[HN Gopher] DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the indus...
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DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why
Author : binarycrusader
Score : 160 points
Date : 2025-11-26 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.xda-developers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.xda-developers.com)
| downrightmike wrote:
| "For context, these increases have even outpaced the surge in
| gold prices over the same period"
|
| And you can't just manufacture or not the gold supply into
| scarcity
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| yes you can. It's called mining
| teeray wrote:
| This quote is basically the TL;DR:
|
| > memory suppliers have both the motive and precedent to
| coordinate behavior, even tacitly, in order to keep prices high.
| When only a handful of firms control the taps, it doesn't take a
| formal cartel for them to collectively benefit from constrained
| supply. Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all
| of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur,
| and this is next to impossible to prove. The backdrop of past
| cartels makes it hard not to be cynical when hearing that "AI
| demand" is solely to blame for increased prices. Whether or not
| any collusion is happening now, it's clear that memory companies
| are profiting immensely from the current crisis. After bleeding
| financially during the last oversupply downturn, the major DRAM
| makers are now seeing record-high earnings in the third quarter
| of 2025 thanks to the price surge, and to put it bluntly, the
| shortage is great for business.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Each firm knows_
|
| In some cases, firm == family,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol A chaebol
| is a large industrial South Korean conglomerate run and
| controlled by an individual or family. A chaebol often consists
| of multiple diversified affiliates, controlled by a person or
| group. Several dozen large South Korean family-controlled
| corporate groups fall under this definition.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I'm so excited to read the pro-monopoly take on this.
| sershe wrote:
| Not pro monopoly as such, but in the recently posted article
| on UK shipbuilding they mentioned that a major reason for
| it's decline was it didn't build out capital capacity after
| being repeatedly burned by cyclical nature of the industry,
| with some quote even claiming they thought they would be best
| positioned for the next bust explicitly.
|
| What choice do these companies have, even assuming the demand
| doesn't crash? They can build out and cause a glut in a few
| years. They can not build out and then what? Barriers to
| entry are high but not insurmountable; long term they'll go
| the way of UK shipbuilding. It might take a while, though.
| Also one defector building out would have massive advantage,
| so it doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium. See also
| constant bickering in the OPEC, an explicit cartel.
| minkeymaniac wrote:
| Yep, it doubled in the last 4 months
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM I upgraded my PC by
| adding 64GB.. two Fridays ago I sold the 32 GB I took out for the
| same amount of what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
| magicalhippo wrote:
| And I'm beating myself for not preemptively ordering that 128G
| kit for $500 a couple of months ago, thinking about upgrading
| soon.
|
| Last week it went to $1300 and now it's not available anymore.
|
| Guess I'll just skip AM5 and wait for AM6 at this rate...
| energy123 wrote:
| Same situation. I looked up the previous RAM boom and bust
| cycles (thanks Gemini) and we are looking at over a year of
| waiting potentially.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Bought a 64gb upgrade kit in September for my wife's new PC for
| $205. The same kit right now on Newegg is $570. That's not even
| double in 4 months; thats almost triple in 2 months.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| If I can get that right now $389 retail is there an arb
| opportunity (not in US, but maybe you are getting fucked on
| tariffs? Could that be the difference?)
| andix wrote:
| I bought a refurbished laptop with 64gb ddr4 (so-dimm) last
| week. It was just slightly more expensive than the 32gb variant
| with same specs. I guess the seller was not yet aware of the
| high memory prices.
|
| In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just
| selling the memory.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| You'll own nothing, not even your own short term memory, and
| you'll be happy.
| deadbabe wrote:
| you will own liabilities and be happy
| type0 wrote:
| Why would you need short term memory when you'll have AI agents
| /s
| eb0la wrote:
| Every 3-4 years RAM prices spike. There is always an excuse like
| a fire in a factory. I believe the truth is 1) we have little
| amount of suppliers, and 2) supply is very near the limit of what
| can be sold.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
|
| There's also been not one but two price fixing settlements at
| different times for the same companies. Almost like every few
| years they get bold enough to try again, and just settle as the
| cost of doing business
| walterbell wrote:
| "OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND
| production quotas?
| https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423
|
| _> Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer
| output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down
| from the previous year 's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted
| its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this
| year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output
| conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher
| prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01
| million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year.
| Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production
| at Fab 7 in Singapore--its largest NAND production base--in
| the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply
| posture._
|
| China YMTC (sanctioned by US) and CXMT are increasing
| production capacity.
| gruez wrote:
| Can you blame them, though? Between the notorious boom-and-
| bust cycle of semiconductor industry, and everyone
| (including much of this forum) thinking that AI is a bubble
| that will crash any minute, is it really that unreasonable
| that they're not trying to massively ramp up supply?
| walterbell wrote:
| In the meantime, Chinese memory suppliers are ramping
| supply and winning deals with PC OEMs.
| lazide wrote:
| Like drug or oil cartels (OPEC), the reasons are obvious
| and reasonable, but also we don't like to be grabbed by
| the balls.
|
| Both parties can have perfectly rational reasons to both
| exist and hate each other at the same time.
| charcircuit wrote:
| That wikipedia page only shows one settlement. The other got
| dismissed.
| dboreham wrote:
| There were also dumping controversies in the 1980s. Who knows
| that may even be where Trump got his crazy tarrif fetish
| from.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Companies will always seek to maximize revenue. Your options are
| 1) don't buy 2) choose competition.
| jandrese wrote:
| And the competition doesn't exist anymore.
| foobarian wrote:
| Isn't this just the normal process of market clearing, if they
| are still selling out? It may be a bit coarse grained due to long
| lead times for more supply but still.
| legitster wrote:
| What's happening right now is _very different_ than what happened
| back during the dot com crash. When they were doing price fixing
| it was because there was a glut of supply and demand was tanking.
| Prices were _falling_ and they coordinated to keep prices from
| falling less.
|
| Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless.
| Prices are _going up_. The incentive for one of the big players
| to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up
| market share is extremely lucrative.
|
| It would also be dumb to cut production when prices are high
| because you increase the incentive for one of the outside players
| to suddenly ramp up production and jump in the market.
|
| Not saying they aren't coordinating in other ways (following each
| other's leads on price hikes and availability). But again the
| context here is literally the opposite as last time.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on
| endless
|
| Why is demand extremely high right now when it wasn't a couple
| of months ago? What changed since then that caused it to triple
| overnight?
| ares623 wrote:
| Maybe Some nerds joked at lunch that if we hoard all the RAM
| we cut it off from competitors. They saw what COVID did to
| supply chains and thought they'd be so smart if they could
| simulate it.
| gishh wrote:
| No no no, it's all just the bullwhip effect, remember?
| Remember when prices went fucking nuts during Covid and
| then dropped?
|
| Oh wait, they never fucking dropped.
|
| Still waiting, all you bullshit, er, bullwhip truthers out
| there.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Why is demand extremely high...
|
| Data Center projects that were announced a couple months ago
| are _now_ beginning to be built out.
|
| Additionally, there have been some supply chain issues the
| past few years due to trade wars between the US, SK, and
| China [0], along with the earthquake that hit Taiwan last
| year [1].
|
| Generally, you feel the pain of supply chain issues within
| 6-18 months of the initial incident, which is where we are
| now at because stockpiles have been reduced significantly.
|
| [0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20230310PD204/chip-war-
| memor...
|
| [1] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/micron-flags-hit-
| its-dram...
| davoneus wrote:
| I've heard it was Sam Altman and OpenAI basically buying
| every wafer available from both Samsung and SKHynix at the
| start of October.
|
| Neither company know of the other purchase until it was a
| done deal.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| The CEO of OpenAI and OpenAI didn't coordinate?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Samsung and SK Hynix. OpenAI made deals to buy almost
| half of manufactured DRAM in the world. There's
| speculation that after this was announced, other
| companies started making their own deals in a panic,
| further driving demand.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Kind of funny to see manufacturers get screwed by their own
| opaque pricing policies for once.
|
| All well and good when you're dictating terms with dozens
| of buyers, but probably not so much when a single buyer is
| dictating terms to a couple of sellers.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Fundamentally because demand and supply curves are lagged.
| This drives DRAM flood and drought cycles. Right now high
| DRAM prices are driving fab investment up and demand down. In
| 3-5 years new fabs will cause DRAM glut that will drive
| prices down. Lower prices will stimulate demand via things
| like doubling DRAM size in consumer electronics as companies
| compete on getting the number bigger. Eventually demand curve
| will eclipse the supply and we will end up in the DRAM
| drought again.
|
| This time things are further complicated by the fact that the
| world is investing a sizable chunk of GDP into building RAM
| hungry data centers in hopes of building a god which will
| convert the rest of the world into data centers.
| vablings wrote:
| The biggest issue here is that it hurts smaller consumers.
| Scaling up a fab to produce ram takes 5+ years, people
| generally buy new hardware ~5 years so this lifecycle of
| hardware for some people is now locked out. Let's say you
| was due for an upgrade this year you now might be priced
| out of the market for the next 5 years and basically due to
| poor business practices
|
| There is a similar issue happening in the manufacturing
| space where metal foundries are basically "full" up on
| allocation for other customers and will refuse to sell to
| you unless your purchase order is six digits otherwise you
| pay a hefty premium which once again drives capital towards
| larger corporations. Compounded by a stagnant jobs market
| the means that scarcity is just going up and up and nobody
| is re-investing to meet consumer demands because the market
| is poisoned by speculation to the absolute extreme
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Do people really still upgrade so often? I mean it made
| sense pre 2015 for desktops, and pre 2020 for laptops...
| But since... Not much has changed from a performance
| standpoint.
|
| Even gpus hardly advanced since 2022 (4090) and the next
| generation is at least 1++ years off. Likely 2-3... And
| it's unclear wherever it will actually be an upgrade or
| more of the AI shenanigans they released with the 50
| generation.
| brennanpeterson wrote:
| This isn't true. It used to be, as a new fab would
| appreciably add quantity. At 1M wspm in 2015, a new 100k
| fab at the most modern node would add effectively 20-30%
| capacity, and usually multiple.players at once, since all
| had cash.
|
| Now, the relative shrink is tiny, so capacity adds are just
| wspm, in effect, and that gives 5%.
|
| Put differently, you cannot invest your way out of the
| shortage, or into meaningful share....so you take profit.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > in hopes of building a god which will convert the rest of
| the world into data centers
|
| I'm as pro AI as it comes, and I love your way of putting
| it. Very poignant.
| loeg wrote:
| It didn't triple overnight. Contracts for 2026-2027+
| hyperscaler orders get negotiated gradually over time and
| when those contracts are N% higher than last year, ~all
| supply is spoken for.
| 0manrho wrote:
| People pulling their heads out of their ass as to how to
| actually deploy these systems at scale (AKA to do this
| effectively, you need to do more than just throw pallets of
| GPU's at it, such as properly considering Topologies of both
| NVMe-over-Fabric and PCIe roots/lanes [0]) combined with
| advances in various technologies (eg RDMA, CXL,
| cuDF/BaM/GPUD2S/etc) that meaningfully enhance how system ram
| can be integrated and leveraged are a big part of it.
|
| Also we're hitting that 5 years after DDR5 being readily
| available which means that a lot of existing enterprise
| hardware that was on DDR4 is going EOL and being replaced
| with DDR5 which, given many platforms these days have many
| more channels available than previously, results in more DRAM
| being bought than was previously used per node and in total.
| A lot of enterprise was still buying new DDR4 into 2023 as it
| was a more affordable way to deploy systems with lots of PCIe
| lanes which was more important than any the costs associated
| with the performance gain from DDR5 or related CPU's. (Also,
| early days DDR5 wasn't really any faster than DDR4 with how
| loose the timing was unless you were willing to pay a BIG
| premium)
|
| Regarding the hype of the day: AI specifically, part of it is
| the rise of wrappers and agents and inference in general that
| can run on CPU's/leverage system ram. These usecases aren't
| _as_ sensitive to latency as the training side of things as
| the network latency from the remote user to the datacenter
| means latency hits due to hitting the CPU ringbus(infinity
| fabric, QPI, whatever you want to call it) results in a much
| less significant share over the overall overhead, and the
| cost /benefit/availability concerns there has also increased
| the demand for non-GPU AI compute and RAM.
|
| I wouldn't rule out corruption/price fixing (They've done it
| before) but I have no evidence of this. Wouldn't surprise me,
| but I don't think this is it (unless this problem persists
| for several quarters/years)
|
| There's some geopolitics and FOMO (Corporate keeping up with
| the joneses) and economics that goes into this as well but I
| can't really speculate on that specifically, that's not
| really my area of expertise. Suffice to say, it's kind of
| like a bank run where it's not so much that the demand itself
| hit the curve of the hockey stick, but it was gradually
| increasing until it hit a threshold that was starting to
| cause delays in delivery/deployments. Given how important
| many companies view being on the cutting edge here, this lead
| to sudden spike in volume customers willing to pay premiums
| for early delivery to hit deployment deadlines, artificially
| inflating demand and further constraining supply, which just
| fed back into that feedback loop pushing transient demand
| even higher.
|
| 0: Yes NVMe NAND flash is different than DRAM flash, but the
| systems/clusters that host the NVMe JBOD's tend to use lots
| of sysRAM for their index/metadata/"superhot" data layer
| (think memcached, Redis, the MDS nodes for Lustre, etc), and
| with the advent of CXL and SCM you can deploy even more DRAM
| to a cluster/fabric than what is strictly presented by the
| CPU/mobo's memory controllers/channels. This is not driving
| overall market volume, but is a source of fierce competition
| for supply at the very "top" of the DRAM/Flash market.
|
| TL;DR: Convergence of a lot of things driving demand.
| sc68cal wrote:
| > The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the
| other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is
| extremely lucrative.
|
| I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually
| demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During
| times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to
| protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged
| spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from
| dropping.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
| lpribis wrote:
| > Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months
| in prison and fined US$250,000.[6] Lee was subsequently
| promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then
| President of Samsung Europe in 2014.
|
| Lmao he got rewarded for taking the fall.
| flanderizedNed wrote:
| Was in the room working for a hardware company during the
| offshoring phase of high tech manufacturing
|
| Offshoring was 100% because of antitrust concerns.
| Copyright landlords and hardware manufacturers were
| concerned with Americans and their morals also having the
| skills to create endless competition.
|
| American workers compensation prize was endless hustle jobs
| to distract them from political revolution.
|
| The olds don't care if the kids end up unskilled knowledge
| serfs, fuzzy VHS tapes of outdated academics. The olds will
| be dead.
| tshaddox wrote:
| If there are a small number of sellers and barriers to entry
| are high, we should expect at the bare minimum "tacit
| collusion":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand)
| they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.
|
| Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from
| dropping during a spike in demand? a spike in demand will
| obviously not be expected to lower prices regardless of
| collusion
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes, the industry is capacity limited so if there's a true
| spike in demand, prices will be high even absent any
| collusion. Especially if previous investment in expanding
| capacity has been lacking for many years.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I do not have any particular insight into the market, I was
| just extremely confused reading this in particular
|
| > _Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on
| endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big
| players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to
| pick up market share is extremely lucrative._
|
| Given this first statement, the last one makes no sense.
|
| Either the demand is limited, giving sellers that undercut the
| ability to move more products... Or the demand is higher then
| production, making it nonsensical to undercut anyone, because
| you'll sell out anyway, no matter if you're cheapest or not
| lazide wrote:
| If demand is high and supply is fixed (generally the case)
| you can also pull a DeBeers, grab everyone by the balls, and
| charge 3x (or more) the already high prices everyone would
| already get when you sell out your inventory.
| energy123 wrote:
| To the extent that demand is price inelastic, which in
| practice means a lack of substitutes and the product
| serving an essential need.
| mindslight wrote:
| Hey, at least a fab didn't have to burn down this time. That's
| progress.
|
| I've maxed out the RAM on every (consumer mobo) build I've ever
| done, and have always ended up appreciating it. I did a Ryzen
| build with 192GB back in January, so despite the questionable
| signal integrity of DDR5 especially on AM5 (more than one DIMM on
| each channel means lower speed) this time turned out to be no
| exception. I also stocked up on 130TB of HDD and 30TB of SSD, as
| it was clear we were headed towards _some_ kind of economic
| disaster. (look, I 'm avoiding politics!)
|
| But the best RAM purchase I ever did was during the dot com crash
| glut a few decades ago. I maxed out my Athlon XP with 3x 512MB
| sticks for $27 each. A gig _and a half_ of RAM. Those were the
| days.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Is there a futures market for DRAM? I feels like there should
| be...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| of course there is - https://www.dramexchange.com
| okanat wrote:
| You can always buy some SKHynix or Micron shares.
| wnevets wrote:
| Glad to see I'm not the only bringing up just how untrustworthy
| these memory companies are.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| I expected that this was because China use DDR5 in their new AI
| chips (Due to not having access to (enough) HBM)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| HBM is independent of the DDR revision being used. HBM how the
| DRAM attaches to the chip. Really not sure what you're trying
| to say.
| ksec wrote:
| I said this last time, YMTC from China is making NAND and finally
| crossed the 10% market share. I would not be surprised if they
| have 30% by 2030. The more NAND Fabs reconfigured to DRAM from
| Samsung or others the more YMTC will grab NAND market share. So
| yes naturally those profit current NAND and DRAM player enjoys
| provides an extra cushion for them to build their Fab which is
| becoming ever more expensive due it its size and machinery
| required. But also as war chest. And they know it well.
|
| CXMT's DDR5 and LPDDR5 is also slowly gaining market shares,
| although not at the pace of YMTC due to yield and cost issues.
|
| Both company are close or already at escape velocity. And then
| there will be a moment like electric car where DRAM and NAND will
| oversupply. Which is another reason why DRAM manufactures are
| eager to move to LPDDR6.
| elektronika wrote:
| YMTC also announced entry into the DRAM market a couple months
| back. CXMT recently announced DDR5-8000. Sanctions clearly
| aren't working to slow progress in China's tech sector, but
| they seem to be great for the profits of US vassal-states
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| Shorten patents to 18months (the industry's innovation cycle, in
| the past).
|
| I'll bet you'll see a lot more output, esp. with low margins --
| to make the market uninteresting for new players.
| avidphantasm wrote:
| Quick, buy a Mac with higher-specced memory while the price is
| almost reasonable.
| kwanbix wrote:
| What? Apple's memory upgrades are never reasonable.
|
| Last time I checked going from 16 to 32GB in a Mac Mini was
| more expensive (or as expensive) than buying two 16GB Mac
| Minis.
| 360MustangScope wrote:
| Right now in this environment, they look reasonable. Not that
| they are
| ahartmetz wrote:
| *only slightly less reasonable than market prices before they
| adjust it in order to stay at 2x less reasonable
| kristianp wrote:
| I'm wondering if Apple will need to adjust their prices to
| maintain their margins. Given the scale of price rises I'd say
| yes.
| zarzavat wrote:
| There's no way that Apple pays spot. They will have contracts
| directly with the manufacturers, guaranteeing them a given
| supply at a given price. Their whole business kinda depends
| on it.
| mindcrash wrote:
| Unfortunately got some experience with that...
|
| Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD
| Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial
| SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD...
|
| Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be.
|
| Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming
| weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my
| aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...
| QuantumSeed wrote:
| I ordered 96GB of memory last Tuesday from Corsair. Two days
| later when I checked the website again, the exact same memory was
| being sold for twice what I paid for it.
| beloch wrote:
| I've seen a fair number of articles suggesting that the finances
| of AI companies have lost touch with reality and that the AI
| sector is now well within bubble territory.
|
| If AI companies continue to scale up and buy massive amounts of
| memory _as prices spike_ , how much will that intensify the
| spike? Could feedback of this nature cause a price shock
| sufficient to pop the AI bubble earlier than it might have
| otherwise? How soon might that happen?
| Juliate wrote:
| Is RAM the new oil, then?
| super256 wrote:
| I am currently trying to sell a brand new DDR5 6000 64GB CL
| 28-36-36-96 kit for 100EUR below market prices with warranty (I
| purchased it 3 months ago, and never opened it as I figured I
| don't need 128GB in my PC.)
|
| But it's just not selling. I guess most people don't even check
| ebay, and go straight to hardware online retailers.
| derkster wrote:
| personally, i always check ebay. but i know general sentiment
| around "used/like new" items is fairly poor. just ask grand pap
| sitting in florida, buying half the computer new, because "he
| would never buy used", aka some returned tower.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| The question is how much of this consumer memory is selling
| either. It may well be that not many people are actually buying
| DRAM right now, given how much prices have spiked.
|
| I also have a lot more luck selling PC hardware on bespoke
| forums than on ebay etc.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I don't understand when people blame AI for buying DDR5 DRAM -
| aren't they mostly interested in HBM? Or is the fab space being
| diverted to manufacture more HBM than DDR DRAM previously?
| andix wrote:
| If/when the AI bubble bursts, there will be a lot of cheap used
| parts available to buy.
|
| Is it actually standard modules that are high on demand, or are
| the chips directly soldered to custom mainboards?
| andix wrote:
| Maybe the crypto bros reallocated from bitcoin to DRAM.
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