It can still get worse: Double-digit price increase expected for RAM in the New Year
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/80-percent-of-samsungs-data-center-memory-is-already-sold-for-2027-meaning-yet-another-double-digit-price-increase-for-ram-expected-and-more-likely-to-come/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
61 replies
Suppose you're a RAM maker. You're raking in fat profits from this maybe-a-bubble situation. Your market forecasts show there's a risk the bubble might pop. Or that new Chinese sources of your commodity are about to become widely available in the West, cratering your beautiful margin. What do you do?
One thing you might do is: encourage the public to buy now, while prices are still high.
Certainly you don't invest in more production capacity, if you suspect that demand will crater before your new production comes online.
I thought ASML was backordered for like years?
That's the way they like it. Building more capacity costs shitloads of money, and reduces the price of your product. ASML, TMSC are a racket.
If a major player like the US govt decided they wanted an ASML machine and didn't want to wait, ASML would find a way to make more in parallel. It would cost billions more, but that just makes it expensive, not impossible. With the right incentive, anything is possible. ASML and TSMC aren't incentivised to change the current market.
We need a subsidised European* alternative to break the duopoly.
*doesn't have to be, but as an EU citizen I'd prefer if it was :P
If those companies that ordered suddenly go boom, those orders are financially worthless.
Not only that, if it does crater, your product can still be sold to consumers and businesses like it used to. They have no incentive to change anything.
Meanwhile, Amazon is just putting GPUs into warehouses so their competitors don't get them. WTF.
Yeah this is about more than llms. They're done, or want to be done, doing commerce with the plebs, the bottom 90%. Everything is for the top 10% (already make up 50+% of purchases and spending power, that stat is from 2024 so more now) and B2B.
We get the scraps of the scraps.
Along with Nvidia (and the RAM manufacturers) requiring people to buy shitloads of components in advance, or they just sell to someone else.
So when is the free market gonna correct this?
Turns out the invisible hand of the market isn't so much a hand as a single outstretched middle finger.
Where's this free market you speak of? All I see is corruption and corporate welfare.
RAM isn't a free market; it's a cartel.
When the AI black hole inverts.
~2-3 years when the new fabs come online, assuming we're not still spamming new DCs. If we keep spamming new DCs for the next 3 years, then longer.
Eric Andre as "The Free Market" shoots consumer RAM production; "Why would Samsung do this?"
Never, you know how this games goes.
This is text book market mechanics. Demand rises and so do the prices. As a consequence the demand is somewhat dampened and therefore the market can slowly (!) heal. Due to the shit ton of money that is and can be made, new actors are incentivized to enter the market and existing actors are incentivized to increase their capacity (so no one else jumps in and grabs parts of it).
Now the question is: is it a good sign if such a big number of buyers are willing to throw such an excessive amount of money at you? Probably not, so you might bet on this not playing out in the long run. And the following crash will be hard, because then all the components from the closed data centers would hit the market at the same time with all your backorders going poof.
There still is not a path for data center components to be used in your gaming rig. They are not compatible and you can't really adapt something like RAM I would wager. You'd have to tear off the chips and make new boards.
If a crash dumps hardware on the market, I bet someone will find a way to make use of it. But I don't think it will devalue, local models work and are useful, so if most datacenters closed tomorrow, I bet they'd be able to sell that hardware at decent prices to all sorts of companies.
I think if that happens, much stock will be intentionally destroyed before anything like that can happen.
What motivation do people in the DC and AI sector have to fuck with consumer prices? It's not like NVidia still owns that silicon or something.
When the AI bubble bursts, or the various electronics suppliers and their suppliers get more factories/capacity online in 2028
my 10 year old ram need no die
Dig up that old invoice or receipt if you can since even your ten year old RAM might have a lifetime warranty on it.
If they'll even honor it. No, there are no legal requirements for anything in the US any more.
"Lifetime" warranties are for the lifetime of the product (however they define that), not for the lifetime of the owner. There are court cases where a "lifetime" of less than 5 years has been upheld.
It's one of the most clever doublespeak things most consumers remain unaware of, so they keep doing it.
Bingo. and my tolerance of sheep grows ever more thin as the days tick by.
Let as all sacrifice a rock and chant the sacred chant!
How mich margin is enough?.Gamers nexus just did a video on Micron's gross margins, and its absolutely disgusting. Its gone from mid 30% to 90% in some of their divisions in a few years.
It's never enough.
Ah, the free market and the conundrum of infinite growth
Increasing prices is a valid instrument to reduce demand. They are far beyond their capacity.
But the prices never come back down, unfortunately
That depends. If it turns into the other direction that they have much less demand than they produce, they have to reduce prices until enough people buy again so "it keeps flowing".
Took Econ 100 did ya?
So it outpaced the profit margins of scientific publishing? Damn! And that article is from 2020 and cited it as 40% for Elsevier, it certainly went up since but surely not to 90%.
I guess I'll double down and not buy new hardware even harder!
Double digit...so like $10 right, its only going up by $10.
Cheap ram for you, just not for you for you. Like bullets...bullets for you, just not for you for you.
What does "double-digit price increase" mean?
$10 is two digits.
I imagine it's a percentage increase? But then again, it could be anything from 10% to 99%.
Or maybe adding two more digits to the price?
I had the same thought, it's such a terrible way of talking about it. I'm guessing it means one order of magnitude.
I was thinking of selling my old DDR4 RAM but at this point, I think I'll keep it as a backup in case my current dies for whatever reason between now and the next 10+ years.
Where is the best place to sell DDR4? I have 128GB mixed DIMM and SODIMM.
Right here dogg, hook it up! Honestly anywhere things are sold will be fine, it's pretty much the most liquid commodity besides weed right now. For real though DM me if you're willing to cut a fellow poster a deal. I'm super broke but almost have a free trash PC put together, 10th gen i7/rx580/case/mobo/power supply. For whatever reason people just aren't throwing out old ram these days :p
Not a bad idea, just keep in mind that a lot of memory companies have lifetime warranties on their higher end modules too that you can try. I recently had success RMA'ing my 2.5 year old sticks that went bad but of course YMMV.
Well, when hockey equipment got too expensive I set my sights on soccer. When RAM gets too expensive I'll reset my sights again.
So it goes.
Honestly I haven't been super interested in a demanding game on a while anyway and my 32GB of DDR4 still works.
So, the 32gb DDR 5600 I have sitting in this drawer next to me is currently my best investment?
Unrelated question but what's your address and when are you usually not at home?
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20500.
Check my schedule here: https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/calendar/
We know.. Here in America everyday is worse than the one before.
Just go somewhere el.... Oh wait, it is fucked everywhere!!!
The Worst Day of Your Life So Far....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpPArfDTGw
Even worse than the day before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o26MJsBYwM
I didn't think the 32GB DDR5 7200MHz kit that I got off an eBay auction for 72€ would be a flex a year later
Ram companies stock prices is falling down.
So I guess I should get more ram now before it goes even higher....
Good lord... I was just recovering from the shock from current prices...