile if you look at Micron their gross margin was 41% for
| fiscal year 2025, and 2024 looks to be 24%.
|
| Micron and its peers, are competing with Nvidia for shareholder
| dollars (the CEO's real customer). Them jacking up prices is
| because there is enough of the market, dumb enough, to bear it
| right this second. And every CEO has to be looking at those
| numbers and thinking the same things: "Where is my cut of the
| pie, why aren't we at 60 percent".
|
| We're now at a point where hardware costs are going to inhibit
| development. Everyone short of the biggest players are now
| locked out, and thats not sustainable. Of the AI ventures there
| is only one that seems to have a reasonable product, and
| possibly reasonable financials. Many of the other players are
| likely going to be able to weather the write downs.
|
| The music will stop, the question is when.
| 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?
| bloudermilk wrote:
| Gamers Nexus is reporting increasing DDR4 prices, but it's
| unclear to what extent it's driven by the DDR5 market. DDR4
| production is expected to be slowing anyway given the move to
| DDR5.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hLiwNViMak
| 55873445216111 wrote:
| It will. The big 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) have announced
| they will quit making LPDDR4 so that they can make more
| (LP)DDR5.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Even if production capacity wasn't shared/shifting to the
| higher end products (which it seemingly is), there's certainly
| going to be an increase in demand for DDR4 as it acts as a
| substitute good. Prices are already up significantly.
| vamos_davai wrote:
| I'm ready to fight for my 401k to defend DRAM cartels
| bloudermilk wrote:
| Wild experience building a PC today and discovering the prices
| are less competitive with Macs than they've always been. Building
| a well-appointed gaming/production/CAD rig is suddenly very
| expensive between RAM, GPU, and nvme prices being so high.
| Jackson__ wrote:
| It's not like apple is going to eat the cost of this for either
| though. As soon as their tariff supply runs out they'll price
| hike like everyone else.
| 15155 wrote:
| Basically every integrated circuit is exempt from retaliatory
| tariffs, current custom MacBook Pros are shipping from China
| direct: which tariffs are you referring to?
| Jackson__ wrote:
| I'm referring to the plane loads of hardware they shipped
| in during the tariff panic.
| 15155 wrote:
| Which tariffs would be applicable to this hardware?
| Therenas wrote:
| I can't imagine Apple doesn't have capacity booked well in
| advance, and their suppliers aren't going to stiff them
| because they'd lose those long-term contracts. Sure, if the
| shortage lasts a year or more, there'll be issues, but if
| it's short term they might be fine.
| more_corn wrote:
| Everyone here can actually fix that by never buying Samsung
| anything for your data centers.
|
| They put ads in the refrigerators. Never buy Samsung anything
| ever again.
|
| That includes everyone who works in supply chain at big tech.
| Permanent total boycott.
| ekropotin wrote:
| Just when I start seriously getting into homelabbing
| NegativeK wrote:
| Now you can pretend you're an enterprise IT environment with
| arbitrary and ridiculous purchasing constraints!
|
| But for real, that sucks. The alternatives -- much older, used
| RAM -- may not be very attractive, depending on what you're
| doing.
| thway15269037 wrote:
| I had a simple proxmox/k8s cluster going, and fitting RAM for
| nodes was the last on my list. It was cheapo ol' DDR4.
|
| Where I live price for my little cluster project gone up from
| around ~400 usd in july (for 5 node setup) to almost 2000 usd
| right now. I just refreshed page and it's up by 20% day-to-
| day. Welp. I guess they are going to stay with 8gb sticks for
| a while.
| jdprgm wrote:
| We've been getting increasingly fucked for years on housing
| prices, healthcare, food, live entertainment, etc. Consumer
| electronics were one of the few areas that you could at least
| argue you were getting more value per dollar each year. GPU's
| have been a mess for awhile now but now it seems like it's just
| going to be everything.
| Havoc wrote:
| Dann I sold my excess too soon
| bgwalter wrote:
| Thanks "Open""AI", Trump for making us pay for the "AI"
| infrastructure. In the original deal "Open""AI" claimed Samsung
| would scale up production:
|
| https://openai.com/index/samsung-and-sk-join-stargate
|
| The Samsung announcement contains no reference to scaling up
| production:
|
| https://news.samsung.com/ca/samsung-and-openai-announce-stra...
|
| Semiconductor companies have been bitten in the past by scaling
| up production into a bubble, so of course Samsung just raises
| prices. When you buy DRAM, remember that you are financing
| oligarchs and that Stargate has lied yet again.
| LASR wrote:
| I've been following share prices for Micron, Seagate, Western
| Digital and Sandisk.
|
| They've all pretty much 5x'ed YTD. That's completely wild.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| So first it was bitcoin/crypto, now it's ai. pc gaming is dead at
| this point. i wonder if it will force developers to care about
| doing more with less hardware and optimize now.
| yunnpp wrote:
| Many studios don't even hire rendering engineers anymore. Much
| of AAA is UE5 slop. And then there is the looming AI slop,
| which publishers are already thinking about. I think it'll
| burst at some point, but it'll get worse before it gets better.
| ramshanker wrote:
| Somebody do the math on when we will reliably start running out
| of Grid Power. Than only this "AI builout" will slow down.
| Manufactiring generators is boring, and very less invested than
| manufacturing AI servers.
| fooey wrote:
| I wish I saw more people realizing the build out promising
| being made by the big AI are physically impossible
|
| not only is it impossible to build that much power generation
| on those timelines
|
| it's also not possible to build enough GPUs to fill a purported
| tripling of US datacenter capacity
|
| what's the ROI on giant empty warehouses full of empty server
| racks and no electricity?
| nalinidash wrote:
| That's why its increasingly more important to find answers
| how to build these models that work sustainably. The approach
| of training with HUGE amount of data requiring HUGE infra
| seems to have blinded the hype-bros that they are not
| planning to innovate to do it in a small-scale.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Also the transformers. (The big magnetic ones for voltage
| convetion)
| danparsonson wrote:
| At least if the robots in disguise turned up, we'd answer the
| AGI question
| ikiris wrote:
| Why do you think the build out will stop instead of electricity
| prices soaring?
|
| They can afford to pay more.
| kristianp wrote:
| The Reuters article referenced:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-hikes-memory-chi...
| wingmanjd wrote:
| At $DAYJOB, we have had confirmed and paid for orders be
| cancelled within the last week due to price hikes. One DDR5
| server configuration went from ~$13k to near $25k USD in a matter
| of days.
|
| We also were looking for DDR4 memory for some older machines and
| that has shot up 2x as well.
|
| Hate this AI timeline.
| evanreichard wrote:
| It's wild. I bought 64GB (2x32) DDR4 SODIMM (CT2K32G4SFD832A)
| for $100 this April. Cheapest I can find it today is $270.
|
| I picked up 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 (CMK32GX4M2E3200C16) last
| September for $55. Now it's $155.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| My 2022 GPU has 24GB of ram. It's like 50% more than what is
| similarly affordable today. It's fucked up and I'd rather slow
| down my spending and see the whole market go down than get
| scammed by hype.
| benjiro wrote:
| > I'd rather slow down my spending
|
| And that will result in even more resources being allocated
| into the "big spenders". We are for a long time, in a death
| spiral for the whole PC field. If it was not crypto mining
| (multiple times), then it was HDD mining, then it was pandemic,
| and now its AI.
|
| What used to be a stable market, that was predictable, has
| become ultra expensive. And now the whole SSD / DDR pricing are
| going to hurt even more.
|
| Worst of all is, that a lot of resources are now going to
| enterprise hardware. So even if the AI bubble goes down, its
| not like the market will be flooded with cheap NVMEs or cheaper
| DDR sticks, as that production will have gone into 2.5" U.3
| drives and LPDDR memory or the likes.
| cubefox wrote:
| This website mentions the price increase for DDR, but AI
| companies use Nvidia GPUs, which probably use HBM or GDDR. So I
| assume the respective price increase for soldered-on memory on
| graphics cards is even steeper.
| runeks wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012710 (from
| 2024)
|
| > hbm chips are now emerging as another bottleneck in the
| development of those models. Both sk Hynix and Micron, an
| American chipmaker, have already pre-sold most of their hbm
| production for next year. Both are pouring billions of dollars
| into expanding capacity, but that will take time. Meanwhile
| Samsung, which manufactures 35% of the world's hbm chips, has
| been plagued by production issues and reportedly plans to cut its
| output of the chips next year by a tenth.
| EnPissant wrote:
| The 96GB RAM kit I bought in June for $320 now sells for $1175.
| Insanity.
| dgan wrote:
| I might sell my 10yo laptop with a profit!
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Just about time that I'm finally contemplating upgrading my 13
| y.o. laptop >:E
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Wonder how much of an effect this will have on inflation as
| businesses see their computing costs massively hike?
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| Are these new prices there to stay?
| Roark66 wrote:
| I'm especially annoyed that this is most likely intentional.
|
| (Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors
| (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual
| problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting
| better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only
| due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3
| and kimik2 exceeded their capability and you can run them at home
| if you have the hardware or for peanuts on a variety of
| providers. Cheap-er hardware like strix halo (and Nvidia dgx)
| made 128gb vram achievable to enthusiast. And Google is eating
| their punch with Gemini.
|
| All while their CFO starts talking about government bailing them
| out from spending they cannot possibly fund.
|
| Of course they will attempt to blow up the entire hardware market
| so if they AI flops they will be able to at least re not you
| hardware like AWS.
|
| Of course they
| ant6n wrote:
| Uh, the argument ended in some sort of stroke there.
|
| Kinda curious how the story
| an0malous wrote:
| There's 3 or 4 places where the commenter just glitches out.
| Sounds like they're using a transcription tool or something
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's telling that the comment is highly upvoted (as I write
| this comment, anyway) despite being incoherent and
| incomplete in multiple places. I guess being generically
| angry and complaining about popular targets like OpenAI is
| an easy way to earn upvotes from visitors who don't
| actually read, just scan comments for keywords and vibes.
| hu3 wrote:
| It's complete enough for me (and others I guess) to form
| a constructive argument.
| knollimar wrote:
| I assume they're saying blow up the hardware marked so they
| can liquidate assets efficiently?
| amelius wrote:
| Looks like they ran out of RAM.
| wohoef wrote:
| Nice try! You got it next time
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Jokes on them, my PC has had enough power to do what i need for
| the last decade and AI isnt moving the needle.
|
| Enjoy yohr number goes up fad.
| bytehowl wrote:
| What if your PC dies?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| hrm, the only PCs I've had died was from a cursed case.
|
| I did have a laptop die because I let it get a little wet.
|
| But when you look at the history of memory, etc, it's
| certainly going to come back down once the bubble subsides.
| redleader55 wrote:
| Companies that invested in CXL got their money's worth. CXL is
| basically older RAM connected over PCI-e. Not only you're not
| throwing away RAM which cannot be used with the current
| generation of motherboard and chipsets, but you also have a way
| to get a lot of slower memory for applications that don't need
| the best and the newest.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I mentioned this previously in a thread about node sizes and got
| down voted for it, but I stand by my opinion: the rest of the
| world ie normal people need China to become competitive in chip
| manufacturing.
|
| Without that competition, everyday consumers are going to get
| priced out of the market by major corporations. We have reached a
| point in CPU technology where newer tech is no longer
| automatically cheaper and faster to make; therefore, we need more
| competition to keep prices down.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Except a lot of other people don't live in countries that are
| allied with Chinas vision. We need more competition among our
| allies, not have the only competition from our enemy.
| meindnoch wrote:
| What's the current state of memoryless computing? Is it feasable?
| kranke155 wrote:
| Literally doubled while I was building my new machine. Insane.
| ghtbircshotbe wrote:
| Maybe it was a bad idea for Intel to sell off their memory unit
| razighter777 wrote:
| So glad I bought 128gb ddr5 for my desktop a year ago... I
| usually don't need it all but it was cheap at the time. Most I
| use it for is cpu offloading for LLMs too big for my 3090 and for
| running 10 or so small VMs for my projects.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Apple ram prices suddenly started to look a little reasonable.
|
| Who am I kidding, but the such a high increase means these
| changes are here to stay, it's not a progressive change at all.
| shevy-java wrote:
| So AI drives prices up, directly and indirectly. I am not happy,
| in part because I actually need to purchase new hardware
| (eventually, and unfortunately quite soon, probably next year
| already, again).
|
| I think there must be a tax of all those AI corporations - they
| cost us as society WAY too much. We need to bring this into the
| discussion; right now lobbyists such as the orange king want to
| ban all discussions therein aka making AI investments exempt from
| numerous things. This is leeching on the general taxpayers, in
| all countries. It is not acceptable.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> I am not happy ... I think there must be a tax of all those
| AI corporations
|
| There are a lot of elements to this AI shit-show that I don't
| like or worry about, but taxing them specifically because
| they're driving up the price of memory when you want some is
| not really a "societal cost". You then mention something about
| "general taxpayers" - didn't you just lobby to make them a
| super tax payer? Go ahead and rant, but seems like pretty basic
| supply & demand, and keep some perspective; it's computer
| memory not bread.
| InTheArena wrote:
| I pre-ordered and picked up a framework desktop with 128GB of
| DDR5-8000 inside of it. This is the type of system that is the a
| indirect byproduct of the change towards AI - it may not have
| been what AM was originally intending with the AI Max 395+ line -
| but it definitly is the kind of optimized thinking that will
| drive AI into the hands of consumers.
|
| That's part of the reason I think this boom-bust cycle might be a
| bit different. Hopefully, Intel can use some of its capacity that
| they have coming up in the foundry to service this need.
| atsmyles wrote:
| Intel should go back to where they started and return to the
| memory business.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Samsung and its peers, SK hynix and Micron Technology, have
| redirected much of their fabrication capacity to high-end chips
| used in AI servers. While this shift yields higher margins, it
| leaves less capacity for traditional DRAM products that power
| laptops, desktops, and mainstream servers.
|
| So if the AI bubble does pop in early 2026, you will get a
| tsunami of cheap server RAM. You still won't be able to find
| cheap PC RAM. So either way, the short term future of computing
| is firmly fixed in the cloud.
| antman wrote:
| Memory prices have always been a racket. In the good old days
| news of a memory factory burning periodically raised the memory
| prices. Nowadays price fixing cartels don't need something so
| elaborate.
| lvl155 wrote:
| This problem is so much worse when you look at server mobo
| configurations that basically jumped from 8 to 12 slots. Meaning
| you need 50% more sticks to saturate versus Epyc 7003/2. I was
| hoping to build a Genoa-X server for compute and ram cost just
| went bonkers (that's on a nearly 2-yo system). I decided to
| shelve that idea.
| shdh wrote:
| Guess I'm sticking with my 5950x and 128GB of DDR4 for a while
| longer, should have upgraded my system earlier this year like I
| was thinking
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-22 23:00 UTC)