2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
ign.com
ign.com
> As discussed previously, the ramp of HBM production will constrain industry supply growth in non-HBM products. Industrywide, HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given number of bits in the same technology node. With increased performance and packaging complexity, across the industry, we expect this trade ratio for HBM4 to be even higher than the trade ratio for HBM3E. We anticipate strong HBM demand due to AI, combined with increasing silicon intensity of the HBM roadmap, to contribute to tight supply conditions for DRAM across all end markets. As the memory industry is still recovering from the challenging environment in 2023, this tight supply environment will help drive the considerable improvements in profitability and ROI (return on investment) that are needed to enable the investments required to support future growth.
https://investors.micron.com/static-files/4550f98c-1054-4847...
The problem is that they need actual chips tomorrow. I fear we are reaching the point in the semiconductor industry where, in order to sustain the revenue growth propping up their valuations, they're going to have to start selling future chips that cannot possibly be physically produced.
I’m confused because this reads like a denial of basic economics. If the price is high enough, the chip will be produced for you.
Do you mean because of the production lead time, higher prices won’t result in increased production? Commodities like corn have been managing this for a long time… what’s special about chips?
What is your actual argument?
So it's more "what's special about corn". It is also fairly hilarious to claim the parent is denying basic economics and then bring up corn as an example of having successfully managed economics. If the scales were not being thumbed, and "basic economics" were in play, corn would be in very very bad shape.
In the case of DRAM, there is an incredibly long history of these gloom/glut cycles, and they have stayed roughly the same timeframes (~3 years) since the 1990's.
Almost all the ones who have survived this long are either in the same kind of boat as corn - protected in various forms from the downside - or don't increase production and get caught out until they are absoultely forced.
The very temporarily increased profit is not worth going bankrupt for - they make more money long term by being very cautious and know this.
There are a near infinite number of economic studies you could look at (and several sibling comments cite some) - DRAM manufactuers don't chase the price and probably couldn't anymore if they want to.
None of this denies basic economic theory, of course, since economic theory is not exactly "rigorous", even to the degree it could be (IE even the parts that are pure analysis of data rarely reproduce!).
Memory is just too useful now that you can use it to drive cars and write code.
In any other business choosing (2) would mean someone else swoops in and steals all your business. It doesn't look like this is at all possible for memory fabs.
FWIW - Lots of people seem to believe the "in any other business", but it turns out there are tons and tons of places it is equally untrue, even where there is near zero time or cost barrier to entry.
Which directly leads to the next big development: all the big players are investing in silicon with "baked-in" models, like [0,1]. Turns out you don't need an expensive general-purpose GPU with heaps of RAM to contain a model when you can make a custom ASIC around one specific model! Why spend a fortune on DRAM / HBM when all you need is some finetuning parameters which are easily stored in on-die SRAM?
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/08/06/amd-acquires-...
[1]: https://thenextweb.com/news/google-frozen-chip-gemini-silico...
Everyone. Open models are going to keep prices down. A lot of current models are more than usable. Self-hosting would have been an option if hardware prices get back to sane values.
The insane investments have to do with insane over-valuations, VCs involved and hence media spam on it. Chinese labs for example make do with 1% of the valuation and 1% of the resources.
Yesterday a coworker posted on a customer's Slack the specs of a box he is planning to buy to run local models. It's about 5k Euro. I am paying 18 Euro per month for Claude Pro and I'm going through a migration (almost a total rewrite) of a web app from Vue 2 / Vuetify 2 / Vuex to Vue 3 / Vuetify 4 / Pinia. I never hit the 6 hours limit. I could consider running an equivalent model on a 500 Euro machine (about 2 years of Claude Pro) but 5k is 20 years and that box will be obsolete or will have failed beyond repair (no spares) much earlier than that.
You can use the state of the art from 20 years ago for that.
"If the price is high enough" is of course technically true, but the scale of what high means in this context is important.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have a combined market share of 90% - with most of the rest being a very new-to-the-market CXMT. It is a cutthroat market which behaves like a stereotypical "pork cycle". Semiconductor fabs cost billions to build and take years to complete, so you better be damn sure you have buyers before you start constructing one. You and your competition overestimated the demand? You have to pay back the construction cost, so you're now in a race to the bottom and one of you is going bankrupt.
Ever wondered where Intel came from? They started out as a DRAM manufacturer, which dominated their revenue well after the introduction of their first microprocessors. But in the early 1980s the glut of supply from new Japanese manufacturers made it so unprofitable that they had to ditch the memory market altogether. The stories of Texas Instruments and Motorola aren't much different. And that's not even mentioning the likes of Mostek, which once held a 85% market share and was dead less than 5 years later! Oh, and those Japanese manufacturers? All gone, pivoted like Intel or died like Mostek.
So no, the three remaining DRAM manufacturers aren't going behave like headless chickens and start ordering new fabs just because there's a bubble causing a temporary demand peak. Unless those AI companies are going to pay in advance, in cash, for an entire fab, they'll just have to wait and deal with the price increase.
Chips aren't grown, for starters. They require very expensive facilities that take a long time to plan, build and start up. And ag firms are not seeing their stock price skyrocket based on the assumption that they will show exponential revenue growth every quarter, so there's no incentive for them to overbook their capacity and hope for the best. Maybe if the population was doubling every six months, you'd see something similar in corn. Prices in the real world are not perfectly elastic, and big deals are often locked in long before actual production.
It's a frictionless market in a vacuum right? No barriers to entry. You could make one right now if you wanted.
That's a classic stereotype of what an economic "expert" is going to say, while completely ignoring reality. Just because someone is willing to pay for it, does not mean, that goods just materialize. Sure, a lot of the time someone finds a way, but that is still limited by physical constraints: lack of expertise, lack of needed resources or as in this case simply lack of time.
Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not.
If you happily sell apples for $1 and see a hungry person walking towards you, must you raise the price?
I think that basic thought gets lost sometimes when people talk about shortages causing the price to increase. The shortage didn’t cause anything, some executive decided they want more money. That’s all. There’s nothing inherent in the system that requires it. Whether that’s OK or not is up to the reader, I just think people lose sight of the reality and talk about it like it’s gravity, rather than simple decision making.
if you happily sell apples for $1 and now there are VC-funded companies who need a ton of apples to produce some dubious crap and can pay you $5 per. And you are the only company selling apples.
what you should do is keep selling $1 apples to retail customers and charge corporations as much as they accept. you invest it into more apple trees and maybe subsidize the hungry people even
To be clear, I’m not taking a fully altruistic position. I’m just tired of price hikes on things, from apples to memory, being blamed on the weather rather than openly understanding that it’s a person wanting more money. “I can’t afford gas because of the shortage” - No, it was the CEO saying a number in a meeting and that person has a name. When someone is robbed we don’t say “an economic disparity caused a wealth adjustment.”
If there is demand for N chips at $X price, but you only have N/2 chips, then half the people aren't going to be able to buy them. The people who really need the chips, and would be willing to pay a lot more than $X for them, will be competing with people who are only willing to pay $X for them. You will end up getting scalping and shortages and hoarding. Since people know that there are enough people willing to pay a higher price, everyone will try to buy them at $X, even if they don't need them at all. Just buy them at $X, and immediately sell it to one of those companies willing to pay a lot more.
The market is extremely inefficient... since the manufacturer isn't charging enough, you get way too many people trying to buy them from the manufacturer.
So you find the price where the demand is N/2 chips, and everyone who is willing to pay that much will get one, and there is no profit for scalpers so the only people who will buy them will be actual companies that need them.
I don’t believe scalpers are an issue in B2B; these aren’t concert tickets being sold to the general public.
It’s clear you grasp the economic theory as it’s taught, but my comment was meant for you to question it. If someone is hungry you can charge more for food. The market allows and encourages it. But don’t mistake that for “willingness” and don’t mistake raising the prices purely to get extra money from the exchange as some inevitable law of the universe. You’re welcome to love the concept, but don’t whitewash it.
Demand is elastic. If the price of potatoes rises to $1000 / kg most people will switch to using pasta or rice for their dinner instead. There might be a shortage of potatoes at $1 / kg, but not at $1000 / kg.
If my 7-year-old computer were to die tomorrow I would've normally replace the entire thing. It has had a good life, the newer generations of hardware are a decent bunch faster, and it would be nice to get some additional features. With current RAM prices? No way I can afford to upgrade to DDR5, I'll have to get a replacement AM4 motherboard / CPU to fix it.
> I don’t believe scalpers are an issue in B2B
They are called "speculators". DRAM is a commodity and is traded no different from, say, potatoes. It's why there are companies like DRAMeXchange. DRAM module assemblers like Kingston, G.Skill, and Corsair will buy chips from whoever gives them the best deal. Similarly, anyone assembling hardware using DRAM will have stockpiled it when the AI boom became noticeable - with some almost certainly selling it off now that it has become too valuable to use for cheaper products.
My MacBook is showing its age, though. Hearing that 2027 wont be any better makes me hopeful all the vibe coders can ask for memory efficient implementations to stretch existing hardware a little further.
I've been thinking about this too. After being forced to work off a laptop with 6GB of RAM for a few weeks it made me appreciate my 32GB at home where I run Electron apps with abandon. It still seems crazy to me that we've normalized running an entire browser for a single program just because the UI frameworks are too hard/unfamiliar to the majority of programmers.
> just because the UI frameworks are too hard/unfamiliar
i take it even with ai companies will still do this, whith exhibit a being the electron-based codex app from openai...
If potatoes suddenly became $1000/kg, everyone would agree that there is a shortage of potatoes. While sure, people won't starve and will eat other things, it doesn't change the basic fact that there aren't enough potatoes.
The situation with RAM is even worse. If I'm trying to build and sell computing devices, I need RAM. Whether no one is willing to sell RAM at all, or whether they'll sell it only for 10x yesteryears's price, it doesn't make much difference to me, I'm still going out of business. Sure, that will then make demand technically go down, but not the shortage.
1) Some people won't be able to afford alternatives. They will starve to death
2) There may not be enough of other foods, so even if people have money, people will starve to death.
There are years where corn or rice or oats are of poor yield. A couple of years of that, and canned food and stored food is gone. It doesn't take long for "we have no <core staple food>", and things become bad.
This isn't a 3 month or year long blip in RAM pricing. If nothing changes, no bubble bursts, we won't see RAM become plentiful until 2035 at least. And a tight supply until 2030.
That's not a year of no potatoes. That's a decade of a core crop, with loads of calories, gone. That's "people are going to starve somewhere" trouble.
(I hate this food analogy, because in the West we've not seen a drought cause people to starve for half a century, if not longer. People are too complacent.
To speak to that, we grow crops where we get best value for the money. And best results. Corn cannot be grown in much of Canada, it needs a LOT of sun to mature, where as wheat can with a shorter growing season. Rice needs lots of water, where as other crops are more tolerant. Potatoes do well in certain soils. If there are no potatoes, you cannot just grow anything in that location.
Take away a core crop, and you can just lose those calories. Especially as farmers won't switch on the first year of a lost crop.)
RAM is quite durable, so I can imagine buying new servers with new CPUs, but instead of DDR5, it has DDR4 RAM slots. A loss of performance to be sure, but a good way to renew your fleet, and reduce the impact of all of this. But such boards aren't really here I don't think, not in quantity.
The year 1845 called, and they'd like a word
In a lottery, the goods are misallocated to a bunch of people who aren't getting the most value out of the goods, creating economic inefficiency. A bunch of GPUs would be sitting in warehouses waiting to be resold (either when the price goes up, or in the inevitable black market), or in my basement screwing around with them, instead of being deployed in a way that the most people can benefit from creating maximum economic value from their deployment.
Your gaming PC isn't as economically valuable as JPMorgan using AI for fraud detection, for example.
Moreover, if you are appointed god and force everyone to sell GPUs at one dollar just because you want cheap GPUs, then this is the last batch of GPUs that will ever be produced and you'll have a shortage until the end ot time.
There are many other ways to allocate capacity. For example, you could give preferential access to customers who sign long-term purchase commitments, or some other favourable terms. These other methods might correlate well with value to the seller and might be easier for buyers to pay.
Other methods could be "allocate to customers that you want to maintain a good relationship with." I suspect HBM is not allocated either with pure auctions or by lottery.
One of the most difficult shortages during WW2 was rubber, because there was no (known, at the time) comparable alternative.
With GPUs, rationing would have the same effect as a lottery -- you either get to run AI, or you don't.
If there was an Ozempic shortage tomorrow, it's not the morbidly obese people who "really need" it who would be getting it, it would be the Hollywood A-listers who need to drop 4 pounds for their next movie, or the billionaire who's feeling a little tubby. Price is a good allocation system, but it's important to recognize that it's not a mechanism for attaining some kind of ethically "best" allocation.
The people who really want the chips, and are able to pay a lot more than $X for them.
Please can y'all stop pretending that raising prices allocates resources by need and willingness to pay? With the level of spending power imbalance, the person who wants something and has too much money will ALWAYS squeeze out the people who actually need something and have less money. Always. No other factors are considered by the market.
That’s what makes this so distinct so it probably shouldn’t just be some offhand parenthetical at the end. It’s incredibly expensive, it takes a long time, and it’s incredibly specialized. You can absolutely forget the idea of a “disruptive startup” entering that space too.
Previously investing in that space didn’t make a lot of sense. Now that there are a lot of consumers willing to buy something they can build and sell at a price between the previous low point and the current high point.
The only tricky thing is that the current shortages need to continue until the fans are well up and running.
Even if the supply side suddenly crashes due to the AI bubble bursting or someone inventing a way to only need 1/10 of RAM, I can imagine them keeping the prices relatively high.
Building things happens a bit quicker in PRC compared to the US. If they see it as a way to undercut the US/Taiwan hegemony on the chip markets, it might even just fun to do it.
With the basic supply/demand curve, "shortage" and "discount" are synonyms and I know which word makes more sense to describe the scenario.
Normal people definition: there isn't enough to go around
Economist corollary: there is enough to go around, people are just buying more than they need because the price is low
Can you tell the difference between the supermarket put potatoes on sale and sold out, and there are no potatoes because of the potato blight?
(Other than a convenient-for-some/inconvenient-for-others "let the richest get the stuff first!" shift, and just pretending that we are all fully independent actors instead of members of a community?)
Raising prices is a way to filter for most valuable use.
This is a myth. The volume of inventory remains the same regardless of the price. When demand is higher than supply you have shortages regardless of price simply because you have unmet demand. If you raise prices, that demand is still unmet, you're now filtering that demand by who is willing to pay more so you maximize your own value and profit. Not even rationing prevents shortages because, again, the demand exists. Rationing simply tries to spread the supply around so more people get some rather than none. Price hikes instead say "who wants it badly enough?"
All demand is not equal. Some companies have very valuable business they can do with the inventory while other businesses have less valuable uses for it. The more valuable uses are willing to pay more, so higher prices means the most valuable uses get filled first.
Rationing does not stimulate investment this way.
> Now, you could raise prices to the point where you destroy demand.
You know supply and demand is like a curve right, you can find an optimal equilibrium? It’s not a cliff that you can fall off.
An airline overbooks flights. Lots of people get their flights cancelled. Takes six months for the fallout to settle where everyone who got burned booked their future flights on a different airline. 3 months out the airline has to cut the number of flights and cut prices in the face of falling revenue to reclaim market share. As soon as they do that, they're flooded with too many bookings. So they take the bookings and overbook flights again, but it takes time to bring the new flights online.
It's not a 1:1 situation. Each time you miss the market you wobble a little further until all the inefficiencies of bad predictions eat you up.
Did this actually happen though? Is there any evidence or you are just imagining a scenario which if it did happen could lead to the scenario you outlined?
Several examples can be found in lists of supply chain disasters, eg the 1995 Apple production shortfall:
https://supplychaindigital.com/supply-chain-risk-management/...
Isn't that topic .. the first chapter of any economics 101 course? Supply and demand and how they influence each other? You think after hundreds of years of economic study we don't have any sort of grasp on these absolute most basic concepts?
Nonetheless, even after all these hundreds of years of economic study, companies still make mistakes (and occasionally, commit fraud). And we still have massive economic crashes. If only everyone understood the "basic concepts", all of this would go away and we would achieve 100% economic efficiency at all times. What a pity.
Maybe you could pay someone else who is less desperate to part with some, but that does not increase supply.
Nine women cannot produce a baby in a month, even though you could average about one per month if you wait about nine months.
They need it today. Best if it was NOW!
So, another futures commodity on CME.
This is already happening with gpus, no? Tsmc and McDaniel capacity are sold out into the future. Data center that might not be needed in 1 to 3 years is where they’re headed.
…but that would be unethical.
cue the laugh track
It happens due to failed estimates (we thought we could start production in January but we couldn't figure out the process until March), upstream supply failures (our surface-mount supplier can't get us enough capacitors), or global market conditions (concrete and steel unexpectedly doubled in price and we can't afford to build the whole building this year).
It happens all the time and isn't your fault (but it is your responsibility to handle).
This is true in the ordinary course of business. But we may be in an extraordinary situation where, if the chipmakers do not overcommit, their stock price collapses today. Given the choice between blowing up now or blowing up 2 years from now, these companies may very well be choosing to blow up in the future. A lot could happen in the meantime, including bankruptcy of their customers. Which would certainly solve their overcommitment problem.
That's really interesting, and I wonder why? I believe HBM has redundant ECC bits by default, which would add a few %, but other than that, is it just that the yield is much lower due to die stacking? Of course, this is a 2024 document so things may have changed a bit since.
In order to get high bandwidth, you want memory as close as possible to the GPU. The more trace lane length = signal loss, bandwidth loss.. HBM is compact, and so you can stack 24GB modules, 8 around a GPU die.
If you tried to do that with normal memory, you need like 64 modules. So a a TON of traces more that all need to be equal length, and because so many = far away from the GPU = less bandwidth.
The issue is like stated above, its a process that waste a ton of wafers. Wafers that can make easily 3x more normal memory.
Intel with "Crescent Island" is trying to make a 160GB card using LPDDR5x memory but the bandwidth is only ~700GB/s.
The base interface die has eight or 12 memory dies stacked on top of it. The wafer cost of that interface die is therefore small.
If the process of die thinning and TSV stacking reduced yields by a factor of three, nobody would consider HBM mature enough to put into production, and especially not mature enough to be increasing stack height from one generation to the next.
Trace length has approximately nothing to do with die size. If anything, designing for shorter traces means you can get away with smaller PHYs at either end.
What might go some ways toward explaining such a huge difference in die size is that the TSVs themselves take up significant die area and must be fairly numerous to carry both a large number of signal wires and all the power and ground required by the stack. But it's wildly implausible that the die area consumed by the TSVs would be significantly larger than the die area consumed by the memory arrays themselves, or that anyone would build a memory die where the memory array was not a large majority of the total die area.
If there's any truth to that ~3x higher wafer requirement for the same number of bits as compared to DDR5, it must be a combination of several factors and probably includes something non-obvious and dubious, like counting all the area of the passive interposers that go between HBM stacks and GPUs (those interposers aren't competing for the same fab space).
What the freaking hell.
GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous.
The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad.
Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices.
I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.
The PC I replaced when I bought this one was such a huge improvement.
My options basically boils down to fixing trash that’s falling apart or a sidegrade at best for the same price as what I bought a beast of a PC for 10 freaking years ago. Depressing.
Point is, quite a lot of hardware can still do a lot. I have a Ryzen 5500U-based laptop that still outperforms the PCs of most people that I know (non-tech people).
Though in my case I feel like I have to get a loan to buy a workstation + an actual gaming PC for my wife. That all is beginning to look like at least $15k... yikes. But I am not sure I can wait until 2028 to see if things _start_ normalizing... Depressing indeed.
I agree that the current situation sucks, but I don't think one can say it locks someone on your situation out of your game collection.
(edit: misremembered, $2000 is not the price of the game collection)
It wasn't the same model or vendor MB but it was a compatible one. Same chipset.
That's actually not bad, last time I checked the only ones that were in stock cost 300+ (IIRC all x570). My plan then was to maybe get a new case and rebuild it on a micro ATX board which are generally more available and seem to have a few decent options in the ~80 price range.
Anyway, again it's a question of is it worth it spending several hundred and the time it takes to rebuild. It currently "works" fine except it takes 5 minutes to boot and is unable to save any BIOS settings like XMP, fan curves, and so on (and yes I changed the CMOS battery - there's a long thread on the ASRock forums of others having the same issue even after the battery is swapped). The non-optimal settings probably eat a few % of performance but other than that it's mostly annoyance, so it still feels like if I'm going to invest any more in it, it better be more worth it
Pick any B550 with a VRM heatsink for $90, a 5600 for $190, and you are back in business.
Get a 5070 or 9070 before GDDR supply is completely gone if you want an actual upgrade.
As for GPU price, that Vega 64 was $500 in 2018. Even a midrange GPU hasn't been $300 since the Radeon RX 480 launched a decade ago.
Same I just built a dual Broadwell Xeon E5 server / NAS. Why? Because someone local was selling a cheap Chinese X99 motherboard, two Xeons, and 64GB of DDR4 RAM for $150 CAD. The deal was too good. So I built a machine around it. (Though what I should have done was shove it into an old Dell T630/730, and saved myself some hassle.)
Now is the time of re-using old tech.
Could be less than $100 if buying used too maybe!
I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers at everything else to the point where I had swapped out CPU, PSU, and RAM, until they relented and replaced the motherboard (the replacement which is broken again now 5 years later by the way...)
Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you're buying? Use Newegg for reviews even if you buy from Amazon?
Though if a component dies due to ESD from an imperceptible spark then the manufacturer skimped on ESD testing
Steam Machine can't be upgraded.
Once SM becomes too slow for gaming it will become mostly useless as it lacks necessary ports to be repurposed into a reasonable home server. I always reuse my old PC parts as home server upgrades.
Steam Machine uses a proprietary fan that will be annoying or even impossible to replace 5 years from now.
- 2x the GPU for about the same price.
- Same power usage while in sleep.
- HDMI CEC with a dongle.
- Wake up from sleep with controller if using official Steam Controller.
- Cool and quiet operation. You can actually beat Steam Machine at noise levels under load.
- Upgradability.
- Standard parts that are easy to service and replace.
What you can't get with a custom PC is:
- Comparable size.
- Comparable support (software/firmware fixes and good warranty/service).
- Cool led strip unless you're into electronics and can make your own from scratch.
That finally starts to ease pressure... then the AI RAM boom happens and now I can't even buy memory for anything I've got and I'm trapped in 8GB baseline RAM hell.
Every plan I had to update my network, my home, all out the window. I haven't seen my Steam library in at least a year or two now.
Too high latency for Clair Obscura (and obviously Dark Souls) level reaction time. Though surprisingly passable for most FPS (I just played "Ready or Not" on it yesterday, and it was acceptable).
It's going to look a bit like oligarchs subsidizing consumer tech as they try to offload more ram than God could own.
But velocity down probably will mean a meaningful recession, so there's that.
I also think most hardware expenditures done today will lose their value quickly; as we saw with crypto, hardware manufacturers will make specialized hardware so the cost/performance ratio will go down by at least 90% within a few years, possibly more.
This isn't the condemnation of AI that you think it is.
When you are building an industry, you don't want to be in a "cash cow" phase. Because the person who is willing to reinvest profits (and further: seek and sink investments) into growth and innovation is going to eat your lunch.
~8 years ago my BIL condemned Tesla with "they aren't profitable" and I explained this to him. Now they're a trillion dollar company.
Uber tried that and failed. Now they cost as much as normal taxis if not more. Airbnb tried that and now cost as much as hotels if not more.
And tesla is a trillion dollar company on paper only. It can vanish into thin air in a day.
I'm describing business. Period. It's incredibly rare to encounter products above a fairly small revenue level (niche products), that haven't come from a company that spent significant time reinvesting profits and therefore being unprofitable. Same for using outside investment.
Yes, there are companies who have burned outside investment on things that didn't pan out.
Love them or hate them, the AI companies are doing a huge amount of research. And research companies have always cost more than they've generated in revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
And it is just one of several "business" methods that are widely regarded as abusing the rules/manipulation and regulated or outright banned.
Your AI companies are not just reinvesting profit, they are burning a fuckton of predatory investors'money to try to drive adoption, but also competitors to bankruptcy.
I don't see any advances for me, only for my employer, maybe, but it is not sure thing too.
Total imports are maybe 14%? But not as highly tariffed.
The average consumer isn't purchasing a lot of products with a lot of RAM every year.
Their 8GB of RAM phones will go up in price a little bit, but people aren't buying phones every year or even every other year.
So if the price of the 8GB of LPDDR went from $40 to $160 and it's all passed on to the consumer buying a new phone every 4 years, that's an extra $30/year in spending.
Most adults I know now use their phone for everything, so they're not buying new computers and laptops. They can wait 3 years for the market to settle before upgrading those, too.
Even I'm a heavy buyer of tech products and RAM, and I would bet you that my family's annual food bill fluctuates by more than what I've had to pay for RAM prices growing.
In the shorter term, you’ll probably see more “base” models on offer with some of the most intensive features disabled. There’s still going to be all of the telemetry stuff that makes them money through third parties though.
>Most adults I know now use their phone for everything
You mean the cloud for everything. A lot of phone tasks share their computational and storage workloads off in the invisible ether that has actual computers with real costs behind them. Amazon has no problem with bumping up their costs in order to pay for their fleet of servers. I mean, what business doesn't use the cloud these days.
Many smaller companies will have issues getting enough, but even they could buy something with memory and rip it out. When you're willing to pay a hefty multiple, you can outbid other people. The shortages are not nearly bad enough to escape standard supply and demand.
Isn’t it just… prices?
My solution is to see what four or five-year-old equipment I can buy that will let me run local LLMs. I may only get six or seven tokens per second out of an i7, but it's a start. And best of all, I can turn the machine off when I'm not using it.
IMO, Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers.
I'll second this. The combination of Whisper + LLM makes speech recognition fantastic. I occasionally have arm pain from typing, and this is a Godsend.
I don't use it to write code - but in my experience stuff like emails + docs was the greater source of pain (one generally types slower while coding).
This shift is probably inevitable, but it will vary significantly by region depending on prices for electricity. Look at, for example, the difference in fundamental homelab build recommendations between Germans and just about anyone else. Electricity prices in Germany are so high that even a now expensive Raspberry Pi or other ARM board is often preferred over Intel/AMD builds due to low power draw (especially low idle power draw), an effect that adds up for a machine running all the time over years.
With local LLMs and the GPUs to run it, especially if you want a model available to you all the time and can remote into your local network to use it whenever you want, there's no escaping much higher power draws, even at idle. Wherever electricity is expensive, the electric bill can be a prohibitive barrier.
Eg: I shaved ~40W off the idle load on a server (250->210W) by doung nothing more than removing the redundant supply
A college buddy used to work at Motorola (I'm naming the company because they wouldn't mind this story being shared) back in the late 90's or early 2000's. They had redundant power to their campus, bought from two different companies, coming in on opposite sides of the campus, so that even if some backhoe operator cut a ground-based power line somewhere, they wouldn't lose power.
And yet, one morning, the power went off all across their campus. After a little investigation, they sent pretty much all their employees home at noon and told them "take the afternoon off, don't come back until tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to do any work anyway". Turns out that although the power lines came in at opposite sides of their campus, somewhere a few miles away both of the power lines feeding their campus ended up running through the same underground conduit. And yes, a backhoe had managed to cut that conduit and break both of the lines they depended on at the same time. They had a single, VERY non-obvious, point of failure, and the backhoe had unerringly homed in on that SPoF.
LLM serving is most efficient when you batch a lot of parallel requests together. Data center solutions also have the advantage of collecting queries from around the globe, so the hardware can be utilized around the clock.
Having everyone serve their own local LLMs would produce a lot more memory demand. Not less. The same memory would be idle most of the time, and when it was used it would be used for 1 person instead of a batch of requests.
There are other reasons to run local LLMs, but solving hardware demand problems is not one of them.
It occurred to me much later that local machines could become a shared resource of a small co-op. Or it only runs off solar or energy harvested at times of excess generation (too much daytime solar, lots of wind, or overnight when demand naturally drops).
Exploring how to partition inference across many machines and shed load for idle sections of hardware would be a problem that could be solved by a community of smart people like us here
It's also resilience. I can still do AI stuff if the internet goes down.
And hand problems was an aggregate thing. first chronic pain then fine motor control and tremors. The pain flares up again if I try to use my hands too much.
I don't see the llms have me trapped like a tethered elephant anymore than the other layers of entrapment that we live with. I would argue entrapment started when we learned the secret was banging rocks together.
Or did you mean some other kind of entrapment?
And yes, running local ones actually are the best of both worlds I think, because it puts less pressure on the memory/storage needs as a whole.
> how do I do this one piece of a query in MySQL, since I'm not a MySQL DBA
Honestly for most things, the actual documentation is the best resource. I needed to learn to stop looking for solutions to my issue on various fora (like SO) and just read the primary documentation from the vendor. Have a look at dev.mysql.com or mariadb.com/docs/server
In that example specifically, it was a bit of "let me see how this works and how good it is" too.
Microsoft has a great racket going on there. Vibecode shitty, unreliable services, offer wrong information in the slop documentation, then charge an arm and a leg for premium support which, in many cases, will just be an employee regurgitating more wrong AI slop information to you.
Most recent one I bought a multi-tb hard disk, but got an old multi-gb disk shoehorned into legitimate box. Couldn't just get a replacement - had to buy one for more money since that drive's price had increased.
HP, Acer and Asus are now using them
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/china-tech/hp-asus-and-acer...
Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.
What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.
Moore's law is alive and well.
Posting instead of researching in hopes someone smarter can chime in, because I'm lazy.
1) .net app, one text field, one button; private bytes 22mb, working set 27mb
2) native app, two text fields, three buttons; private bytes 1.2mb, working set 7.3mb
Just tested
example-0.c (fits both GTK3 and GTK4) from https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/getting_started.html
Not sure if it had something to do with my env (NixOS), but either way it was a turn off since I see 20-30 MB with GTK3 which is about the size of my full-featured macOS AppKit apps.
1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.
2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.
Sounds efficient.
Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive.
Now RAM in the cloud, now you're really paying the Java premium.
Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today.
To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011.
So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.
It seems worth noting here that DDR5 RAM is faster than DDR3 RAM, and was not even available until 2020.
Were devs supposed to optimize RAM for a shortage that might come? I’m guessing you had enough foresight to stockpile RAM?
Every native UI framework I've ever used allows drawing directly to a canvas, and can have literally any visual style that can be created with pixels.
How is a new business going to compete with incumbents that buy 100% of the necessary components needed to enter the market? Is no one else allowed to compete in this market anymore going forward?
I'm sure there will be a ton of standard DDR5 sticks, but not so much from AI-only datacenters.
Even better, looking forward to having hardware like that at home for "cheap" in the future, compared to what it costs right now :)
Maybe we can get a few MI350P's out of that then :) Surely it will be easy to do :clueless:
On a more serious note, I do wonder if it would theoretically be possible to put HBM on something like CAMM instead of regular DDR? I have not done any research on this.
I hope that China makes up for the capacity that RAM producers are not willing to produce, so that the latter are sent back to the past (with no bailout nor protectionism)
(PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)
Why? High demand and low supply is very good for shareholders and make indexes go up, their goal is not to meet demand, they want exponential qurartly revunes
To me it seems like they’re just riding the AI hype out, expecting a crash after, and not willing to risk a lot of capital on someone else’s bubble.
If memory is now upstream of so many companies, then maybe a higher regulatory involvement would be appropriate (like power companies).
Specifically, and it could fix all of this, capping the max % of their supply they're allowed to sell into the AI space.
The arguments for infrastructure being managed more tightly by the government is because it's a natural monopoly that everything depends on. Memory isn't a natural monopoly, if we found ourselves in a spot where we all depend on 3 companies then that's not a law of nature, we need more companies.
Memory absolutely fits both these criteria.
As for the net public good weighing, at the end of the day the question would be if it would be more economically efficient to mass produce memory with a managed price structure (i.e. US agrees to buy X amount at $Y regularly).
Which turns into whether having an anchor buyer allows the producer to economically create (and continually run) more production capacity than they would otherwise.
It feels like for semiconductors, the planet as a whole would benefit from maximizing production to floor cost.
Granted, AI infra mania current times is an anomaly, as was internet build-out.
I put "food" and "airplane frames" in the "worth it for state intervention" category personally. Memory is obviously not food, the question is whether it is airplane frames at this point in time. Maybe? I'd give it a solid 55/45 maybe. But we shouldn't sponsor korean/taiwanese companies, so what's the plan for an American memory company?
Couldn’t intel repurpose some of its fabs (maybe the old ones?) to produce memory?
I’m no expert but… seems like an easy win?
Other manufactures like Micron do have aggressive expansion plans, but fabs take a long time to build and bring online - multiple years.
https://www.guru3d.com/story/cxmt-dram-capacity-reportedly-s...
Traded as CUSU for end-users: https://en.twsc.com.cn/enCUSU/index.html
The big three are also expanding their capacity. IMO, it seems to make more sense to sell equipments to those who could make better, efficient use of them. ASML has a backlog of €38.8 billion and is fully booked for 2027.
For the skeptical ones: Somewhere people are already being cut off from state and financial institutions without proprietary software with bundled security certificates, applications are bound to collect data on the environment they are used in (other apps) and organizations deliberately limit access to their services or cripple them without their applications (can't do things from a generic web-browser).
The words after this point make you less convincing, not more, as they only serve to confirm the egregious slippery slope of your reasoning.
My point was to make a joke about state-issued phones but also make sure it doesn't read as an absurd, easily dismissible claim, because it's a real possibility.
Or lease a laptop from Apple if faceputer's aren't as much your style.
"The original retail price of the computer with 4 KiB of RAM was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,900 in 2025)[21] and with the maximum 48 KiB of RAM, it was US$2,638 (equivalent to $14,020 in 2025)"
The M10 are over produced and only PCI-E 3.0 2x lane devices but 16GB of DDR5 is going to cost over $200.
You can do the same with USB-C M.2 adapters but the adapters cost more and eww USB for Swap, hope the device never drops.
https://www.amazon.com/GLOTRENDS-Adapter-Aluminum-Heatsink-P...
I suggest using an 1x PCI-e adapter because putting a M10 in a M.2 slot is likely going to only have 2 of 4 PCI-e lanes in use. You have to figure out the tradeoff of using a Swap on your, now very expensive as well, Flash storage that may have flashier sequential read and write speeds but doesn't have the ability to sustain random read and write performance which is what a Swap is going to use the most.
There are faster Optane drives that use 4 PCI-e lanes or even PCI-e 4.0, but they get pricey quickly, so you should just buy ram then. The deal is the 16GB Optane on an unused 1x PCI-e slot.
In any case DDR3 isn’t nearly as bad price-wise and would have much better energy efficiency than stacking 1–2 gig sticks.
For starters, The slowest sticks of DDR(x) are often slower than DDR(x-1). The issue is never capacity, but rather, performance.
The real nonsense? USB? It's a mess. Pick a USB cable and buy it from ANY retailer, let's make it easier, buy a USB-C cable. What is the data rate (depends on cable quality and length), Does it support power delivery? If so, how many watts? (~5W requires a very different cable from ~230W), how do you know from simply looking at the cable? If you buy a cable, how can you tell what it supports by simply looking at the connector? Imagine having a box full of USB-C cables. Could you tell me how fast each of those cables are? (The cables themselves don't! Many don't have any markngs at all, and if they do, the markings could be fraudulent)
RAM does not have that issue. A stick fits or it doesn't. Sure, there are a huge range of speeds, however, that range has a ballpark (JEDEC defines the ballpark, the "cartels" make the memory and push out some faster stuff).
While there are definite exceptions (I was bitten by one recently), you can generally plug in a DDR5 DIMM and expect it to work in the system.
The same cannot be said for USB. Some USB cables ONLY deliver power. Some only work with certain devices. I've USB-C (!!!) cables that only work with the devices they are shipped with, and even more annoyingly, the both may be true! ASUS (!!!) ships MOTHERBOARDS that can only pair with vital hardware via very specific USB-C cables (Strix Hive) and "GLORIOUS" ain't so glorious. Their mouses warn you not to use other USB-C cables, and they are right, depending on the make/model/generation, you can brick your "glorious" peripheral.
No, USB nonsense needs to stay far away from anything else.
Also, the reason this is a huge issue is because the memory makers are cartels. Only a few of them exist, they gang up and bully EVERYONE and nobody has ever invested money to create a competitor due to this, except China, which of course means that the U.S. and portions of the E.U. are insta-banning/trying to insta-ban, even though it is really freaking hard to install spyware on a memory module.
Okay, let's assume it's a USB-C cable and not just something USB-C shaped that pretends to be one.
> Does it support power delivery?
Yes.
> If so, how many watts?
Always at least 60W (3A). Up to 240W if it's e-marked.
> What is the data rate
Depends whether it's a USB 2.0-only cable (480Mbps) or a complete cable (20Gbps). Possibly more in Thunderbolt or USB4 modes - cables that handle those will be marked (both visually and with an e-mark). In any case, pretty easy to check just by plugging things in.
If we're counting fake products then we need to count those RGB sticks that have no RAM in them.
The last time I bought one I looked for one with a proper certificate but that eliminated the vast majority of cables on Amazon and I suspect that I ended up buying something ridiculously over engineered.
USB-C in C-to-C configurations require all the PD pins working for voltages to be supplied at all. So all USB-C cables that aren't the ones that actually don't work at all should be able to do that 20V x 3A -> 60W. Only in rare cases where a C-C cable is wired to make it look like one by being internally wired as C-A-A-C it becomes problematic since only USB-C has the config pins used for non-5V modes, but that should be actually rare.
I think USB-C shaped thing mentioned in GP refers to USB-C devices, like dollar store Bluetooth speakers and such. For those things, it's in fact not so rare that they come with tons of stupid quirks.
The can of worms is mainly in USB 3.0, Alt Mode, 5A mode, and Thunderbolt/USB4. 3A mode is fine. Raspberry Pi notoriously used a "5V 5A" mode that it's not supposed to be using.
Such cable would have to be directional, so you'd quickly realize something's wrong with it. I rather meant things like "power-only" cable, which can't exist and be complaint simultaneously. I've also seen non-compliant USB-A to C cables having incorrect/missing resistors and causing troubles.
In any case, the point was that this is just counterfeit shit to be thrown away. Take literally any other connection standard and I can also make a cable that looks like it's real but doesn't actually work, it's trivial.
You're right that it's much easier to find a USB-C-shaped shitty device than a USB-C-shaped shitty cable - and it's astonishing how little would usually be needed to make it complaint and working correctly. Since using some kinds of cables can mask some of the device's issues, people end up incorrectly blaming the cables.
Your computer already supports that. It's called "swap".
CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.
USB would be the limiter for both.
I had previously ordered from Aeonfly, but they cancelled my order--likely because they wanted to raise the price.
we would collectively all be better off by being forced to stick to older devices, value software optimized for proper resource management, and learn that instead of reflexively accepting "problems" we can see them as choices
enjoy the rat race
Reason being, a more powerful one would cost more than what I'm willing to pay (and, mostly, for fun and learning, which is priceless)
I have a minion in a terminal grinding away optimizing CPU-only LLM inference on Dual Xeon E5s. Why? Because it's neat.
Take what's currently happening to Flock cameras as an object lesson. People are so fed up with Flock that they're cutting their cameras down en masse, sometimes wiping them clean from entire jurisdictions. Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. Law enforcement doesn't seem too keen to catch them either. You absolutely can be so hated that the law will not be enforced to protect your property.
If AI companies don't slow down and build some good will, AI data centres are probably at risk. They'd probably have been targeted before Flock were they not harder targets. A higher degree of cooperation and organization will be required to sabotage them, but it would be foolish to believe it won't eventually happen.
Monopolizing memory production for another year suggests that lessons have not been learned, the mad build-out will continue, and we're headed for some truly crazy stuff.
Salmon is not too important anyway.
It seems inevitable that these lost cameras will simply be upgraded to drone fleets. Not an identical replacement, but still "good enough" for the original purposes. Had they anticipated this problem and skipped the first phase, it might have been harder to manufacture consent for privacy invasion. But now anybody who was okay with the original cameras feels like a victim having them torn down, which makes it likelier they'll be okay with drones everywhere.
> Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. Law enforcement doesn't seem too keen to catch them either. You absolutely can be so hated that the law will not be enforced to protect your property.
At least one third of the country is still okay with them, because they believe it helps rid them of illegals and deter crime, with downsides small enough to ignore, in their mind.
In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe. Capital was always in control with its crude but effective propaganda pipelines to manufacture enough consent. Now imagine those pipelines becoming even more effective thanks to AI. Not looking good.
Who cares about those people? I would argue even they themselves hardly do. And sure, they'll be even more okay with even worse stuff, and that even worse stuff will be even more hated by even more people, whatever the people who are "okay with" (that can mean ignorance, obedience, or evil intent, but it's not justification). If they can be okay with mass surveillance they can be okay with other things, so they're basically a wash, they're just okay with stuff.
> At least one third of the country is still okay with them
Then they can be okay with the majority saying you know what, we're sick of you, you can either stop having your toys or you will be segregated from us and live under your own surveillance. "Being okay with something" isn't some magical wand or a fortress, it's just a limp shrug. It means "pass".
> In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe.
I don't see the connection with the sentence before that, which is a minority being "okay with" something and a majority willing to fight and out there doing it. It's not about controlling what a minority of people are okay with, it's about changing what is done. The people who are okay with stuff can go read a comic book until it's over, how does that not solve anything you raised about them? Or are you saying their being okay with stuff should be respected or even heeded? Couldn't they just make that claim themselves, if they wanted to?
Imagine a raging house fire, people stumbling over each other trying to help, and some guy steps up and goes "WAIT!" they all look at him, sure he has a major contribution for interrupting something like this, a good idea, a plan perhaps; and he goes "... I'm actually okay with this."
It's not the majority, though. Roughly speaking, among adults, we have:
* 1/3 who are willing to vote for the red flavor of lesser-two-evils (some of them don't even register it as evil)
* 1/3 who are willing to vote for the blue flavor of lesser-two-evils (some of them don't even register it as evil, including when it literally manufactures consent for the first third to win next time around)
* 1/3 who see the above as a uniparty of capital interests offering the illusion of democracy through "close" elections as the bullshit that it is.
I wouldn't do that unless you want your airspace filled with birdshot
And if AI is putting people out of jobs and making everything expensive - or that's just the perception - that's gonna set AI back for years.
Civil disobedience? In this economy?
Nobody wants this robber baron shit
Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist.
Lose-lose situation!
What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.
What on earth are you talking about?
The credit risk was a very real problem; Kaupthing, Anglo Irish, RBS, Lehman etc.
In 2008 they didn't. Instead they actively tightened monetary policy by eg introducing interest on excess reserves. The ECB even hiked interest rates.
Companies defaulting on debt doesn't need to bring down the economy.
For the US, you can also see how the construction sector had been winding down for years (eg as measured in construction employment) without an impact on overall unemployment. The crisis was entirely avoidable.
See https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/09/14/scott-sumner/real-pr... for a bit more background.
Quick comparisons: my DDR4 ram is x2-ish (64GB - 342 -> 648 euros). my HDDs are x2-ish (22TB - 548 -> 988). A new _budget_ GPU I bought end of last year is now +100 euros (just half a year later).
Didn't bother to check the SSD since I mostly need it for the OS and they don't die that often, but that comparison should also not be fun. My current build should last till 2030 so hopefully should be okay if nothing breaks, though I am doubtful these prices are coming all the way down again. Either wait it out, pay about 50% more or lower the capacity by 50%.
The list of shortages and price _gauging_ for the last years is pretty extensive: PS5, Xbox, GPU (first bitcoin, now AI), RAM, HDD/SSD, etc. These shortages are becoming an incessant pain in the ass, on personal computing level but also professionally since replacing hardware is becoming difficult and the cloud bill will only go up too. Well at least we have not been replaced by the clankers, yet.
It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
A year ago the SOTA was GPT-5/Opus 4.1/Gemini 2.5 Pro, two years ago Sonnet 3.5.
Looking at Opus 5 for SOTA performance and GPT 5.6 Luna for a viable cheap alternative, AI is much more capable now.
Honorable mention: GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras, capacity limited to a few customers, is supposedly serving 750 tok/s.
Compared to 90 tok/s for non fast mode 5.6 Sol, 56 tok/s for Opus 5, and 190 tok/s for 5.6 Luna.
I am very curious about the next generation of models, GPT-6/Astra is rumored to launch still in August. Not sure what is the state of Anthropic's next Fable checkpoint.
If these models also deliver significant improvements, I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments.
I don’t think most people are saying it is purely a scam (well, some do but I don’t think they are to be taken seriously). What all these talks about circular financing and VC money are saying is that demand cannot sustain the sector long-term, not that there is no demand. People are certainly happy to pay say $20/month for whatever AI chatbot, but would they still pay if it were $200/month, which is closer to the actual costs.
There are several other details that point towards a unsustainable projections:
- measurable benefits from AI-ifying companies are nowhere near what is commonly believed. AI providers are hoping that they can keep the show going until the models are good enough, essentially faking it until they’ve made it, but that is not a given. It is also unstable because it is susceptible to change in public opinion.
- permits for new datacenters are not going to become easier to get as public opinion keeps turning against them. They will have to concentrate in friendly regions, which will add cost (more demand for the same location, plus interconnection for network and electricity, both of which can easily become bottlenecks).
- the electric grids are not ready for all those planned datacenters, so something will have to give. Building more and more on-site diesel generator in times where oil supply is so constrained and random is not very sustainable either.
- eventually the loans will come due and if earnings do not match there will be a, possibly severe, correction.
If we look at the historical example of the dot-com bubble, the crash was not caused by no demand. It was just caused by over-estimated demand and too much money going to a single sector of the economy. We still use the Internet, and it is still hugely important, but the correction was still severe and real people lost real money.
- Chatbot usage in $20 plans is likely nowhere close to a $200 cost.
Inference cost has come down rapidly, with reports from July claiming OpenAI can now serve all of the logged out ChatGPT traffic on just a few hundred GPUs.
- Measurable benefit: I doubt anything of value is being measured. MS Copilot with GPT 5.5 Instant processing SharePoint files? Developers using AI as a fancy autocomplete under a "I review every line" regime?
I rely on my personal value judgement, based on 30h/week I spend using AI outside of my regular job.
I am developing a mobile app, competing with companies with millions in revenue and entire dev teams. I know it is viable. Others lag in effective adoption, their opinion is likely to change soon with even more capable models.
- data center projects in the US: They look to me to mostly be constructed in the most remote backwater. If even there projects with such moderate environmental impact cannot be realized, that would be an embarrassing policy failure
- the grid: I think that one is true. AFAIK the constraint would be gas turbines, not diesel, and oil supply is not structurally constrained
- the loans: Anthropic is rumored to have become profitable earlier this year because of large growth in enterprise revenue. It does not look so bad to me
To add to that, as an ex-software dev that mostly works in a semi-unrelated field now (and can only code as a small part of my job): I think a lot of software devs are underestimating what someone with reasonable technical skills and specialised domain knowledge is able to create with AI.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if, in 5 years' time, the majority of software used by (e.g.) potato farmers was primarily created by other potato farmers. The code might still be less elegant but I think it will be easier for the potato farmer to iterate with an AI than outsourcing to a dev firm.
I have little doubt that a competent potato farmer could possibly implement and sell such software today using Opus 5, Fable, or 5.6 Sol.
Now what I am going to say next may sound a bit crazy, and it is outside of my area of expertise. I hear the recent mathematical breakthroughs made by GPT-6/Astra are field medal worthy discoveries.
What if the current trajectory of improvement holds for another year or two?
Is it impossible that LLMs gain superhuman ability to reason over a large number of constraints so that they can make novel breakthroughs unimaginable to us today?
What I hope to see in five years is not potato farmers writing software, but programmable immune cells that safely kill cancer.
Perhaps I am an optimist.
It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).
> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.
As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.
> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]
I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.
Obviously I need an SSD setup for security cams feed recordings. Just wondering are there any such things to buy sooner?
Besides the AI craze, to me it sounds kinda reasonable. Most large buyers (apple, public clouds, OEMs) do forecasting and orders in advance, right?
AI grows and grows and becomes god and kills us all.
How did it all start? Oh we invested all our money in AI.
Part of me also thinks we need to stop this. How can we have a democratic society when only billionaires have access to computing equipment?
We rewrote all our Python code in Go because the RAMs too damn high!
I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something.
To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs that were producing legacy DDR4 are still producing it, just selling it higher and surfing on the consumer price increase of DDR5. As DDR5 became more expensive, people looked to build old AM4 PCs with the older memory, and the market just raised the price so that option would also cost more. IMHO DDR4 price increase has nothing to do with production.
There shouldn't be much issue converting those 16nm DDR4 fabs to DDR5, it's really just an issue of swapping out the masks. That's assuming they haven't all already been converted years ago.
Even when there isn't an overlap, moving to the next process node usually isn't so much about replacing machines, but adding more machines. To oversimplify, you might not be able to convert one older DDR4 fab to DDR5, but sometimes you might be able to convert two older DDR4 fabs to one DDR5 fab.
Such conversions might not be the most cost-effective option in the long run (that unmodified fab could have kept selling DDR4 for years), but conversions might be significantly faster than building new fabs.
Like everything related to it being a clean room; All the logistics robots which move wafers around; All the machines that deposit layers of material like CVD/AVD/Sputtering; The various machines that do the actual etching; The furnaces; The inspection and quality control equipment;
Also, absolutely everything to do with dicing and packaging. But that's usually already at another factory (often a completely different company) due to how process agnostic it is. Same applies to growing and prepping the silicon wafer.
The inspection and quality control equipment is one of those that you can't just reuse without careful transitioning. DDR5 has much higher speeds, on-die ECC and all sorts of complications DDR4 doesn't have.
At least with logic ICs, they either testing/QC/bining as part of packaging (before dicing), or even have factories that specialise in just testing/QC/Binning. Such fallacies need to be flexible enough to deal with thousands of different IC designs, and there is no reason to tie them to a given process node.
I guess with memory, there are only three-ish designs (DDR, LPDDR, HBM), so maybe it does make sense to integrate testing/QC/binning into the fab.
But I doubt they would have any trouble switching it out.
packaging before dicing? That makes no sense.
That plays out in binning, and it involves even design (laying out dies on the wafer such as the imperfections produce still usable ones, perhaps with some stuff disabled or running on lower specs).
So, there is some sort of QA at that point (seeing how bad the bad dies are), which also feeds into adjusting following batches.
DDR5 is already more complicated at that step. As I mentioned, it has ECC on the die and all other sorts of complications. A clean reuse of a DDR4 process seems unfeasible. There's significant investment needed for DDR5 even for what you consider "dicing".
I'm posting this from a machine that uses DDR3 and is still perfectly capable of meeting my needs.
DDR5 fabrication requires a sub 15mm process, much more complex mounting and lots more testing equipment. It means you can't just quickly convert a DDR4 fab to DDR5.
It was meant to explain that DDR4 price increase has nothing to do with supply chain lanes, and it's more of an artificial demand manipulation than anything else.
There's no evidence of anything artificial here, except to the extent that the data center-driven demand could be called "artificial". When prices for DDR5 go up, it's only to be expected that this induces demand for DDR4, the spillover from people who were priced out of DDR5. Much the same principle that rent control advocates stumble on: "affordable housing" is mainly a consequence of more housing, rather than something to target directly.
I'm sorry. Can you summarize that part in a more concise phrase?
I built a new gaming PC with DDR4 two months ago and it's pretty great. For servers RAM speed usually matters even less.
Not sure if that's what you've meant...
surely they cant doing the same for 2028 right ??
Nothing prevents wholesalers from selling their memory or memory futures at a loss, as that is a risk that is justified by equal possibiltiy of the memory appreciating in excess of inflation.
https://www.polygon.com/ram-manufacturers-sued-supply-price-...
SK Hynix's suppliers are also under investigation for anti-trust behavior in South Korea.
https://en.sedaily.com/society/2026/05/29/prosecutors-raid-s...
Game: Just buy up all the RAM...