Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?
Compared to what though? It's not nearly as horrible as it used to be, and you can do it fairly neatly today, and end up with something much better. Requires you to actually have skill and knowledge about there being other alternatives to Electron though, which seems like knowledge hard to come by these days.
It claims fp8 and fp16 has had higher throughput in the cloud since 2023.
fp32 and general computing still has more compute than personal computers.
And that memory is at the crossover point, but at this point only 10% of memory is going to personal computers, so the next few years will radically change the pc to cloud memory ratios.
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8733239a-328b-4aaa-8d76-0...
Anyway, all of this made me a (tiny bit) sad. It is the gradual end of general purpose computing you own, and the start of everything just being cloud compute that someone else owns and you rent.
Most compute loads are bursty. Most PCs and phones sit idle almost all the time. It's an inefficient use of capital. In the cloud you can be idle and then suddenly command 1000X more power than any affordable PC could ever have... for 10 seconds... then be idle again. Those kinds of work loads aren't possible to realize on a PC without massively overbuying hardware.
I'd like to see more research on secure private cloud computing. Homomorphic encryption has gotten better but is still very slow, but there's other approaches that can help quite a bit but don't require much of a performance hit. Look into secure multiparty computation, reversible anonymization, etc.
I don't think personal computing will die, but I think it'll go back to being a hobbyist and pro thing like it was from its birth in the 1970s up until the middle 1990s. In the 1980s the average person did not own a computer, or if they did it was just to play some games. The average person was not loading BASIC programs off bootleg tapes and calling BBSes.
BTW I've been thinking a lot lately about how AI could save personal computing by allowing us to create an off-ramp from the present rats nest of complexity to something saner and simpler. Just thoughts right now but it's interesting.
It's sort of like what I say about self driving cars. Are they better than good human drivers? Not yet. Are they better than bad, drunk, or texting drivers? Yes.
LLMs are already better than bad coders and honestly most coders are bad coders.
Being able to automatically generate large quantities of code that is worse than a good human programmer can produce is not helpful in this world you're envisioning.
At the same time you are at the mercy of whoever runs the cloud, they can spy on your data or even manipulate your workloads, they can renegotiate the terms of use at any time - including price hikes or booting your from their cloud at any time.
A few thoughts...
(a) There've never been more general purpose computers than there are right now. Spec progress may stall for consumer products due to the price increases, but the demand for workstations is not going to go down that much; they're critical items to get work done. Many are hoping this means a return to memory efficiency; the 8GB Macbook Neo is a good sign that this is something Apple believes to some extent also.
(b) We've arguably been doing this since the 90s. A website (especially in the days of the heavy backend and more passive client) is cloud compute that someone else owns. You rent it by paying them in the form of looking at ads...
(c) There are a lot of companies and people working on making sure you have every chance to run your AI locally. It's surprisingly good now and keeps getting better. At some point we'll see the same oscillation that we always do from thin client to fat client as the latency advantage of working at the edge starts to win out. How long until I have a laptop with a Talaas chip in it running a basic local model at 16000 tok/sec that is just good enough to use A2A to reach a more powerful agent running elsewhere if I need it?
2. Say it's infeasible to have enough compute locally to do basic tasks
3. Force usage of centrally controlled, subscription-based cloud software.
4. Capitalism win???!
Wrt. the memory efficiency - considering that AI is going to be the main workload by far and thus will vacuum in majority of the available optimization resources - be it humans or coding AI - i think it will be even less chances that any meaningful resources will be spent on optimizing on the fringe, ie. the users' OS/browser/etc.
But in the real world, haven't we got to see whether all this investment will pay off? What happens if it turns out people actually don't want to pay for this?
The companies go bankrupt their stuff is sold for pennies & investors loose their money.
The now super cheap stuff might get reused for something else, that is actually profitable. Or will just get dumped, like many unprofitable or never finished lines from the railway mania days.
Once everyone has to pay enough for the usage to just break even, it's going to be a shitshow. And what's worse, they'll have to make up for all the debt they're accumulating now, so even pricier.
Basically, individuals will only stay at the current massive discount. Corporations that are paying token costs right now are dialing back as they realize it's not worth the expense.
We are going to have an AI crash, and the only thing left are going to be the efficient on-device or local models, which are already starting to bridge the gap.
It makes zero sense to rebase your mental model of the tradeoff between RAM versus developer time because of a temporary shortage.
In a few years time you’ll look silly for having wasted developer time on lowering BF memory consumption, while your built new features and waited for supply and demand to rebalance.
It's the price you pay for having an application delivery platform that also needs to be hugely sandboxed running one of the most difficult languages to run efficiently in such large amounts as so the plaintext minified versions are a dozen megabytes in size.
I don't envy browsers even slightly, peoples expectations of them are ludicrous.
The major problem is that nobody is genuinely looking at using more efficient languages, lessening the amount of required inefficient language use or gasp producing native applications. (which, is definitely an order of magnitude harder to produce, I'll grant).
Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
Overall I have made very good experiences with long hardware warranties. Soldered RAM on my ThinkPad died once and I got an entire new mainboard after almost 3 years (it died 2 months before warranty expired.) New one still works today but the hardware is just too old.
I’d say on average DC PSUs are vastly overspeced for most machines. Most machines we work with are not sitting at peak load 24x7, and might be drawing half or so of their max rated power draw. Plus every server is redundant - so the modules themselves are operating at around 20-40% of full rated capacity most of their life. The only time they ever spin up past 50% is during power maintenance or a power failure of some sort that brings one of the redundant power sides down.
They do probably operate in slightly hotter conditions on average, but in much more stabilized temperature environments. Plus of course 24x7x365. But that goes for all components.
I’d say other than fans, failure rates in the PC world vs datacenter world are relatively comparable it terms of what fails most. Dust and temp swings are the large variables the average PC needs to contend with vs the datacenter.
Storage of course is the one that stands out the most - everything else is kind of a rounding error. Here though, datacenter work really does beat on the hardware more than most consumer gear so that’s expected. For every 100 disk swaps we do, I figure we do about 2 or 3 power supply modules. And maybe 1 fan swap.
The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.
...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.
I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.
Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.
But I've seen plenty of other failures:
- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.
- One GPU, replaced under warranty.
- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.
- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.
- Several case fans.
Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.
After the second, HP replaced all that we had from that batch.
HDDs fail every 3-6 months, there's a lot of them (3-4PB).
One PSU.
One CPU/motherboard. (I let the HP engineer handle that one.)
One NVMe drive.
Somewhat recently, Firefox implemented memory testing in their crash reporter and found 10% of reports were due to bit-flips[0].
If it weren't for reading that HN thread, I would never have being prompted to check and find the faulty memory in my laptop. It would have gone undetected and continued to corrupt whatever was stored in the affected cells. I did run memtest86 not long after I bought the laptop, so sometime between running that first memtest86 and the 12 months after, it developed the fault.
Non-ECC memory sometimes fails and there's a good chance you'll never know.
I think over the decades I got one RAM disk fail. And another one didn't fail but, although I bought a pack of four sticks (2x x2), was detected (by memtest, when building the rig), as having another model name than the three others: even the shop who sold me the RAM was confused (don't know how that happened).
The usual component that I've seen fail the most would be the PSU? (before I started buying quality ones). One NVMe drive (an "ADATA") died on me even though it was nearly new.
PC assembled with quality parts usually last a very long time.
Common scenario:
200 PCs at least 6 years old, often over a decade old, come in on pallets.
We pick up the first 50, stack them on benches, and power them on.
At least 10 wont post.
Of that 10, reseating memory and other little jobs fixes 5.
Of the remaining 5, replacing or removing memory gets 4/5 them to post.
Testing those sticks in other PCs confirms the RAM is dead.
Into the scrap it goes.
The remaining PC is dead mobo, PSU or needs a new CMOS battery.
Memory seems to fail pretty commonly overall, less common than harddisks but more common than motherboards.
The issue is that I'm used to using ECC ram, which fails loud when it's actually bad.. consumer memory won't tell you unless you can't boot.. and everyone disables the startup memory testing too.. (in fact, I think it's disabled by default for the last 10 years because people want to boot quickly).
The only thing i've never seen fail is the Case lol. Air cooler too if you don't count the fan.
I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pulled the trigger if not for the delivery date that was almost 4 months out. Sale lost. I suspect a lot of people are like me right now and we'll start seeing significant drops in consumer spending on electronics the next 2-4 years minimum.
I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.
Buying out of money puts with expiration a few years out on AI adjacent stocks should do the trick
"It's the same thing, Michael! It's the same thing!"
"Oh no, when you apply scrutiny to my bullshit I get punished! That means the game is wrong!"
Wasn't the whole idea that people can invest arbitrary amounts to companies by buying their stock, making investing more efficient?
How the hell did we get from that to people using it for outright gambling with shorting ??
We can come up with a formula what "tanking financially in a few years" actually means
Let me know if you're interested in moving forward
I believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).
AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)
The next leap in performance will come with next leap in price tiers.
I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.
If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.
I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.
I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.
Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.
Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.
So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.
I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them.
Both the 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP are deep into diminishing returns territory regardless, however. Aside from some extreme niche workloads like LLMs I can't imagine needing anything more powerful. They both have a ridiculous amount of headroom for the overwhelming majority of anything most people might want a computer for.
Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri.
Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case.
After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.
It runs Factorio and Zelda BOTW, why do I need more? :)
My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.
It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_FM_GenerativeModels
How I love modern software lol
It’s telling the software cycle is a scam, when new major software versions slow perfectly fine machines with zero value added features.
Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.
Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...
Nah. Adding more features to software doesn’t make software run slower. The problem is that software developers only optimise enough to make it run fast on our own computers. Because we keep getting new computers, we get lazier over time and software gets slower.
Electron is the most obvious example of this sort of thing, but examples are everywhere once you start looking.
Apple also seems hellbent on fully utilizing all available space on the low end model. IOS+ System Data is about 30GB.
The original iPhone had a 4GB model and had space left over for the user to use!
Yes. Microsoft is scrambling at the moment because the macbook neo only has 8gb of ram and runs great. Windows 11 can't compete on that hardware because it's so bloated.
I find it strange given microsoft made windows 3.11, which ran fine on computers with just 4mb of ram. Windows 11 is of course more complex than windows 3.11. But not so much that it should need literally 2000 times as much ram.
In some ways, the memory apocalypse is a great thing. The windows start menu should never have been made in javascript and react. I'm hoping our industry uses this as a push to make our software small and fast again. If ram is 5x more expensive, we should aim to make 2gb of ram be more than enough for regular computing tasks.
I suspect if we graphed them, they’d pretty perfectly match the computers that were available. Ie, I think windows is optimised just enough to run on the low end hardware of each generation.
To be more precise, the phones weren’t slowed down to keep the batteries from failing, they were slowed down to maintain stability and stop random crashes. As batteries age they lose their peak voltage capability, so you’re basically undervolting your components unless you slow them down.
As an aside, I have this lovely tower from France, barely used, scrap price should be very high. Priced to sell?
When I build a PC, I pay a little extra because I want it to last a long time. I aim for 5 years, and in reality it usually ends up 7 years (life happens, need the money, etc).
I am now in year 8 of my current PC. I only had money to replace it this year, and am now stuck with it due to the RAM prices. It's going to really suck for me if my RAM fails in the next few years.
The cost of the prebuilt is now lower than today 5090 price.
The PS5/Xbox Series console generation is supposed to be wrapping up soon even though it barely feels like it got started. I don't sense there's appetite for more powerful consoles anytime soon (I don't believe the PS5 Pro made waves like the PS4 Pro did), and jumps in console performance are what determine when games start targeting higher system requirements. So I like to think I can get a good number of years of use out of this.
The problem is I also operated under the prior "storage always gets cheaper over time" and was right at about 80% full when all this insanity hit. I'm now at 90% on my largest ZFS array (~280TB) of spinners... and I get to decide if I want to drop a few paychecks on the next vdev upgrade, or start deleting things.
Not to mention I've been holding off replacing a bunch of old 1TB SATA drives (19 years old now!!) as my scratch partition, as I was going to wait until 8TB SSD got really cheap and just buy two of them for a RAID1 for the use. And now I need those drive slots to upgrade the mass storage pool.
Talk about backing oneself into a corner at the wrong time!
GPU probably not a terrible idea to pay the $20 for those aftermarket insurance plans. Do they even pay out though?
What a producer will do now is hedge their risk. They do this by forward-selling their product, in this case oil from an oil well. The peak for spot prices, depending on the particular flavor of oil, peaked at >$170/barrel while future prices (which are the prices we see) didn't really get above $100 while long-dated futures were significantly lower, rarely exceeding $70/barrel by much.
Now this is a problem because there's no incentive to invest in extra production when you can only sell it at $70/barrel, despite the spot price being up to $100/barrel higher. So new wells and new production in general is down despite the supply disruptions and high prices.
I imagine RAM is in a similar position. It takes a long time to bring on more supply and suppliers don't expect those prices to last. Likely a large amount of new supply will probably cause the next crash in the boom-bust cycle.
But there's another problem with all this. A lot of existing manufacturers are switching from DDR5 (and soon DDR6) to HBM because it's way more profitable and there's seemingly insatiable demand for high end GPUs. I expect that in the short-to-medium term we're both going to see no increase in supply and the DDR prices are going to keep rising to the point where in a year we'll probably look back on current prices fondly
All I can say is I'm happy I upgraded my laptop to 64GB (for $200) and my PC to 64GB (also for $200) last year. .
Nobody is "switching" old process node fabs to new processes, they just aren't building new fabs for old processes.
AI and high density tasks will use memory fabricated with newer processes, freeing the old supply for more elastic, price-sensitive tasks.
The vast majority of memory that has price impacts for most consumers isn't in personal computers, it's in embedded applications that were also impacted by the overall squeeze.
The memory cartel would be crazy to actually invest into new capacity at this point.
If they do diversify, they are compromising a key policy protecting their homeland, it makes no sense!
Trump did do the initial deal though, but TSMC had to cough the money up for that
TSMC wouldn’t put tens of billons of dollars in irreversible investment just to virtue signal, the scale is too large
You can’t “undo” a fab
"In the AI era, technological competitiveness alone is not enough and the ability to supply the required volume at the exact moment customers need it is the ultimate competitive advantage," SK Hynix said in a press release. "We reached this investment decision after a thorough review of market demand."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/sk-hynix-to-invest-3...
Facility buildouts will continue at their own pace, independent of current market demands.
They also took quite some time to decide to ramp up, as this comes a year or more late after they announced they were fully booked for 2026 and 2027.
And, their stock sold off on the news, so investors are not having faith either on the demand to justify capex expansion.
Honestly, it sucks to be a ram company, you are either buying into the hype and then spending years losing money, or you don't and leave a lot of money on the table while competition ramps up and eats your lunch (and then spends years losing money)
"Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own."
https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...
Also, when OpenAI's new device comes out, would people shift to talking to these small devices?
Jokes aside, I've been extremely frugal with memory in my latest project, in the hope that it can fit in a few megabytes of RAM. But we have come a long way since the eighties, and now an audio codec (OPUS) takes the best part of a megabyte, and so do "frugal" scripting engines such as Lua and even SQLite \o/.
I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.
Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.
R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.
When taking the resale value of used kit on the second-hand market into account, one must also take into account the hassle of selling on the second-hand market.
For me? Personally? That hassle absolutely eliminates any money I would get from any plausible sale price. If I'm getting rid of used kit, it's going to be as donations to people I personally know who will come and pick it up at the agreed upon time.
What I have is still fine, though I do regret cancelling now.
Apple has been raising prices on Macs and other products.
So basically utopia. ;-)
(2) If you're WD, Seagate, etc. you may shift all your fabs to higher growth areas which means you create less supply for less demand products (spinning disks)
Your great-grandparents had like a 40% child mortality rate. You’ll be ok that some people around the world are fighting which has been a human constant throughout all of history.
The world is still a horrible place for many people, and there's no real reason why it has to be that way.
Oh, right.
Yet… violence has plummeted world wide and there has never been a safer, healthier, more prosperous time in human history.
But, you could understand the hedonic treadmill, read some history books… OR… cry about it into your thousand dollar smartphone.
Check the price of food. Also, check what the price of a movie resolution film camera cost 20 years ago and realize that you're getting that in the price of your iPhone. Plus of course the corresponding computing power.
> but steak is up 30% from a year ago.
Well that is an extremely specific cherry pick.
The quality, safety, comfort of low income housing in the United States is exceptional in historical terms. The fact that you CAN be anything you want is an unheard of concept even 60 years ago.
The worst cars on the market today are modern marvels of engineering compared to decades ago. Let alone throughout the history of the country.
College, lol, you literally have a secured loan to do study whatever you want with absolutely no required direction from anyone else… to receive the worlds knowledge if you want it.
Oh, things are more expensive? Yes, they’re massively higher quality and larger.
You’re mad about things, OK. They’re objectively the best they’ve ever been. This is indisputable, but again, I get that you WANT to be mad.
I don't WANT to be mad and that shows you're arguing in bad faith. I want to stop checking my bank balance before I buy toilet paper and paper towels. Life wasn't like this until very recently... We're destroying the middle class and making home ownership virtually unaffordable. The average first time home buyer is 40. The economy is not healthy and has not been this disconnected from the stock market since probably 2007.
The typical relative privation argument trap
I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...
The possibility that these fail does concern me.
Sure, some imaginary perfect market would drop. This one is far from perfect, and it may drop by marginal percentages. It won't drop back to what it was before it went up 4x in price.
I would be very surprised if a market for older, superceded chips takes off, not because it isn't a brilliant idea, but because in order to use them, you have to make boards and systems which can consume them, and right now, the people who do that for a living are making a good living selling stuff as inputs to the people making a good living selling memory at inflated prices to the AI factories.
It's turtles all the way down.
This was not created by the manufacturers.
Samsung said they were “moderating demand” which doesn’t sound like they want this problem to be solved either.
So a lack of builds coupled with AI boom at the same time created a perfect storm with no new capacity coming online for years after demand rapidly escalated.
...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing...
That's not a long history of pricing fixing, just accusations.
https://chipletsummit.com/proceeding_files/a0qVV0000032cp3/2...
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/money/general/apple-s-cxmt-memory-...
I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is.
Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#202...
Is it worth the cost? Yup.
When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.
Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to bid for the limited supply. Sucks for other buyers, on the other hand it ensures demand destruction, i.e. that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most, other buyers will delay their purchase and do with what they have.
They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.
You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.
If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.
> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.
It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).
https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2026/01/20/samsung-sk-h...
Big manufactures have absolutely cut production of lower margin products and it's not like they can re-purpose all of the equipment used for it for HBM yet. edit They can definitely focus more resource because of it on HBM though.
Things have improved a bit since govts are starting to get angry.
Tldr; no one is cutting the production of high margin stuff, but low margin stuff can go and die, because it's not a free market it's a stock market these companies want to show off better margins in every unit there is no reason to keep inefficient things running when not doing it pays more.
They just don't want 30-40% margins anymore. That is not free market that is quite literally serving their own interests because they know there is a monopoly.
All big memory manufacturers are heavily supported by the govt, that's what has made them the monopolies they are Micron supported by USA (they crushed Japan's memory industry for it), and Korean giants are more tangled up with the govt than well most people in US would realize.
Somehow people think free market means anything goes, which honestly is where we stand today so I don't blame anyone.
But using govts to crush competitions and build yourself up on subsidies and similar isn't really free markets. China hasn't been able to grow a significant memory chip industry yet because of lack of EUV machines and similar technologies blocked by the US, which is also not "free market".
As for WD, and Sandisk separating I feel like this was more mutual and they new HDDs or SSDs being together was a distraction for both. Which feels more strategic, think of it like this, the shareholders who had the shares how hold shares in both and together they might have likely been worth less so shareholders made money.
Aka good for free market. I don't see how that relates to the actual memory crunch issue more broadly.
...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.
That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.
And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.
The fix is regulation - we are going to have NOT-FREE-MARKET electricity, NOT-FREE-MARKET water supply, .... for vital services.
I'm not talking about you, it's funny to see anti-regulation HN complain about a FREE MARKET working as such. Suddenly it's not so fun where you are at the losing end of the free market when it turns out some are willing to pay way more for RAM than you are.
Will you die without it?
Will your life as you know it end if your next phone has 8GB instead of 12GB?
I call total bullshit on that. I need more.
And why in the world should the government force tax payers to subsidize your extraordinary computing needs?
I'm amazed you could write this in apparent seriousness.
A Mac with 8GB of RAM is blazingly fast for any task your average person would need for it to do. Which doesn't include gaming, mining crypto, or heavy AI models.
Maybe I've missed something? So please tell me exactly what task requires more than 8GB of RAM which is so necessary for the average citizen that the government should subsidize it?
We can go in circles about how developers need to optimize their applications, etc but truth of the matter is that 8GB is considered pretty low for a lot of "average" use cases. MacOS is an exception to the rule and even 8GB on MacOS is limited with multiple Electron apps.
MacOS is not limited in any way for the needs an average citizen has from computers. The average citizen is even fine with an iPad. 8GB is considered "low" by people here, just like a 170 horse power hatchback is considered "low" by muscle car enthusiasts and mining companies looking for dump trucks. But those uses have no bearing on reality for most people.
Ah, a motte and bailey argument! I always love those.
The most absurd argument is that any consumer would need more than 8GB, when it is proven beyond all doubt in physical reality that 8GB gives you extreme amounts of power in for example an Apple device - at consumer friendly prices.
Of course. Because "I need more than 8 GB of RAM" and "the government should subsidize Microsoft" are logically equivalent statements. If you're insane.
1. Nobody has argued either for or against for the government to subsidize Microsoft.
2. However people are arguing that the government should subsidize RAM makers. And their extended argument for it is that people choose to purchase Microsoft Windows. A well known low quality product.
That's a very weak argument. If you choose to make bad decisions and use sub-par solutions when good solutions are readily available, that isn't something that the government should take to account when deciding on subsidies.
What reasoning are you using to figure out what exact amount of RAM is acceptable at a given time period?
I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.
The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more.
OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers organization that limits the amount of syrup a farmer can produce and sell in a year to keep prices high.
Well guess what :) They've done it before, they will do it again.
"To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[1]"
And the reason the market is so small is because of players who did as you propose, the DRAM market crashed on them (not due to them but due to broader market dynamics), and they went out of business.
So there is, quite perversely, strong incentive to collude if possible and if not to abide by an unstated agreement to be extremely slow to expand DRAM capacity.
That said...
SK Hynix has two fabs under construction, one set to open later this year. One for 80k wpm, another 360k wpm. A third was recently approved to start construction.
Micro has an overhaul of Fab 6 in Virgina near done and slated to produce first wafers this year. It also has a large expansion in Boise nearly completion for 300k wpm. They're also building a "megafab" site in New York (my guess is >1m wpm) and expanding at their Japanese plants (40k wpm).
Samsung has two under construction, P4 for 100k wpm.
Nanya - historically a secondary player focused only on producing non-leading-edge DRAM is making a play for the leading-edge market with a new fab dedicated to DDR5 and HBM.
It appears they've all decided that the demand is sufficiently sustained that building new fabs is worth doing... but it takes time. If my guess is right Micron is making the largest play with their New York site at 1-1.5m wafers per month. That would give them a large chunk of the market.
(wpm = wafers per month)
Don't worry they will leave money on the table and lobby for protectionism when china comes and eats their lunch.
It really is. First thing I searched for in the thread.
I think we're in agreement here. I don't think memory manufacturers are interested in a market disruption even though profits are incredibly high for a few years. Make it too profitable for too long and others will arise but keep the supply at a steady pace with decent margins and they will remain the only ones on the block because of massive upfront cost.
China is, to my knowledge, the only country that has so far had the willingness to seriously invest. Not necessarily for profits but for independence reasons. I don't see many (or any really) other countries following suit.
Can you just not join the organization?
Maple trees are living things and have a right to reproduce, you can't fault a bird for shitting maple seeds all over my farm planting maple trees everywhere.
If only building a ram FAB was that easy :).
The best hope is that cxmt gets going quicker than expected and is able to satisfy a decent chunk of the Chinese demand for RAM which would - in theory - reduce the demand for ram from the few other producers.
> Backed by the Canadian civil courts, the federation has the monopoly for selling Quebecois maple syrup on the wholesale market, and for exporting it outside the province. Producers are only allowed to sell independently cans of less than five litres or 5kg to visitors to their farm. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35028380
Lot of unsubstantiated claims with low fidelity meme evidence
https://stream-ai.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/class-action-co...
I do see people arguing, "they had years to increase production - why didn't they?" They've been remarkably candid about this: because RAM production has been losing them money in the past. Because they don't have a cartel, prices were on the floor. Investing in more production would have been corporate suicide.
Even now, there is considerable risk that the bubble will burst, and all this investment in new production will be flushed down the toilet. RAM production is a brutal business.
I said:
> the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
Even when it comes to manufacturing the tooling/testing infrastructure, it's just a question of money aiui.
I didn't say that there was a way to do it in the short run. I laid out what the test is to determine if there's cartel-like behavior or competitive-market-like behavior.
I will say, in a market with only 3 players and very high cap-ex cost, my prior is that you're likely to see more cartel-like behavior than competitive-market-like behavior, but that's still to be determined.
Oh yea, governments can fix by putting 100 billion in memory fabs right now, and when demand crater in decade or so, let tax payer eat the cost of those fabs. At least it will benefit poor computer users like me.
Why would they?
And you claim to have historic examples where they did?
Now what do you think happens when developing new supply is substantially constrained by lead times?
Coz a whole lot less of you have ever dealt with manufacturing logistics.
Some supply and demand curves move in days, some in months, some on years.
That said, even though we might have to wait years for new supply to hit there market, we probably don't have to wait years to see signals of that. We will likely know that manufacturers are starting to build new supply long before we see the chips hit the market.
Even if you started a new fab today, it's 5 years till it comes online. The great hope here is that China's DDR5 yields represent a high reject rate of an enormous amount of new capacity that they'll dump into the market to get a sovereign capability in that area.
This system is too complex, the few individual players too big, with too many artificial distortions for the adjustment to equalize out in a way that's anything but years-long (it may have shock-waves that extend past the decade), and highly destructive to everyone who isn't OPEC, or their largest customers, in this analogy.
The brunt of it will be paid by the people further down the food chain.
And given that these are independent actors in the free market, they’ve seen the history of boom/bust cycles in this market
Free market doesn’t mean “everything just magically happens”
That’s a good one!
20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.
etc
It's pretty simple. In a correctly regulated market the sellers are in competition with each other so there is a limit to how much they can increase prices, since they'll just lose business to their competitor.
In a poorly regulated market that allows competitors to collude with each other to raise prices by the same amount, they'll inflate prices much further.
No? It goes to the buyer with the deepest pockets.
So RAM manufacturers will turn down company B's $2M offer for company A's $1M offer because company A "needed it more"?
I'm actually done discussing this...
In a bubble market where B has massive amounts of capital allocated to it in a way that will likely collapse in the future than it's very likely they will never recuperate the 2M they put in the RAM. Instead buyer A that would get at least 1M of usefulness if not more, gets far less, crippling their business. Then when B collapses a ton of RAM is dumped on the market for far less than 1M cratering the RAM providers business for years.
I'm sure it will only suck for the buyers. This has no effect on inflation and probably will be overlooked by the current admin.
The question is how much of this demand is actually based on AI, or just an excuse to fleece regular buyers (and AI is not really the actual demand driving such prices).
Memory manufacturers have driven up prices via collusion many times in the past (and paid fines for it), without AI or some similar high demand vertical market existing.
But I don't think it's the case now, see my answer elsewhere here for why.
In a market with healthy competition (no collusion), this generally can't happen. Every single vendor is incentivized to lower their prices slightly at all times, with a floor at cost plus margin.
We're talking about the memory market here.
The "healthy competition (no collusion). Every single vendor is incentivized to lower their prices slightly at all times, with a floor at cost plus margin" is the fairy-tale version they teach at 101s.
Everything else you said is accurate, but this is not. Supply will go to those most able to pay, not those who need it the most. It is not a moral allocation, which your language implies.
The actual deals were hours apart and secret for that reason.
It's hilarious watching the conspiracy theorists do their usual thing when there was an actual conspiracy, it was perpetuated by the inner circle of a US company and announced and publicized in full once it had achieved its goal.
Ironically enough it's because of its bet on RAM companies that all of Situational Awareness' publicly trading stocks got bought by the highest bidder (Citadel) when the (leveraged) shit hit the proverbial fan and Situational Awareness created a hole of tens of billions.
Situational Awareness was not forced to sell its share in Anthropic for, by contract, investors in Situational Awareness have no right to force the sale (before this month of September I think) of shares in companies not publicly trading yet.
Citadel bought those RAM stocks right at the end of July, during the dip. Amazing timing for for example MU bounced back from $746 back to above $1000 (now around $950).
Now Situational Awareness may still do exceptionally well: they've got $5 billion or so left in Anthropic AIUI.
In addition to that there are extra fabs build and (for example) China can use the high margin to catch up with their processes without breaking the bank.
An egg takes 21 days to hatch.
Then it's 18-24 weeks to start laying their own eggs. That's ~$5-15 in feed over the period, maybe 40-50 pounds. There's utilities, labor, land, etc., but your incremental cost to add a hen if you have the space is minimal. My numbers won't reflect a lot of operators, as scale matters.
Out of a typical 1.5-3 year lifespan that had a startup cost of a few dollars per, paying back its return by about month 6-7, that's not too bad. It's only worth doing financially in this economy at ludicrous, arguably inherently inhumane scales, but that's what it is on paper.
Not quite the same path to course-correction as a silicon shortage.
"Manufacturers taking advantage of it" wouldn't take it to 500% without AI, because it's way beyond the price elasticity points where they make up lost sales at higher prices.
Those prices lose most consumer sales, and are only viable if there's constant high demand that's relatively insensitive to price (so, not regular folks, but e.g. AI companies).
Eventually someone will manufacture more to undercut
See the tariff thing where Bessent bought rights to refunds
It's all a really low tech con perpetuated by weak elders who need blue pills to simulate virility. Odd how they complain about the kids virtual reality.
Oh no it's not either; it's intentional petty bullying
While they have spiked this year, the trend is towards more RAM for cheaper.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life. Consumer DRAM will stay very high while the cartel retools and moves back into that space. This means that the cartel wins and pays no real price for it when they shift back to producing consumer ram, they step immediately into a massive demand for pc RAM and keep raking in $$$. But they all have to do it in lockstep so that they have a market to come back to. Otherwise someone would become the king of PC ram and they couldn't re-enter easily if/when the AI server market fails. Being in lock-step means they rake in more money and mitigate the risk of an AI bubble, all at the cost of the consumer.
At least that is what this looks like to me. They know they could make a lot of money ignoring the AI server build out but they all magically didn't. A competitive market would have seen a spike in price when this much demand came in, but the lockstep movement of the big three shows that they are coordinated and not competing.
This was true until the last year.
P40, P100, V100, A40, etc are selling like hotcakes and prices have been rapidly increasing.
When there are massive costs to entry, then this is what happens on a huge demand surge that can pay 10x more than everyone else.
The US troops are more likely there as a political shield. Indiscriminate bombing would kill them too, hence drag the US into war so any enemies of S Korea have to act judiciously.
If anything more foreign bases will be closed in the upcoming years to reign in the reckless spending + endangerment by the DoW. It's not only politically easy, foreign bases don't have representation in Congress, but it's a great to sell alternative governing visions (less on foreign imperialism vs more domestic spending).
That's why Japan and Germany are some of the worst places to live in the world. Oh wait, I had that quality of life chart upside down.
I decided to get the extra RAM. Boy am I glad now. If I thought this was just a temporary spike, I would be tempted to sell the extra memory (I don't really need it yet), but I don't see prices falling anytime soon.
If Laszlo Hanyecz knew that, after 10 years, 1 BTC will exceed $50K, he wouldn't trade his 10,000 Bitcoins (~$41) for two pizzas!
Here's hoping I can wait out the current shortage before any upgrades (I typically only upgrade every 5-7 years or so anyway) or replacements, because I do not plan to pay the new price.
So I went to the DDR4 aisle (similarly: wow!), and realized that I'm sitting on a gold-mine of reclaimed DDR4, from several 8th-10th-gen Intels (probably a few hundred gbs, total, mostly as 8gb modules).
Incredibly, this was all e-waste (given to me "if I took it all"). Eureka.
If anybody wants any DDR2/DDR3, I'm in SE Tennessee (and have even more of that... not worth too much, pay for shipping).
----
Anybody shopping for RTX 5050 or 5060 (for new OEM, 8GB both, non-Ti), WalMart has the best prices (probably hasn't recalibrated recently?), beating Microcenter by $85 and $115, respectively. I ended up getting a 5070Ti from MicroCenter (for a great price; my local WalMart does not carry this xx70Ti version), so the trip wasn't wasted.
This is insane & needs to stop. Also those responsible should be punished for undermining modern society (which is heavily dependent on IT equipment) in such a manner for personal gain.
Capitalism gave you cheap hardware and then took it away.
PS: Don't worry, memory is a boom/bust business.
If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour.
The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
However, I do feel like this is the type of conspiracy that unfiltered Claude would come up with.
Ballpark that they need to make around 110 billion a year, each, to break even on these investments. Let's estimate 550 billion a year in necessary profit required for the major frontier companies. That means there needs to be 550 billion of money, available to customers today, that isn't being spent on anything else, that they will now spend on AI. Maybe some of that comes from increased value, efficiency, or layoffs. But 550 billion is not a small amount of money.
Spread over the whole globe, the cash is there. But it is a hunt for cash, combined with a battle to successfully complete their buildouts, keep them running, and make bank, before the bookie comes knocking.
The railroad panics of the 19th century (and subsequent depressions) happened because they over-leveraged private capital without the ability to profit from it quick enough. So it really is a question of 1) can they really build it all, and 2) will people really pay for it all. If either answer is No, we are looking at economic catastrophe.
Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.
Open source https://github.com/cnygaard/glq
Pypi glq https://pypi.org/project/glq/
I picked up some Micron last year anticipating memory demand, but then the stock went down for a while. I waited, it went up and I took 25% profit as I figured they couldn't add any new capacity and would have sold all the capacity from their existing fabs on long term contracts. Then prices went crazy, sigh.
I'm not sure why prices have gone boom now rather than before given we're years into the LLM boom, but probably it's to do with capacity lockups expiring or something similar.
It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
> By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?
In that scenario producing consumer chips is still profitable, much less profitable but still much better than giving up and going home.
You will also unlock latent demand by the mere fact that consumer prices are reasonable again. Those who may have postponed a new MacBook or gaming PC will likely buy as soon as lower prices return.
They would never do that. By then the market has changed and they would produce at the limit of expected demand, certainly not intentionally causing oversupply.
ever since i had my own money, gpu or general hardware had some excuse to fleece us. however, with ram the blatant collusion throughout history does not invite confidence.
this looks as dramatic as it does because the recent trend happened right after a major crash in prices. throughout the years, the usual price for an 8gb stick would hover around 50-80 usd (albeit laptop one, might be lower for desktop). ddr5 also started being 50-100% more expensive than the incumbent when it first dropped. it took a better part of a year to be in a similar price bracket as ddr4.
all this to say, this situation sucks but those of us with 64+ gigs, bought during the last crash, are eating good but got used to using much more memory than they really need.
while it is insane to pay a decent cpu price for 16 gigs today, getting a "good enough" computer still makes more economic sense than a max plan from a frontier lab.
Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.
If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent.
There was a massive spike of RAM prices from 2016 to 2018 followed by a price crash in 2019...
Yeah, I built mine in 3090 times and told myself I'd upgrade every 2-3 GPU generations. I do have 128G ram and I'm thankful for that but I'm definitely not on the same upgrade schedule any more.
I've switched a lot of things to WASM and use way less RAM.
* The Fifth Discipline - read the beer game chapter and AI summaries for the rest, helps build intuition for chained systems
* Chip War - a quick read but AI summaries will suffice, helps build knowledge for semiconductor industry orientation
* The Goal - classic business book on just-in-time, useful to overturn standard human reactions. read if you're a quick reader, AI summary otherwise
Given we're all 9004/9005 now, and that (from what I understand) Venice will support 6400. Will hopefully buy back in a glut comes ready for the next bubble. It's been wild, I even posted a small 32GB DDR5-4800 that was not getting recognized for $100 on eBay and it was literally purchased within ~15min of being live.
The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.
So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.
I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.
Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
It's a totally broken way to practice economics, but alas, it's ours until we change it.