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Comment by gvalkov | Hacker News Reader

The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on.

Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(

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> €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs

That's about 50% higher than you'd pay for retail, small quantity, off the shelf alternatives in the US.

Many vendors have limited allocation so they're sending out extremely high quotes to see who will take it. They know everyone is seeing news about high RAM prices and getting new vendors approved can be hard, so they raise prices and see who takes it.

I would recommend getting quotes from multiple vendors. Don't be afraid to push back. They might come back immediately with a lower price in this market. Also check the retail suppliers you can access in your country.

If you don't need the full memory bandwidth of DDR5 for any particular application area, the best solution is probably just to add flash storage for mostly read-only data and Intel Optane (still sold in the secondary market at around $1/GB) for write-heavy scratchpad space. The latter gives you around DDR3ish performance at a higher power draw than DRAM or modern flash, but its wearout-resistance and lower latency compared to flash still matters.

> Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs.

That's around EUR 40 per GB? That seems quite high compared to what consumer DDR5 RAM is selling for, though it being RDIMM may account for some of the difference.

I’m just working with an EDA client to upgrade their almost decade old machines to run the cadence tools…it’s grim. Real real grim. I was pricing out servers this morning with 64gb(!) of RAM for almost 20k. The machines were running now, some of them have almost a terabyte of RAM. I think the designers are just going to have to suck it up and use the slower machines

That’s about right, sadly. We were buying servers with 1TB DDR5 standard, no longer.

Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.

I got quoted $4K, $6K, and $8K for the same enterprise SSD part in three different quotes within about a week. (I normally expect this part to be $1.5-2.5K.) In one case, a storage array with two SSDs in it cost approximately the same as buying those two SSDs standalone.

When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week.

Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.

I still believe that Mark Zuckerberg would have been smarter investing all his AI funding into just making RAM fabs. Would probably have printed easy cash. Instead he's burning cash on making IG / FB less secure because of his in-house AI.

That would require having actual technological flair beyond 'buying potential competitors'

Indeed... I am starting to be convinced he's only good in terms of running social media apparatuses.

I think Zuckerberg is pretty out of touch with how people actually live and that makes him pretty blind to the actual implications of these technologies. It's too easy to become enamored of technologies and way too hard to find actual applications for them where the technology makes things better rather than just different.

Mine the miners.

> Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs

I sell used RAM in trays of 50 sticks (I physically know how much that is, I've held that many). I've had some trays sell for a few thousand dollars. Six figures for just one tray is absurd, but I've never collected enough DDR5 to make a full tray.

Micron is building a factory near me but it's years out.

The only hope here is China floods the market which would be a good or bad thing however you look at it.

Getting a few sticks today is cheaper than volume. Who wants volume has the pockets to pay for volume. It’s a rare reverse wholesale premium instead of discount.

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