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Comment by phonon | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend

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

>even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend

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.

Let's see Paul Allens IPO filling

I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.

It also would be a huge win for the memory companies to agree to this, considering they will make more money with less supply. Seems interesting to me.

Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware.

But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.

I don’t think there were some grand conspiracy to buy up the world’s ram to keep other people out, it is probably more likely that they just really thought they would need it.

However, I do feel like this is the type of conspiracy that unfiltered Claude would come up with.

next they will become successful business by reselling RAM

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