Sony halts memory card shipments due to NAND shortage | Hacker News Reader

Sony halts memory card shipments due to NAND shortage

techzine.eu

82 pointsmethuselah_in32 comments

A moments silence for Memory stick... Yeah that should do it.

I feel like all these hardware shortages will supercharge 2nd hand electronics and their refurbishing from repair specialists.

For many years I had been advocating for Linux distros to optimize for lower spec machines as their life times got extended. Best case, you head off potential hardware end of life, worst case you allow newer hardware to run more effciebtly. The latest shortage I didnt see coming, but it would have helped out regardless. Keeping old hardware going is vital nowadays, need to end the mind set of disposable goods.

Might even bring back some value to those _westerners_ who are still hooked into the nostalgic scene -- have you made a trip to Akihabara district lately?

2nd hand is up massively already. Built a ssd nas with eBay parts in mid 2025 and everything is up 100ish percent

Only 100%? I'm seeing SSDs going for about 400% what I paid in 2024.

Old 2nd hand enterprise drives on ebay have seen pretty modest increases.

Actually just went through my purchase history and its even lower than I thought. 37% inc versus May '25.

Pretty niche crowd that is down for building a NAS out of drives that have had long lives already. Basically only people with grasp on zfs redundancy & willingness to accept the risk of SSDs with heavy use but enterprise endurance.

Didn't OpenAI cancel a bunch of memory orders? Seems premature to announce this as there soon will be a glut of memory in the market.

Source?

I've seen this going around on social media but not on reputable news sites.

Coincidentally, the SK Hynix US IPO has been announced: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sk-hynix-files-co...

top signal if I've seen one

I think that is misinformation caused by circular logic. DDR prices stopped risking, simply because supply reached equilibrium vs demand and willingness of customers to overpay. The Micron stock price also had minor correction. Suddenly internet is full of articles how it is all caused by TurboQuant release or OpenAI giving up on its huge wafer orders.

Looks very similar like attempts to explain random crypto price changes with any (un)related news.

Am I wrong that essentially what OpenAI tried to do is to short squeeze the memory market?

What happens if they decide to dump all the stock they don't actually need anymore?

Will half the memory industry run into the ground because of the oversupply means their current production is unsellable?

The term I would use is "corner", as in "silver" and "onions". But there's a couple of distinctions:

- supposedly buying for their own use, rather than reselling

- bought as forward, rather than spot: much of what they've ""bought"" is a commitment to buy memory that has not yet been manufactured

> Will half the memory industry run into the ground because of the oversupply means their current production is unsellable?

They've seen that coming, this is why there isn't a massive expansion to meet the demand rise and instead they're letting "demand destruction" happen. A decision vindicated by the war, as well.

> supposedly buying for their own use, rather than reselling?

Do we know what they're using it for? I mean not reselling would imply the chips go on some OpenAI specific proprietary hardware directly, rather than it being sold back to OEMs to buy more GPUs or other off the shelf accelerators.

> They've seen that coming, this is why there isn't a massive expansion to meet the demand rise and instead they're letting "demand destruction" happen. A decision vindicated by the war, as well.

If you're a memory company, this sounds like making the best of a bad situation. not making more stuff despite demand far outstripping supply, just to prepare for the potential oversupply your customer can cause because they can walk back on their massive order.

I thought they were buying it more to keep it out of the hands of their competitors than any other reason.

OpenAI is not the only buyer. If they canceled, Google/Microsoft/Apple will pick it up.

And there is another incoming tidal-wave of compute demand from all the vibe-coded apps that everybody is making now.

This will create a CPU shortage too.

Is this how globalization ends?

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565075

No big loss here: Sony memory cards have always been massively overpriced.

The AI corporations owe us money. I fail to see why we all have to pay more due to these greedy companies - they should pay us compensation money for driving up the prices here. In particular the US government is helping drive these prices up as well - not just due to AI situation, but also due to destroying part of the energy supply lines via its bombing of Iran as well as stock market manipulation. A mafia is pillaging all of us here.

How else will we be able to write these HN comments if data centers are not there to help us? By typing on our keyboards character by character? [1]

[1]: https://x.com/sama/status/2033935276079510011

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