[HN Gopher] Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis
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Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis
Author : naves
Score : 70 points
Date : 2025-12-28 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.idc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.idc.com)
| transcriptase wrote:
| All so people in developing countries can churn out boomer-
| baiting slop for social media engagement farming and ad views.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| What makes you think it's limited to boomers.. know of just as
| many millennials that eat the stuff up too.
| willis936 wrote:
| As a millenial all I see is my generation being repulsed by
| AI slop. Boomers and zoomers though have a large presence of
| consumption. It was easy to see this with your own family
| over the holidays.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| I think your sample of Millenials is probably more well
| informed.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Nah, it's fueled by huge misinformation campaigns. It's
| going to kill art, put us all out of the job, uses 1.5
| million gallons per query, pollutes water, will kill the
| electric grid, etc. These seem to be the most popular
| uninformed lines of thinking.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| We have always been at war with Eastasia.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ya we seem to live in the the place where the firehose of
| falsehood is filling the lake of bullshit asymmetry. The
| problem with this is uninformed lines of thinking
| eventually lead to policy.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are
| really poor in quality and can be emotionally
| driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other
| end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who get
| surprisingly aggressive if you say anything remotely
| negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having
| a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these
| tools. Particularly how they are trained and deployed and
| who should be guiding that process.
|
| I find it very odd when people proudly proclaim they
| used, say, Grok to answer a question. Their identity is
| so tied up in it that if you start talking about the
| quality of the information they get incredibly defensive.
| In contrast: I have never felt protective of my Google
| search results, which is basically the same thing given
| how most people use these tools currently.
|
| It's kind of wild how hostile some people get if you
| attempt to open the discussion up at all.
| kubb wrote:
| We musn't be unkind to the boomers. When we're their age,
| the methods for assaulting our poor old brains will be ever
| so more sophisticated.
| willis936 wrote:
| I'm not blaming them. It's really frustrating that old
| people are taken advantage of. We shouldn't need to be so
| cynical. This isn't the star trek future we were
| promised.
|
| Edit: It's similarly frustrating about the zoomers.
| Parents are derelict of duty by not defending their kids
| and preparing them for the world they are in.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > This isn't the star trek future we were promised.
|
| It is, though. We're just in the part leading up to
| WWIII.
| natebc wrote:
| Yeah, that bit of the Star Trek Universe is something not
| many folks know about.
|
| You want to be born into the utopia, not before.
| kubb wrote:
| Sci-fi will never materialize. But the ones passionate
| about it are so desperate for the faux future that they
| won't be able to tell when they're being duped.
|
| Just wait until the next great collapse, a disaster big
| enough to force change. Hopefully we'll have the right
| ideas lying around at the time to restructure our social
| communication system.
|
| Until then, it's slow decline. Embrace it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Sci-fi has materialized, we're living in it now. The
| problem is it's the dystopia edition.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/50754-how-different-
| genera...
| willis936 wrote:
| What do ads have to do with AI slop?
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| "All so people in developing countries can churn out
| boomer-baiting slop for _social media engagement farming
| and ad views_."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46413716
| tempest_ wrote:
| They will tell you they are repulsed by it if asked but its
| a toss up if they can identify it. Look at any thread on
| Reddit/IG/Tiktok whatever and I personally would guess I
| could manage to identify AI output 20% of the time.
|
| Boomers might be out there consuming those AI youtube
| videos that are just tiktok voice over with a generated
| slide show but Millennials think since they can identify
| this as slop that they are not affected. That is incorrect,
| and just as bad.
| kristianp wrote:
| > potential contraction in the global smartphone market alongside
| an increase in average selling prices (ASP). In 2026, in our
| moderate downside scenario, we could see the market contract by
| 2.9%. In our pessimistic downside scenario, it could be as bad as
| 5.2%.
|
| > PC market contract by 4.9% compared with a 2.4% year-on-year
| decline in the November forecast. Under a more pessimistic
| scenario, the decline could deepen to 8.9%.
| RyanShook wrote:
| I see this as a competitive opportunity for Apple. If Apple
| smartphone specs improve while Androids stagnate it could create
| more iOS users.
|
| The promised AI metaverse is still a long way off and in the
| meantime people still want the best smartphone.
| layer8 wrote:
| Most regular people don't care about RAM specs. And lately it's
| Apple that has been rather stagnating in terms of features.
| neutronicus wrote:
| I would love stagnation, the keyboard has always been a
| dumpster fire but these days it is an actively regressing
| dumpster fire
| rockskon wrote:
| What, because they aren't shoving an LLM in every orifice of
| their product?
| memoriuaysj wrote:
| I have no idea how much RAM my phone has.
|
| And if you think that somebody buys an iPhone because they
| compare the specs with Android :)))))
| Maxion wrote:
| Basically if I have to start comparing iPhone specs to
| Android phone specs I might aswell just buy an Android. The
| point of iOS is that you don't have to.
| arcbyte wrote:
| I agree with you and have agreed with you for a long time.
| However, I definitely see the writing on the wall. More than
| one person in my circle have traditionally been Android users
| and the lack of innovation from both Apple and Android have
| them comparing devices on specs MUCH more. I include myself
| in this list on my next upgrade. I'll be looking largely at
| specs on the next upgrad because honestly there's not much
| day to day difference in usage between apple and android
| anymore
| oezi wrote:
| The competitive advantage comes from Apple having the supply
| chain contracts in place to not be affected by the 2026 price
| hike as much. The Android phones will be more expensive and
| thus will capture less market share.
| memoriuaysj wrote:
| iPhone being expensive is a feature.
|
| "What do you mean my status flagship iPhone costs only half
| as much as a flagship Android???"
| root_axis wrote:
| > _if Apple smartphone specs improve while Androids stagnate it
| could create more iOS user_
|
| Nah. The marginal utility of more smartphone ram is near zero
| at this point. The vast majority of people wouldn't even notice
| if the memory in their phone tripled overnight.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| How is it an opportunity for Apple? They are a customer of
| Samsung and Micron RAM modules just like everyone else is. They
| aren't in any unique position other than their user base is
| already used to paying extreme markup for RAM. Now whether
| Apple just eats the cost in their profit margin or charges
| _even more_ for RAM remains to be seen.
| krackers wrote:
| Their supply chain prowess likely means they have already
| secured contracts for 2026 (and maybe even 2027), so they
| will not be affected by the price hike. But maybe they'll
| still use it as an opportunity to bump prices and rake in
| free profit, who knows.
| walterbell wrote:
| Apple reportedly negotiated a 50% price increase in memory
| supply for 2026, down from a higher price given to other
| OEMs.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I welcome this. Anything that makes consumer electronics more
| expensive acts counter to the Baumol Effect.
|
| How scarce does memory have to get before it makes health care
| half as expensive?
| Avicebron wrote:
| Where do you think the IT costs for doctor's workstations are
| going to be redirected?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I always thought it was more about differences in
| productivity between sectors. If the Baumol effect made
| service sector wages increase, would wouldn't ineffencies do
| the inverse?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It makes _all_ electronics more expensive. This makes every
| service more expensive as well.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| It sounds like effenciencies in manufacturing sectors lead to
| more costly medical services, _and_ ineffencies in
| manufacturing sectors lead to costly medical services. Am I
| understanding correctly?
| krupan wrote:
| Who said efficiencies in manufacturing sectors lead to more
| costly medical services?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| William J. Baumol the namesake of the Baumol Effect[1].
| Generally it is
|
| > the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced
| little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in
| response to rising wages in other jobs that did
| experience high productivity growth
|
| Specifically, manufacturing sectors have increased
| productivity and service sectors haven't.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Imagine a future where a resourceful computer will be unobtanium,
| because AI companies decided to outbid consumers. Your PC will be
| _just_ powerful enough to work as a terminal, with all the heavy
| lifting done by cloud compute data centers.
|
| Every functionality be will subscription-based. You'll own
| nothing and you'll be happy.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean this is one of the risk factors in AI safety that's been
| communicated for a long time. It's not just computing, but
| potentially everything. Energy resources, land resources (like
| those used to grow food for us meat bags), transportation
| resources. Suddenly humans find themselves outbid by AI as AI
| has pushed us out of the economy.
|
| The economy says nothing about requiring humans to exist.
| nialse wrote:
| That is the logical conclusion. The era of personal computers
| is coming to an end. It had a good run though.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Luckily Beelinks are still cheap, work decently, and can run
| Linux/Windows, so if all someone needs is to browse the
| Internet and do basic stuff, honestly? They're fine. We'll
| see how long that lasts though.
| antonkochubey wrote:
| "Heavy lifting" here being running 108 MB of JavaScript to
| render shopping cart of an online store, correct?
|
| Or consuming 2 GB of RAM to have Teams running in the
| background doing nothing?
|
| Yeah, if we got rid of that as a result of RAM shortages,
| that'd be great.
| tom_ wrote:
| I'm struggling to picture how we get there from here? There's a
| huge pile of second hand PCs available, and almost all of them
| are massively more powerful than necessary for terminal
| purposes only.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase -
| Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of
| their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic
| warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along
| with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in
| sight. This price increase was engineered.
|
| The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of it started
| swirling in September. Take a look at the RAM price charts.
| Anyone who attributes this just to "AI growth" has no idea what
| they're talking about. AI has been growing rapidly for three
| years and yet this price increase just happened exactly when
| Altman signed this deal.
|
| https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
|
| It's also worth noting that IDC, who published this report, is
| wholly owned by Blackstone, who is also heavily invested in
| OpenAI. It would be prudent to be cautious about who you believe.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| After the dns entry, the stockpile of ram may be the most
| valuable asset that company has.
| anon373839 wrote:
| Right! Raw wafers, not even memory. I have seen no evidence
| that this move was anything but a means of taking product out
| of the global supply chain.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they
| can't even utilize what they bought!
| kubb wrote:
| It feels like abuse. They shouldn't be able to get away
| with such trickery.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| With a functional government, antitrust enforcement would
| prevent a single company from driving economy-wide price
| inflation out of an attempt to starve its competition.
| Since we don't have a functional government, we'll
| ungracefully take this up the ass.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| You do know that they can hire semiconductor packaging
| companies to put together memory modules the same way they
| bought the DRAM wafers, right?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Doesn't Apple routinely do the same thing? Reserve chip
| production for the leading-edge nodes, and sometimes enter into
| similar deals for other tech such as displays? I'm not seeing
| any evidence that this was intentional "warfare" on OpenAI's
| part: they're just making a high-stakes bet that they can
| ultimately find a better and higher-margin use for that raw
| DRAM than HNers' gaming battlestations, or whatever the next-
| best use was when they made that deal.
| duped wrote:
| No, apple does not buy production capacity to prevent others
| from using it. They buy it to use it themselves.
|
| The wafers are not DRAM. This is more likely burning oil
| wells so your enemy can't use them. Wafers are to chips what
| steel blanks are to engines. You basically need clean rooms
| just to accept delivery and entire fabs to do anything.
| Someone who doesn't own a fab buying the wafers is
| essentially buying them to destroy them.
| cedws wrote:
| Not sure that OpenAI's move was a very good one, they've just
| created a lot of enemies for themselves. I see comments all
| over the internet about AI slop making RAM expensive. It's
| going to eat into the profits of a lot of companies. People
| will be willing for this insanity to end.
| krupan wrote:
| We can only hope you are right
| krupan wrote:
| I hadn't heard of this, so I searched the web (without any help
| from an LLM, btw) and found this:
|
| https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the things I've been hoping for every time a new EC2
| instance comes out is for them to unpin the memory:core ratio a
| bit. I don't expect they have enough r# and c# users to
| completely balance things out so what they're really doing is
| selling people more CPUs to get the memory they need.
|
| It would be nice if it were creeping up generation to generation.
| But if this keeps up I fear the opposite.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The best way of "unpinning" those ratios for many ephemeral
| workloads is to use Lambda/FaaS, not EC2.
| hinkley wrote:
| kv stores also exist because for many generations of tooling
| it was faster to manage read-mostly data off-heap instead of
| on, and that becomes more true the more processes you run
| doing jobs that touch the same data.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You should just get used to it because the memory per core is
| going down inexorably forever until someone makes a physics
| breakthrough. We know how to print cores and the core count is
| going to keep going up.
| Youden wrote:
| "However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a
| mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent,
| strategic reallocation of the world's silicon wafer capacity.
| [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM
| stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module
| of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop."
|
| I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-efficient
| software? The trend for the last couple of decades has been that
| nearly all consumer software outside of gaming has moved to
| browsers or browser-based runtimes like Electron. There's been a
| vicious cycle of heavier software -> more RAM -> heavier software
| but if this RAM shortage is permanent, the cycle can't continue.
|
| Apple and Google seemed to be working on local AI models as well.
| Will they have to scale that back due to lack of RAM on the
| devices? Or perhaps they think users will pay the premium for
| more RAM if it means they get AI?
|
| Or is this all a temporary problem due to OpenAI's buying
| something like 40% of the wafers?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There's plenty of scope for local AI models to become more
| efficient, too. MoE doesn't need too much RAM: only the
| parameters for experts that are active at any given time truly
| need to be in memory, the rest can be in read-only storage and
| be fetched on demand. If you're doing CPU inference this can
| even be managed automatically by mmap, whereas loading params
| into VRAM must currently be managed as part of running an
| inference step. (This is where GPU drivers/shader
| languages/programming models could also see some improvement,
| TBH)
| dummydummy1234 wrote:
| But aren't the experts chosen on a token by token basis,
| which means bandwidth limitations?
| antisthenes wrote:
| > There's been a vicious cycle of heavier software -> more RAM
| -> heavier software but if this RAM shortage is permanent, the
| cycle can't continue.
|
| What do you mean it can't continue? You'll just have to deal
| with worse performance is all.
|
| Revolutionary consumer-side performance gains like multi-core
| CPUs and switching to SSDs will be a thing of distant past.
| Enjoy your 2 second animations, peasant.
| duped wrote:
| It's not a zero sum game because silicon wafers are not a
| finite resource. Industry can and will produce more.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Neither are paperclips.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| If industry has a bit of fear that the demand will slow down
| by the time they can output meaningful amount of chips, then
| probably not. Time will show.
| treebeard901 wrote:
| Code the AI will produce will solve the memory usage problems
| which is itself a result of lazy or poor human coders.
| xocnad wrote:
| Nice assertion. Perhaps you meant that AI could be directed
| towards less memory intensive implementations. That would
| still have to be directed by those same lazy/poor coders
| because the code the AI is learning from is their bad code
| (for the most part).
| to11mtm wrote:
| IDK, given the prevalence of Electron and other technically-
| correct-but-inefficient code out there, at bare minimum it
| would require decent prompting to help.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-efficient
| software?
|
| If the consumer market can't get cheap RAM anymore, the natural
| result is a pivot back to server-heavy technology (where all
| the RAM is anyway) with things like server-side rendering and
| thin clients. Developers are far too lazy to suddenly become
| efficient programmers and there's plenty of network bandwidth.
| krupan wrote:
| This is a temporary problem driven by the AI bubble. It's going
| to hurt until the bubble pops, but when that happens other
| things are going to hurt
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I don't really get the panic. This is the same as the pandemic,
| just for different reasons. A change in demand is causing supply
| shortages and price hikes. But the demand will eventually swing
| back as the current demand is completely unsustainable. AI demand
| will crumble, prices will bottom out, and companies who bet big
| on AI & RAM will end up going into big layoffs triggering another
| recession and a huge market crash. We literally just went through
| all this, it can't be a surprise.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| On the AI correction point: given the K-shaped economy, we're
| headed for a mean reversion either way. Either the bottom
| corrects upward or the top corrects down. Real life being what
| it is, I'm bracing for the latter. Though I'd love to be proven
| wrong
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