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Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.

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I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.

This doesn't imply that it will settle at the same or lower price as before though.

> it's a short-term economic quirk

Not with the memory cartel that exists right now. They're more than happy to keep things exactly as they are, with lawsuits flying [1].

[1] https://www.rainintelligence.com/blog/dram-price-fixing-laws...

Fabs take a long time to build. The price will come down once the new fabs come on line. It’s expensive because there isn’t enough of it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s supply and demand. We’ve see this boom and bust cycle again and again.

This cycle might need more competitors, not only more fabs. It's in the interest of three companies to keep supply constrained to raise prices, and they act as a cartel so until the cartel breaks or a competitor grows large enough to have fabs that can make a dent in the demand we will keep seeing high prices.

For a relevant competitor to show up takes much longer than building a fab (which is already a long enough endeavour).

I'm not that hopeful the price for RAM and other PC parts will come down in any meaningful way for the next 3-5 years.

> It’s not a conspiracy

Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

We are not the courts. The most reasonable and truth based position is operating with a fuzzy impression that most businesses are substantially more dodgy than their carefully manufactured PR releases are meant to portray themselves as.

And in this case, that includes acknowledging that a literal criminal conspiracy in well within the realm of possibility.

The reason for the price increase isn't hard to figure out. The AI boom is here and the demand is off the charts. Supply is limited and increasing production is difficult and slow.

> Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.

Because conspiracies are generally not true and it's not needed to explain this situation.

It could be a medium/long term political quirk, because as long as RAM and GPU prices stay high the BigCos maintain a monopoly on non-trivial AI compute, and personal AI can't happen.

I still can't work out if data centre mania is an irrational faddy bandwagon event or a covert socio-political monopolisation strategy.

Or rather creditors scrapping AI datacenters once all the money burning "AI labs" are finally insolvent & repurposong the hardware into something actually useful for people, possibly on chip level with custom PCBs.

Aaaand, then watch prices continue rising regardless.

Fabs take multiple years to spin up, so expect it to last probably 3 to 5 years.

Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?

At least base 2.

That’s honestly plausible with RAM and SSDs, the same kits of RAM I spent around $50 on years ago were being scalped for $500+ because there was absolutely no supply.

A normal RAM kit went up a lot but it's still more like 6x. SSD, more like 2.5-3x.

But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.

Same.

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