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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

What is also interesting is no one predicted this in 2022-2025 as LLMs were gaining widespread use. It just suddenly happened--"boom!" memory shortage in mid 2025 to early 2026,and it caught everyone by surprise. It was understood that the biggest bottleneck was "compute", not the memory. Even experts, such as popular AI bloggers, industry leaders, and top podcasters failed to anticipate this. No one on twitter either. I spend a lot of time online and I don't recall, afik, anyone before 2026 saying to buy memory stocks.

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Sam Altman laying claims on 40% of the world’s RAM wafer production is what took everyone by surprise. The supply shortage likely would have ramped up more slowly otherwise.

More importantly that did take subterfuge: there's no way a contract that large would've been agreed to by both manufacturers if they knew the other was signing it.

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.

I think Leopold of "situational awareness" fame predicted this, tried to make it widely known on podcasts and x, and still started billions worth of hedge funding based on this.

> I think Leopold of "situational awareness" fame predicted this, tried to make it widely known on podcasts and x, and still started billions worth of hedge funding based on this.

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.

Everyone in cloud knew this was going to happen, the contracts for all parts of server stuff were measured in years.

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