Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
pcpartpicker.com
pcpartpicker.com
In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were both caught off guard and left a lot of money on the table.
The current price increase is the result of the huge demand spike. Production takes years to ramp up, but demand has spiked rapidly. Supply and demand.
I wish they didn't stop producing DDR4, at least they'd be the sole producer of that.
Some dotcom-boom companies that survived also had sustained multi billion dollar losses afair - Amazon and Uber for example.
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
What is the instrinsic value of one of millions of GPUs, if the world only needs 15-20% of them?
That's the meaning of intrinsic calor - the device can do what it can do, regardless of market conditions. Today it has the value of fifty teraflops, and tomorrow it still does, unless it breaks. However, intrinsic value cannot be measured in dollars.
I'm sure that farmers during the Great Depression were also consoling themselves with the "intrisinsic caloric value" of their corn.
GPUs would have taken the world by storm already in the roughly 30 years since they've been around.
Even for GenAI it's likely ASICs take over at some point if we really care about performance.
If you put a 75% discount on these powerful GPUs there will be a long line of non-AI-company purchasers.
Yes, lots of companies will buy them for cheap, but these AI beasts also have OpEx costs. Not every alternative use is worth the money and there are 0 guarantees that the alternative costs cover the gap. NVIDIA sell 80% of GPUs for AI now.
I think people don't realize just how big this bubble is.
There are also intrinsic costs, mostly power consumption.
So demand from other sources has to be suppressed through being priced out in order to meet those supply promises made to OAI in ignorance of their true scale.
This is OAI doing suppliers dirty by making economy distorting moves without transparency, intentionally distorting the market in an effort to hurt competitors.
Yet another example of the “free market” creating destruction for the general public.
As a thought experiment, replace “dram” with “rice” or another essential food stock. Market manipulation such as this is wildly irresponsible, anti-humanity and antithetical to public good. Wars are started over less.
This is an excellent example of the actual alignment of OpenAI as an organization. Yet we are to trust them with leading the way in the alignment of our manque oracles of truth and power?
Except they are
> SK hynix to boost DRAM production by a huge 8x in 2026, still won't be enough for RAM shortages
> It's also not just SK hynix that is boosting DRAM production capacity, with both Samsung and Micron rapidly increasing their respective DRAM production numbers.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/109011/sk-hynix-to-boost-dram...
That's such an impossibly big number for that timeline. The actual news is they're ramping up their newest node, which they were doing anyway, and which was a small percent of their total production.
At the speed OpenAI is growing, it's far more likely they're trying to protect themselves first, not harm competitors. The market only exists because it's free / semi free. Were it controlled by statist bureaucrats - which is the sole alternative back in reality - the situation would be drastically worse. Just ask Soviet Russia. You'd get your meager once every ten year DRAM ration and you'd like it.
The general public isn't the standard of morality or good. Invoking it is meaningless.
In a reasonably well regulated market, deception at that scale (that utterly destroys competitive buildouts by externalizing the costs that normally would be borne by a customer needing an exceptional order) would be a clear violation of market laws. The fact that deceptive, aggressively anticompetitive behavior such as this , blatantly harmful to other innovation passes as “free market” is a laughable assertion… this is merely the will of the stronger, not any reasonable definition of a free market. A free market implies transparency in pricing and demand, alongside fair competition practices.
Anyone else planning to innovate in the ML space just took a huge hit thanks to OAI, including scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and other things that arguably operate mostly in the realm of clear public good.
Their inherent assumption that might = right is a very powerful indication of their inability to be trusted in the control of a tool / weapon that has more potential to steer the future of humanity than nuclear power/weapons ever did. It’s clear that A: they don’t see AI as any big deal, or B: they don’t care how their actions affect humanity in any nuanced sense of the concept.
If this price goes on for a longer period though, I assume that won't be the case.
Exactly. This is why they’re not scrambling to invest in additional capacity. If these memory manufacturers went all in on new capacity it would take years to build out. If the bubble bursts, or even if it doesn’t burst and just tapers off back to normal demand, they would be in a bad position with excess manufacturing capacity that isn’t paying off.
They would want to expand capacity if they believed this increase in demand is long lasting - the implication is therefore that they don't believe it, or not enough to risk major capital expenditures.
You saw the same with GPU makers not wanting to expand capacity during the Cryptocurrency boom. They don't want to be left holding the bag when the bubble pops.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oil-production-prices-us-compan...
Which sucks extra bad because if you shut the project down but start it back up you can't just flip a switch. Gotta put together a whole new team and possibly retrain them.
Hopefully the Chinese manufacturers ram(p) up rapidly and spike Hynix and Samsung with heavily undercut prices.
No it’s not. Memory business has been cyclical for years. Over expansion is a real risk because new manufacturing capacity is very expensive and takes a long time to come online.
If they could make new manufacturing come online quickly they would do it and capture the additional profit of more sales.
The risk of overexpansion is real but I really doubt they want to expand much in the next couple years. They don't have to worry about being undercut by small competitors so they can enjoy the moment.
Look at the standard Econ 101 supply-demand curve.
If they could make and sell twice as many chips, it would not cut there margins anywhere near half. They would be making much more.
When demand spikes up and down there will be pain. Because booms are not predictable, in timing, size or duration. And accelerating supply expansion is very expensive, slow, and risky.
Many boom prompted RAM supply expansions have ended in years of unprofitable over capacity.
You really think that? I would expect their margins to drop down to a small percentage if they doubled production. Maybe even less.
Any price increase reduces purchases by many customers. This tends to keep prices stable. With only small changes in price relative to regular changes in demand.
Yet prices have gone way up.
Which means that many people and businesses are cancelling, delaying, or scaling back their RAM purchases. And yet new demand is incredibly high.
To get prices down, supply would have to grow tremendously. Enough to soak up even more purchases from the very motivated, and to cover all the purchasers that have currently pulled back.
Especially because the demand curve that's skyrocketing right now is the RAM that isn't in long-term contracts. Doubling all production would much more than double the RAM available for normal purchases.
> To get prices down, supply would have to grow tremendously. Enough to soak up even more purchases from the very motivated, and to cover all the purchasers that have currently pulled back.
Is "down" here back to normal levels?
But normal levels are like a tenth of the profit margin. They'd make significantly less money doing that.
Actually, let me eat my words, you are right. As I typed this I saw some news from an hour ago[0] about SK Hynix planning to invest about $500 billion into 4 more fabs. I imagine [hope] Samsung will follow, and together with Chinese memory fabs ramping up both in capacity and technology, prices will return to earth in 2027, maybe 2028.
Guess I am just a little too bitter because GPU prices finally seemed to normalize after half a decade of craziness. Topped with corporations in the West usually forgoing investment and using profits like these to do massive stock buybacks and dividends, souring my expectations.
[0]https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/hot-on-the-heels-of-...
If the demand holds I’m sure they’ll expand. Until then, I think they see it as a short term supply spike.
Honestly having problems remembering the other AI companies without googling it. I recall MS, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Anthropic.
That farm land is dead and gone, best we can do is urban/rural decay.
Capitalism has never been about the survival of the fittest. That's just weird Nietzschean-Libertarian fantasy where someone ends up blaming the lack of truly free markets for their inability to get a date.
Any large building in a rural area will be used as a barn if it has no other useful purpose. It's kind of hilarious when I pass by the old AT&T long lines facility being used as a hay barn.
Las time I bought something at Sears was the spring of 2008; a new set of tires for my car, and they were bad so I never went back. Also, there aren't a lot of Sears in Mexico.
Financial trouble at OpenAI - even minor stuff where they slow purchases by 25% - could have a big impact on global prices.
Fake demand - fueled by ponzi debt financed by other debt.
Oh, forgot to mention - fake supply too. China was doubly-excluded from the RAM market by using both equipment export bans and tariffs - ensuring the supply is frozen solid.
I'm pretty sure this isn't a coincidence or due to incompetence.
Even current DDR4 3200 DIMM prices are at an all time high.
These are 6+ year old chip specs now!
I even thought stuff was overpriced four years ago in mid-2021 already, but this is a whole new level.
Some sample long term data for those:
And then there are other factors like more sticks of ram stressing things further. I had to downclock to get memtest stable when running 4 sticks even though each kit ran fine on it's own. But that is expected as well as 4 sticks stresses the memory controller even further.
I confess I don't have any real recent experience with DDR5 though, mostly with DDR4 on Ryzen 1000-5000 series.
Here the price hike was pretty instant as secondary effect of DDR5 evasion in two waves. I July and now in October.
There is usually no shortage of old working PC components as they also are avalable used and tested from people decommissioning and upgrading systems. These are not some rare parts in normal market situations.
I made a habit of maxing out motherboards a year or two before upgrading to an new platform. This was always dirt cheap until like 5 years ago.
You can take a look at the 5800X3D and how it was at its cheapest about 2 years ago when AMD was winding down production and Zen 4 had been launched.
Unfortunately now they're too late on making the bank with DDR5, too: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/chinas-chip...
Then a smartphone would work fine with 1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy.
The problem is that most web pages these days fundamentally are not simple.
Rather than trying to make web pages small, the real effort would be in designing web pages to be simple.
The large majority of software devs, PMs and the like don't really know how to do anything else than a Node + React webapp.
I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.
There's a lot to say about the side effects of frameworks but there's a reason why everything converges towards that.
Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case for most people.
Most people want their cars to be safe and convenient, and their webpages useful and rich, more so than they want to return to some idealized simplicity.
A simple webpage or blog with minimal styling that runs as an ARM binary on a TV remote is cool and fun but it’s not economically useful. It’s the equivalent of a manual scooter. We can build better apps (in the same way that car manufacturers can build less crappy infotainment systems) but optimizing for scarcity isn’t the answer in a world where abundance tends to grow.
(Edit: your downvotes mean nothing to me, I’ve seen what gets upvoted!)
Tbh, it’s unpopular around HN, but I felt like AMP was a great experience for users. AMP pages were super fast and had no annoying banners - and none of my pet peeve: layout shift.
The JS Gmail UI from 15 years ago was just as functional as the one today.
Websites that are supposed to be simple lists end up bloated and laggy because of really poor JS that makes one request per item iteratively to populate a list.
I crank the window up and down 3x faster than the little button
And I could adjust my damn seat before electricity is available... sigh
How do you know?
I can be in the house before it gets there, but I don’t trust. Just let me close it.
I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.
When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.
More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.
Animations and etc. that distract from the actual content are superfluous. Agreed! I hate it when sites scrolljack.
But lots of HN posters want to impose the same austerity on every website, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. You can’t build Linear in 100KB of JS. Nor would you want to run it on 1 GB RAM. And that’s the case for a lot of economically useful applications.
Keeping things as simple as possible shouldn’t be the goal. It should be keeping it simple enough for the use case at hand.
I remember a time when I was surfing the web with 256MB and a 5KB/s modem.
And I prefer text over video. Cat videos excluded, of course.
Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €
They even have one SKU of 2x32GB DDR5-6400 that’s gone to… €4480
On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other's deal was, nor how close to simultaneous they were. And this secrecy mattered. It mattered a lot.
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain…and it's worked so far...
OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!On paper this makes OpenAI look like absolute assholes. Like they have realized that all of their potential competitors will be memory constrained and have poured billions of dollars into making sure that happens instead of using that money to improve their own product.
Wouldn't this be ... collusion?
Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something.
OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.
OpenAI is creating more demand, therefore the price must go up, if it didn't then there'd be shortages.
If you know demand will go up because Microsoft announced that each new Xbox will have 2TB of RAM, that is perfectly fine. Or if OpenAI issues a press release that they intend to buy half the worlds RAM.
If you know demand will go up because you learn the volume your customer intends to purchase from your competitor during confidential negotiations, that is not ok.
If they bought the DRAM in order to stop their competitors from using it because they are falling behind, that's anticompetitive in spirit, though I'm not sure if it actually breaks any laws.
There is no reason to pathologize or find suspicious these normal economic facts. Especially when it is not within the power of a big player to choose how other people react to their actions, which is all "moving markets" is. If something is suspicious and illegal about that, then it is equally suspicious that you and I seem to go along with this "market movement" by these big players and pay the new prices. Are we colluding with them? We could do with less conspiracy-minded interpretations of these things.
Before you buy anything from a store, do you also show them all your receipts from the other stores you visited today?
That's exactly the goal, to raise prices for OpenAI's competitors.
In reality, so-called collusion is normal and unobjectionable. But when price surges happen, often due to factors outside of the seller's immediate control, people look for any reason to find an ethical dimension and find how to place blame, because this is more convenient. Things that were normal become abnormal and suspicious. It is in consumers economic self-interest to act in this way, because it often secures favors to them from various economic policies that they don't normally get when the market is "normal". This is no less a form of collusion than what sellers might do to secure their economic advantage. But a key difference for these anti "gouging" policies is that it gives consumers a special privilege and makes market pricing less able to fulfill its social functions.
CPU sockets with more than two memory channels are also far more expensive; the higher pin count usually increases the number of layers the motherboard needs, and the larger size of the socket requires more metal for stiffening (and EPYC CPUs still have issues with imperfect mounting leading to some IO lanes not working).
Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges.
by trading them with longevity challenges.
Even though 2 decades have past after the "usual suspect" lead-free solder, gpu or vram chips needing a reball is still a common occurrence from a cursory look at YouTube channels of professional electronics repairmen.
One of the key points of HBM is that dies are stacked up with many, MANY, more signals and channels. That's how NVIDIA has a memory bandwidth an order of magnitude higher than M4: 550GB/s for the M4 Max, 4.6TB/s for H200. And yes, that's bytes per second, not bits per second.
some GPUs use HBM. Most use GDDR. AMD and Nvidia still extract huge bandwidth from GDDR via high bus speeds + wide buses (like the 1.79 TB/s on the 5090)
Apple uses off the shelf LPDDR modules. They have nothing whatsoever special about them.
Apple gets high bandwidth out of these modules not with high bus speeds, but with a very, very wide bus. This is expensive on the SoC side (requires a large die, which is why others don't necessarily do this), but allows for commodity memory modules.
NVIDIA recently told their board partners that they will need to source their own RAM and will not be bundling it with chips anymore.
If there is a supply crunch on DRAM, commercial GPU production lines will start having idle downtime. That is literally the worst possible thing that can happen to a company that has invested heavily in tooling and they will negotiate at or below cost production runs to fill the gaps if a customer can bring their own DRAM to the table.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/openai_broadcom_deal/
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
Even Samsung is running into this issue now: their own internal foundry is refusing to give them a long term contract now so the S26 series will become more expensive.
If this happens to Samsung, what leverage will a player like Valve have?
These large corpos are so greedy to the point they harm themselves. I remember something similar with Amazon, where the Amazon shop had to redo the whole architecture from some microservice setup back to a monolithic approach because they used AWS and paid these weirdly structured prices like everyone else. Which made running a monolithic architecture under such constraints inherently cheaper. Not sure what the resulting compounded business cost for this "endeavor" was, but more often that not such things are never accounted for, so they don't show up as an issue.
Their interest isn't necessarily in squeezing out the most margin on each unit. If unexpected market conditions let them more or less hit their original margin targets but get far more units installed in homes, that could be much better for them in the long term.
There's a lot we can't know as outsiders, at the moment.
i agree. Valve's money machine is with the steam platform, rather than any hardware sales - breaking even on hardware is sufficient imho.
Valve's existential threat is from microsoft closing off windows somehow (or extracting rent...like a store!). Therefore, pushing steam machines which can be run without windows, is both business expansion as well as an insurance policy.
Wasn't that true with the previous incarnation of the steam machine, the valve index, steam controller, etc.? IIRC their VR gear was some of the most expensive consumer level gear on the market.
The steam deck, and now the (newer) steam machine is looking to push into the mass market of consoles, and i reckon it would be more successful. Not to mention the more mature steamOS and compatibility layer now (compared to before).
I have high hopes for it. I want PC gaming to break free of microsoft windows.
Being pragmatic, I wonder if Valve benefit from the health of the PC market, whether they'll also put efforts into helping people get more life out of their existing machines, or individuals/businesses refurbishing to sell on the used market with more confidence. There's already an angle for reducing e-waste with the win10 end of life if it can be tied into installing linux.
Companies had supply agreements in place but they will find essentially any excuse to "delay" delivery. You might eventually get your product but fat lot of good it does for you while you're mired in court and not getting anything anyway.
The particularly amusing example is a project continuously selling spot LNG while saying it's not yet operational, stiffing the companies with which they'd signed long term contracts with on a technicality.
I was originally going to just get 64GB of DDR5-6000, with the option of adding another 64GB later, thinking the price might drop even further. At the last minute, I decided to get the whole 128GB instead. Glad I did.
Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?
First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing". A lottery is a better principle than "surge pricing". In the case that someone over purchased, they're free to dispose via secondary market if the value to them is lower than the out of stock price. I.e. decentralised pricing (and profits). Secondary market sales are just more efficient, they occur at negotiated prices that reflect true individual valuation, not the retailer's speculation.
I'd rather reward diligence and personal responsibility - if you monitor market trends, anticipate needs, and act quickly, such as buying RAM ahead of a known upcoming supply crunch, you're rewarded with access at the original price. Rather than passive reliance on wealth to solve problems. First come first served values effort and foresight. Scarcity is managed through time and effort rather than money.
This is called a price ceiling, and it's a bad idea with a track record of failure and significant harm.
I'd rather pay extra and get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance and otherwise be forced to go without or buy from scalpers for the same price I would have paid anyways. This is the purpose of prices. So the people who really need it can buy it, and those who are borderline about the purchase decide to opt out.
If you're concerned with wealth inequality or one large buyer cornering the market, there are better ways to address those problem than prices ceilings.
The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling. That's a different thing. That requires more than simply swapping surge pricing with first come first served. You've created a strawman.
> I'd rather pay extra and get what I need with 100% chance
False dichotomy. Neither approach increases supply. Of course according to economists who can hand wave away bullwhip effects with simple "this model assumes X" statements that go unquestioned in the conversations which cite the findings of the given model but i digress. According to economists, both approaches do increase supply, the theory goes that the price gouging retailer invests in more factory capacity. Or the factory owner buoyed by vibrant secondary market activity views increased production investment as a safe bet. Maybe there's some truth in the latter...
> If you're concerned with wealth inequality
I'm concerned with lazy financial engineering over hard work. Why should the scrappy but innovative startup be excluded from resources over the sclerotic incumbent with a deeper wallet?
And a "scrappy but innovative" startup has an obvious interest in being able to source the DRAM or other goods they require, even at higher prices.
If you force companies to price products lower than what they want, then you have a price ceiling by definition.
> Neither approach increases supply.
I didn't mention or allude to supply at all, although it's true that price ceilings also decrease supply (less so if there is monopoly or collusion, but they still do).
I was talking about resource allocation. The person who needs a new system because their previous computer broke will be willing to pay the extra money, but the person who already has a DDR4 system with a 5950x that runs their games well enough will be content to hold off on their AM5 upgrade to DDR5 because the marginal improvement isn't worth the extra $400.
If you have a price ceiling like what you proposed, the person with the DDR4 system may buy the DDR5 that they don't really need 1 day earlier than the person who actually needs the DDR5, creating a misallocation of resources.
(that's an example of the more abstract principle at play).
Theoretical arguments aren't even needed here. The empirical history of price ceilings is there for you to google.
If you didn't know that what you were proposing is a price ceiling, and you thought that I was talking about supply instead of resource allocation, then I mean this with no offence intended but you should study elementary economics before forming confident opinions on the subject. Society is in a vulnerable point with cost of living pressure and we don't need more energy behind these harmful populist ideas.
Price ceiling definition: a government-imposed legal maximum price
My original comment: First come first served is a better <snipped for brevity>
This is not a legal maximum price, this is a legal maximum in the derivative of price.
> I didn't mention or allude to supply at all
>> get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance
How do you square these two statements? One claims 100% supply certainty when no such thing exists in this context. Without making certain assumptions (unstated, but ludicrous, assumptions are rife in economics discourse), you can't state much of value about which buyer will get the goods in the surge pricing model, you especially cannot say that the buyer with the larger wallet will always win. Think for a second what assumptions you've made to this point in the conversation - you're still down the rabbit hole of price ceilings in the comment chain thus far.
>> The empirical history of price ceilings is there
Not disputed but as per your call out of definition above, not relevant.
To make the point further - the name for a limit on rate of change of price is not a price ceiling, anymore than the 0-60 time of a car is its top speed limit.
>> you thought that I was talking about supply instead of resource allocation
My challenge to you is to name the assumptions you've identified in your reasoning around resource allocation. I'm confident i can point out the deficiencies in your model because that is the nature of models.
>> you should study elementary economics
That's a great idea, a really good follow on from that is to identify logical fallacies you discover i. that process, especially those so accepted that it's not a stretch to say they are underpinning the discipline. A good example of that would be the conjectural origin theory of money but i digress.
Retailers are first come first serve. The first customer to buy product gets the next unit of inventory.
If you’re trying to argue that retailers need to be forced to set a retail price for each unit of in-stock inventory and then be forced to sell each unit at that price later no matter what the market rate does in the mean time, that’s an awful idea.
I’m sure you don’t mind when retailers decide to give discounts or put things on sale, do you? If the market price drops, they reduce selling price. Same thing when market rate goes up.
Forcing retailers to price things how you want doesn’t change supply and demand. It would only force retailers to add extra margin into their prices to account for the added risk of the government forcing their hand in sale prices.
What is it then? If you allow the price to increase, there is no need to enforce a different rationing mechanism. The only reason to think of implementing the alternate rationing mechanism is if the good isn't being rationed. If you insist on the previous, lower price, then that is a price ceiling in so many words, with the consequence of needing your rationing mechanism. If you allow a higher price, then your alternate mechanism is unnecessary.
The word for "monitoring market trends, anticipating needs and acting quickly" is, well, speculation. Why should a retailer not be allowed to speculate and hold more product stock when they anticipate a future crunch? In fact, the whole reason prices have become so volatile right now is that this supply crunch was not properly anticipated.
The reason why retailers are not "price fixing" is that price fixing involves setting an artificial ceiling on total production; retailers are not in a position to do this, and there is no evidence at all that DRAM makers are doing this either.
First come first serve must means enterprising individuals would buy as much as they could afford and then immediately relist it on Facebook Marketplace for the actual market rate.
Thinking that retailers could keep RAM prices low and also keep it in stock for you is irrational.
Not a claim i made
Are you just angry that retailers are making a little extra temporary profit on their in-stock inventory? Is the goal to punish them for behaving rationally and understanding basic economics?
>I'd rather reward diligence and personal responsibility - if you monitor market trends, anticipate needs, and act quickly, such as buying RAM ahead of a known upcoming supply crunch, you're rewarded with access at the original price. Rather than passive reliance on wealth to solve problems. First come first served values effort and foresight. Scarcity is managed through time and effort rather than money.
Are you really going to discount the effort made by the manufacturers to produce the product? You know, giving them money is the best way for them to produce more products. A lucrative DRAM market will also make it easier for new competitors to enter the market.
Also, if everyone does what you suggest, then all that will happen is that the price will rise extremely rapidly before the actual supply crunch even happened. That sounds like what is currently happening.
Look at how most places handled war-time gasoline shortages. Rationing coupons, purchase limits, demand leveling (like the odd-even system), price or profit controls, strict prosecution of scalpers and price gougers. And it's not like only the communists did this - even the US had most if not all of these things. And it worked far better than the shit that happened during the pandemic shortages. Governments used to know how to govern.
And it's not like the higher prices mean more money goes to the producers so they can invest in more production capacity. The price increase is spread out between every middleman in the chain untils there's almost nothing left. This could work only if the producers themselves are the ones raising prices, but then everyone else would still add their own cut, leading to even crazier price hikes, and also it's unlikely that extra profit would go to much more than lining the owners' pockets.
Additionally, demand spikes usually don't last, so any new production capacity you build will be a liability later, after the market settles down.
This is patently false. Every oil reserve around the world has a cost per barrel of extraction. At $60/barrel many of them are shut down.
If you fix the price at $60 and demand goes up, you’ll end up with shortages and producers won’t be able to fill the gap.
It is very rare to have a market of physical goods where the cost of production is fixed and supply is effectively limited. For every other market, the price needs to go up to entice investing in making more supply.
In reality, it is almost never a true binary of "afford" or "cannot afford" like critics of surge pricing make it out to be; people evaluate the price according to their circumstance and make a trade off. It is because of these decisions, the state of demand, that surge pricing is possible, not because of the machinations of evil price scalpers. That is why manufacturers couldn't lower prices even if they wanted to; gpu msrp being a great example of gpu vendors being caught between consumer ignorance about economics and the facts of reality that gpus are scarce enough to warrant higher prices.
Something like "GPUs are actually scarce" doesn't even make sense to say, since scarcity is more a function of demand than supply. The supply of GPUs wasn't exhausted because people suddenly needed more GPUs or because Taiwan couldn't produce as many of them as they used to, it was because a few rich bastards were buying into a bubble so they could make as much money a possible before it all comes crashing down. They didn't "need" those GPUs much more than even the scalpers. They were just a vehicle to make short-term profits at the expense of everyone else.
And yes, of course those willing to buy things are the ones enabling the peice gouging. But that's not a useful observation. You either need something, so you'll buy it even if it doesn't make financial sense, or it makes financial sense to buy it, so you will. Notice how scalpers also fall into that second category, along with the rich bastards draining the supply.
Putting this in view to the idea that people don't "afford" things equally: by your assumption, this implies people can indeed "afford" other non-ram things better when it comes to the more important alternatives they could buy with the ram-equivalent funds. Not only do ram-equivalent funds compete with alternate uses, but ram as a factor of production competes with other factors of production. And all factors of production compete, by way of the so-called rich bastards, for your and my dollars. In other words, if ram is more expensive, it is to support alternate uses of ram whose products are valued more highly by consumers than the direct use of ram. And, most importantly if one were to try to get around this higher resulting price for ram, it would cause higher prices for the products of those alternate uses of ram. People would be less able to get the thing they value more highly than ram because ram competes with all our needs, and less ram can be used for its indirect use.
All of that is to say that efforts to combat so-called price gouging bounds those who can less afford ram to be in a worse spot than otherwise. They can't afford ram as before, that much is true. But they prefer the alternatives to ram. If they would be better off by having ram, they would purchase that. Waving a magic wand to redistribute ram to them will give them ram, but now they lose what they valued more highly than ram.
The money OpenAI is using to starve the rest of us of RAM is coming from pumped up valuation through circular investments, investor FOMO, cheap debt and often straight up gambling. Rich bastards know that they can pump money into the bubble to grow it and hopefully cash out before it bursts. Nowhere in that process did any regular person value AI datacenters over other uses of RAM.
This is incorrect. Anything that is bound by something like TSMC production is only made scarce when nvidia realizes they could sell out the entire run at $1000/card or whatever.
They were supply limited for years during the crypto boom. The way you know it was a supply problem is that you couldn’t even buy new cards because they were so frequently sold out.
Nvidia cards became really valuable overnight in the same way as any other asset. You trying to scream at “rich bastard” buyers will not change the fact that there is a shortage of cards so the price is going to go up across all sellers until the supply and demand curves intersect.
This is basic econ in action and history is fraught with attempts to try to fix supply shortages by capping the price.
This is not true at all. It isn't left available to those who absolutely need it but to those who can pay for it. Those are two very different things.
These two exchanges are not disconnected either: phone prices are affected by revenues of companies which use ram for production. And those revenues are determined by purchases of phones. The person demonstrates through their choice that the use of ram for an indirect purpose of making phones (however indirectly that might effect it) is more valuable to them than the direct use in their computer. The person is not excluded from "having" the ram in the most general sense: they have it indirectly because they benefit from its use in production whose products they value more than the direct use of ram. The person, along with all other consumers, participates in organizing production in the manner that best benefits them, according to their needs, which may not necessarily involve them directly owning the thing.
It would have been better if people did raise prices during the pandemic for those things to prevent hoarding so I could actually wipe my ass at 2 cents a wipe instead of 1. But alas, the “price gouging” cry babies would have come out and lambasted them for “being greedy”.
Nope, governments were famously bad at this. Coffee rations and gas rations were a disaster.
(Edit: Replying here because of dumb rate limits)
>You guys are being unreasonable, we have plenty of toilet paper for everyone. Each person gets two rolls per week unless you can prove you need more until you calm the fuck down
And this is why it’s dumb. There actually was a supply shortage. You should read about it.
Toilet paper manufacturers made industrial scale toilet paper for offices, schools, public buildings, rest areas, etc.
1/3 of the entire toilet paper market for giant single ply rolls sold in bulk disappeared overnight. And that same demand flowed back into home multi-ply toilet paper that couldn’t be scaled up quickly because it came from a different mill.
Rations would have been completely stupid in reaction to a legitimate 50% increase in legitimate demand.
And no, doubling prices wouldn't have done anything. Hoarders would just hoard more because not only was supply low, but prices were increasing, so they better buy it now rather than later.
If governments actually governed, this wouldn't have been a problem. "You guys are being unreasonable, we have plenty of toilet paper for everyone. Each person gets two rolls per week unless you can prove you need more until you calm the fuck down. We're also putting the toilet paper factory into overdrive to compensate for this stupidity."
This carries the same energy as company leadership insisting that a RIF is not a layoff.
Retailers raising prices in reaction to an incoming event that will take supply away from everyone is not that.
The retail price of a product is a function of the market rate at the intersection of supply and demand. The price paid for inventory on the shelf doesn’t matter.
It works both ways. If retailers bought a lot of RAM at high prices and then the market suddenly dropped, they could have to sell it at a loss.
Some people get irrationally angry at this, but you do it too. If you bought a house for $500K and the market went up such that it was worth $700K, you wouldn’t think it was “price gouging” to list it at market rate. You’re just trading an asset for cash at the current price. The price you bought it at is irrelevant to the price you’re going to sell it for.
Just ignore the downside part of the house analogy because it doesn’t apply to this current DRAM situation where prices went up.
The key point is that if you buy something and its value goes up, you’re not going to offer it for sale at the same price you paid for it. You’re going to sell it at market rate.
Everyone does this, including retailers. It elicits angry cries of “gouging” from people who want to believe retailers are the cause of the high prices and be angry at them, but the market is big. It’s supply and demand.
Shouldn't be recycled chips too, as those were always older gens. I bought one ddr3 dirt cheap and no issues.
Today - G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 5600 (PC5 44800) Desktop Memory Model F5-5600J3636D32GX2-RS5W - $620.
Prices from Newegg.
I wonder how much price increase it takes for Apple to raise theirs.
- $25 / GB ($200 for 8 GB for the M5 MacBook Pro and the M4 MacBook Air)
- $16 / GB ($400 for 24 GB for the cheapest M4 Pro MacBook Pro)
- $12.5 / GB ($200 for 16 GB and then $800 for 64 GB more for the most expensive M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros)
and Apple's RAM is faster than PC RAM.
Are you sure about that? The M5 memory has a max bandwidth of ~150 GB/s, meanwhile there is PC memory that reaches 200 GB/s
The problem is that training these models and using these models has required exponentially increasing amounts of memory.
ChatGPT has existed for years and in those years it's userbase and model size has increased tremendously. Not to mention the fact that a lot of competitors have sprung up in the wake of GPT. Including the likes of cloud based open model hosting services.
Tariffs implemented by this administration:
"Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff
pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic
strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While
services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration
in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of
greater price pressures to come. The Fed will want to hold
steady as it awaits more data."[0]
Afraid so. Industry impact from tariffs does not require them to be applied "across the board to all components." See here[0] for more information.
With erratic massive tariff proclamations, counter-tariffs are to be expected. All it takes for companies to inflate prices is to either:
A) be provably impacted by tariffs
B) be opportunistic by being "tariff adjacent"
0 - https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2025/12/03/trump-...
Where do Europeans get their DRAM from?
If it is the same handful of companies the US gets their DRAM from, then why would Europeans pay any less? Because the EU is not engaging in the same asinine trade war?
Sounds good in theory, but in practice those same few companies can set prices for markets outside the US to be at/near US prices. It doesn't take much effort for manufacturers to set their prices at or near those of their competitors and rely on an implicit mutually assured destruction[0] understanding.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
... because tariffs are paid for by the buyer?
Importing memory from Korea to the US means the importer had to pay a tariff. Importing memory from Korea to Europe means the importer does not have to pay a tariff. The company selling the memory gets exactly the same amount of money in either case.
If a company in A sells a widget W to both the EU and the USA, such that a consumer in the EU and the USA pay the same prices even though the USA has a tariff and Europe doesn't, then the company will make a lot more profit per unit selling all their W in the EU and none in the USA.
I'm not at all sure what's happening at any given moment with the USA's tariffs on anything, given the chaos over there. But let's say W is the set of all things relevant to AI data centres. What this means is that all the data centres are now much cheaper to build in Europe rather than in the USA. Data centres can be put just about anywhere, given they're used over the internet anyway. This means that the companies selling W would have all the demand they want for W in the EU, so they could sell all of their supply of W in the EU, so they could get a higher profit margin on all of it.
I'm not sure how much DC investment money is going to which parts of the world, but I am sure that if all the suppliers stopped shipping to the USA because they could sell as much as they could make everywhere else in the world for more profit (and the same purchaser price after tariffs), I would have heard about it.
This is a case of second-order effects[0].
See this post[1] for details.
0 - https://research.gatech.edu/blind-spot-big-decisions-why-sec...
I was just about to edit my response to the GP to say the same thing. Let's explore this hypothetical situation a bit further.
Suppose there was a DRAM manufacturer named "Acme DRAM" which decided to have a separate pricing schedule for the EU reflecting the lack of insane US tariffs.
Some enterprising entrepreneur in the EU would establish a company in the country having the least US tariffs and resell Acme DRAM to US companies. Surely this would make money hand-over-fist.
Problem is, the US DoJ does not look kindly on this kind of enterprise:
DOJ also has demonstrated a growing willingness to pursue
criminal charges against companies and individuals involved
in customs fraud schemes such as the purposeful
misclassification of goods, falsifying country-of-origin
declarations, and intentionally shipping goods through
low-tariff countries. Importers of goods into the U.S.
should expect criminal enforcement to accelerate in the
coming months and years.[0]
All of this risk in the pursuit of lower profit margins by definition.
0 - https://natlawreview.com/article/what-every-multinational-co...
Re-badging is a thing that some companies do actually do, despite what the DoJ says.
> Importers of goods into the U.S. should expect criminal enforcement to accelerate in the coming months and years.
I am absolutely not a lawyer, but wouldn't "importers" be the USA residents, not the EU businesses doing the exporting?
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984629/ram-is-so-expensive-...
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
AWS, MS, Oracle, and Google demand is growing ~100% in 2026. Nvidia demand is growing ~50% in 2026. Supply isn't forecast to improve at all until H2 2026 and it's probably ~all spoken for through at least EOY 2026.
We have more and more wars, less free trade and international spirit, freedom and privacy is going down the sink, "everything is going down", and now ram is a good example of things that use to be abordable and with price going down, becoming expensive luxury good.
One could say that RAM price is just a special temporary event not related to our down trend but a decade ago major players would not have left a profitable consumer market without new actors coming to fill in.
But now we prefer restricting offer instead of increasing production...
It certainly seems clear that a purely upward trajectory of peace and living standards in the West was not supposed to last. History has its ebbs and flows, I'm sure we have a long way downhill to go, but I suspect there are peaceful times on the other side.
The profits might be used to port the DRAM to multiple foundries to gradually increase supply. Alternatively, they can shift to produce other components, like VRAM. Make the low-to-midrange accelerators with larger VRAM more available at reasonable prices.
Just speculating. I don't know silicon economics well.
I think that acted as a dog whistle for the rest of the market signalling there'd be no consequences for ripping other people off.
Also relevant: https://youtu.be/B7sB1-8jKno
(I’m sorry I couldn’t resist)
The seek time of a consumer-grade hard disk is said to be on the order of 10 ms. That's roughly the latency of a very high quality FTTH connection. Meaning that if you run a HDD rather than an SSD, a swap file in the cloud could potentially be faster than a local one (especially when you consider multiple reads/writes that could be done in parallel).
It's not exactly downloading more RAM but decently close to call it that for the joke.
I want my money back. There should be an extra-tax on all those AI companies - they are heavily responsible for DRAM costing more now.
Man it'd be great if these AI assholes could stop absolutely trashing every single part of society, the economy, and the physical planet at large.
Well...
All of it is being murdered by the AI bros. Before them it was the crypto bros. It’s one thing after the other and I hate it so much.
The prices are wild tho.
I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL
PC gaming is not "murdered", it's doing better than ever.
In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.
The inflation-adjusted price per gigabyte of RAM has dropped from $3/GB to $2/GB over the last 10 years, even including the recent price hikes.
So spare me the hysterics, your hobby is fine.
And you know what? The increased demand for compute always spurs innovation, so you'll probably get a better computer in the end as a result. You're welcome.
This is like saying "Spotify's subscriber count grew by 800% over the last 10 years. Music is doing better than ever!"
That means that yes, it will probably by more expensive than before this raise, but no, not nearly as much as today.
Silksong is playable on an 8 year old Nintendo Switch.
Hopefully this all calms down eventually. But it's hard not to feel like shit in this situation.
Benefit? The manufacturers of course.
Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be shifted to other military markets and family car production would take some time to resume.
Meanwhile you've got OpenAI buying up all the DRAM and maybe just piling it in a warehouse so no one else can have it or they figure out what to do with it. Microsoft recently said they don't even have a power source to plug the ton of GPUs they just bought into so they're also just sitting around collecting dust. What is even happening?
Bit like you could get NVIDIA Server cards before things went crazy but they’re on ancient cuda etc so not exactly as glorious as one would imagine
Why isn't some consumer protection regulator going "actually no, OpenAI, you can't corner the market for the foreseeable future"
Hell, make OpenAI pay for this shit up front. You want to corner the market? Put up the money you don't have.
It's more useful to construct multiple separate inflation measures that represent different types of people. Like a "typical renter" inflation figure vs a "typical homeowner" inflation figure. It wouldn't be hard to do and would shine a light on inequality and help explain the rise of populism in certain segments of society.
An even better measure would somehow appropriately normalize the figure by the average disposable income in each of the segments to come up with a figure that measures the felt impact better.
The figure would be negative for wealthy people (who actually benefit from inflation because of asset price inflation) and positive for poor people (whose disposable income mostly goes to rent).
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
I don't exactly agree with the numbers, but I think the basic ideas are true
So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year.
That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%.
Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.
We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today.
Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it.
Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser.
What does your math say about that?
Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.
This is some kind of fundamentally different era for the tech industry, but ...