Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

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.

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...

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?

Nothing costs trillions.

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...

My guess is that they will plummet down when the AI bubble bursts.

A waiver is a waiver. The cost is per square mm. It’s pure supply and demand

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).

Olds remember the years around '95 when RAM stayed the exact same price per megabyte for what seemed a decade.

> 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.

Aside, $203 USD back then would be about $276 USD after inflation. Not a primary effect, but contributory.

I bought a bunch of hard drives in 2021 (16TB Seagate Exos) that are now $50-$100 more expensive. It's depressing.

If the sticker price stayed the same since 2016, it got about 35% cheaper due to inflation.

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.

Time to start scouring used-PC sales to reclaim the RAM and sell it for a profit?

You should use OBS to screen record rather than video your computer screen with your phone

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?

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.

640K ought to be enough for anyone.

Why did you waste all your money on 32gb when 4gb is enough? Why did we all need 32gb?

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.

Exactly. I recently doubled my RAM and have now 4GB.

I like to tell people I have 128GB. It's pretty rare to meet someone like me that isn't swapping all the time.

and the guy that sold it to you stole it from where ?

new?

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.

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.

what's your usecase for such a build?

> 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.

Good advice for the immortal. For everyone else, "do something else instead" is more practical.

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.

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

>It is a weird form of centralized planning [...]

It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not centralized at all.

>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".

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.

>AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century

Is it?

Why not follow the time-honoured approach and put the data centres in low-income countries?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Unless I get all the resources I want, when I want, all at low prices, the market has obviously failed.

Or you could look at reality where it generates fake social media posts s lot and we could all ask, why is this valuable?

What do you think happens when the majority of consumers are priced not only out of bread, but also circuses?

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.

It is the market working as expected, but it still failed to allocate money diversely.

yeah but the demand is based on empty promises

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consoles are increasingly becoming PCs, so I don't see this happening

console ram isn't magically cheaper

I paid 12x64GB samsung lrdimm total $420 just this January or something. $35 each.

Now cheapest single stick is $195

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Looks like they ran out of RAM.

There’s 3 or 4 places where the commenter just glitches out. Sounds like they’re using a transcription tool or something

I assume they're saying blow up the hardware marked so they can liquidate assets efficiently?

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.

At least if the robots in disguise turned up, we'd answer the AGI question

Basically every integrated circuit is exempt from retaliatory tariffs, current custom MacBook Pros are shipping from China direct: which tariffs are you referring to?

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.

I'm thinking second-hand and new-old-stock, with less demand for it.

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.

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.