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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Noticed SSDs went up too. There's a "black friday" sales price for a 4TB crucial external drive that's at its highest price in 90 days.

Bad time if you need to build a computer.

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RAM prices are cyclical. We are in the under supply part of the cycle.

People just have to wait. As prices are sky high, production capacity will likely increase. Some AI companies will go bust. Demand will plummet and we will buy RAM for pennies while the market consolidates.

That's historically what happened when we had proper competition. Now we have a 3 party oligopoly and massive barriers to entry. Now at least 1 of the 3 is actively signalling than they're not going to not going to spend 100s of billions to expand fab capacity that will lower their profits because if one does it they'll all do it. It's a prisoner dilemma, and they're co-operating. When they co-operate we all lose.

The entry of Chinese DRAM into the market may spur increased competition. If not for competition's sake alone, for national security and domestic supply chain integrity concerns.

Or the existing companies get fat, lazy, and then slaughtered.

Oof, this post aged like milk.

https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

That is also somewhat true for GPUs, hard drives and SSDs. They all usually have different cycles but today AI is making them peak all at the same time.

Great, we can eat the RAM when we're all unemployed.

Dude - I laughed out loud on this comment (I guess we're at the cry or laugh stage). Almost woke up my sleeping kiddo.

Article says:

Looking at it optimistically, you're probably going to find DDR5 at bargain prices again in 2027.

When do you think prices will recede again?

never fully, like with GPU, it a semi-cartel, it's in everything including you high performance SSD (as cache) they have a reason for them being supper high for ~2 years then they will go down but only "somewhat", lets say if the peak it >2x pricing the price in 2027 will be ~1.5x-1.8x price.

And because everything needs prices expect all electronics to be ~20%-80% more expensive in 2027 compared to today, naturally this includes the profit margin.

and naturally every regulation related companies don't like will supposedly be at fault for this (e.g. right to repair)

at least that is a wild speculation on my side

I built 4 systems between Jan-May for myself and family, very fortuitous timing, because no way would I be doing it now.

bc some people up top loved the idea of the old Smoot Hawley thing

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