The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I’ll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.
I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.
I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.
Thought I could wait to build a new PC, but at this point, it’ll be another 5-10 years before things start getting better. After the price of the steam machine, I ordered parts to build my own. Such a bad time to build, but it’s just gonna get worse the longer I wait.
If they get better. By the time the AI sector collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, things will have already gotten significantly worse. You’ll be less worried about RAM prices and more worried about bread prices.
I could crash the prices by tomorrow if I wanted to. All I’d have to do is buy some ram today.
I see this as an opportunity to get invested in non-tech hobbies because there’s nothing else I can do
The ‘AI’ angle is purely cover for the manufacturers actively choosing to now behave like the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve identified a window to pull this shit, and coordinated this opportunistic collusion.
The only meaningful response is to create a diverse production base to remove the choke point the current incumbents are leveraging, but that would require a concerted, collaborative effort by parties who can’t see and/or don’t understand the problem.
To play devil’s advocate; it might be that the RAM producers see AI as a bubble, and it would be incredibly risky to expand their production now, when it won’t come into effect until a handful of years from now.
RAM and SSD manufacturers have already seen many many dips and rises in price over decades.
However, that all of them are deciding not to expand and potentially rake in the cash is more than a little sus.
I’m not sure how to feel about it personally. I hope the true cost of maintaining these AI models gets passed down to customers soon so that it either crashes and burn, or at the very least stabilises the market.
How long does it take a company already established in the sector to build a RAM factory?
8Gb of ddr4 is $25 usd and 16Gb ddr4 sticks are going for about $75 usd goes up from there depending on speed.
8Gb of ddr4 is $25
Ha! My 32g was $600, so 6x that.
You may hate AI, but it’s not the reason we are seeing RAM costs skyrocket.
Looking at the manufacturing data and the historical strong-arm tactics used by Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix, who collectively control about 96% of the global DRAM market, AI just gives manufacturers the perfect public justification to stop chasing cheap bit growth, starve low-margin consumer channels (our RAM products), reprioritize wafers toward premium products (data center RAM), and force customers into multi-year contracts at shortage-era prices.
Sure it lets them make more money off us, but they really love locking in these rates with their data center-based customers.
And all this is just because … AI demand.
Rather they grabbed a fancy reason to increase prices because of greed.
The few big ram production companies likely had a chat and decided: “Hey, more money? Yea! More money! We like more money!”
But of course they do, their shareholders wouldn’t like it otherwise. Capitalism 101. 🤷
No, it’s actually not because of the AI demand. AI is a demand metric but not enough to cause the hikes we’re seeing and (as the manufacturers want us to) even preparing for.
