Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

by zekrioca • 8 months ago

523 401 8 months ago

ggm• 8 months ago

the other side of the AI bubble are a huge amount of 2nd hand parts of all kinds going to come onto the market?

mxfh3• 8 months ago

Waiting for all my out of use 4, 8, and 16GB DDR3 DIMMs that I have somewhere in a drawer to become the new gold standard first.

willis936• 8 months ago

I'm finding that getting an LGA socket to give me two reliable memory channels is far more valuable than the sticks that go into them. I've got at least two motherboards in use at my home right now with only one working channel of memory. There are sticks just sitting around.

bhaney• 8 months ago

My pile of worthless 512MB DDR1 sticks has bad news for you

venturecruelty4• 8 months ago

No, they'll be shipped off to developing nations to be dissolved for rare earths for the next boom cycle.

kragen5• 8 months ago

Memory chips don't contain rare earths, and e-waste recyclers pay a tiny fraction of what used-hardware buyers do.

type0• 8 months ago

Memory chips are divertied to registered server RAM and those will not fit most workstations

bpye2• 8 months ago

Nothing stops you building an EPYC based workstation. For the last socket you could even get mATX boards from Asrock Rack which were kind of ridiculous - I was very tempted to build my PC around one.

magarnicle• 8 months ago

All in a pretty bad state of wear, I imagine.

bpye2• 8 months ago

At least with ECC memory it's very obvious when its failing as you'll see reported correctable errors.

swatcoder2• 8 months ago

A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads.

Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be shifted to other military markets and family car production would take some time to resume.

snek_case• 8 months ago

You can buy old rackmount servers on ebay for relatively cheap and used them as desktop PCs AFAIK (though they can be on the noisier side).

hypercube33• 8 months ago

AliExpress has been selling 2010 or whatever Intel xeons in dual socket desktop board kits for gaming. they are fairly affordable and hold up to almost modern games so people that can't afford new gen systems.

edm0nd3• 8 months ago

I would snag up every possible H100 and H200 if the AI bubble burst and their prices went into steep decline.

twoodfin• 8 months ago

Why? Doesn’t that suggest that demand justifies the “bubble”?

gblargg• 8 months ago

Unless it drags on for years so that the parts are old by the time everything gets liquidated.

Havoc2• 8 months ago

Yeah though expecting that to A) take years still and B) the gear will be old AF

Bit like you could get NVIDIA Server cards before things went crazy but they’re on ancient cuda etc so not exactly as glorious as one would imagine

Daishiman• 8 months ago

Inflation metrics seem to fail to capture the increase in leading-edge tech products of the past 18 months.

tstrimple• 8 months ago

They seem to fail to capture a whole lot of things. Supposedly $1 in 2000 is worth $1.88 in 2025. So 88% inflation over the 25 years. Meanwhile the median home price has increased by 150%. Family insurance by 350%. Median college tuition by 225%. Childcare costs have risen by 200%. But sure. We can buy super cheap 65" tvs now. Hurray for us! Literal kings who lived hundreds of years ago couldn't possibly imagine a world with cheap large screen tvs. So the poorest among us should rejoice at the wonders they are able to enjoy while they skip meals and ration their insulin.

energy1238• 8 months ago

The inflation basket only represent a hypothetical average person, who doesn't even exist.

It's more useful to construct multiple separate inflation measures that represent different types of people. Like a "typical renter" inflation figure vs a "typical homeowner" inflation figure. It wouldn't be hard to do and would shine a light on inequality and help explain the rise of populism in certain segments of society.

An even better measure would somehow appropriately normalize the figure by the average disposable income in each of the segments to come up with a figure that measures the felt impact better.

The figure would be negative for wealthy people (who actually benefit from inflation because of asset price inflation) and positive for poor people (whose disposable income mostly goes to rent).

pton_xd• 8 months ago

A dozen eggs is up over 350%, but a 6-pack of Budweiser is only up 60ish% since 2000. So you know, it all balances out. Maybe drink a few extra cans of Bud with your next meal.

webnrrd2k• 8 months ago

This explores the ideas behind your post: important things, like education and healthcare, have disproportionately risen in price while not-so-imortant thing have gotten less expensive.

https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie

I don't exactly agree with the numbers, but I think the basic ideas are true

actionfromafar• 8 months ago

Making America Great Again, Beer and TV.

nick494881712• 8 months ago

Sure how does it compare to similar low, middle, high end cpu prices? NVME drives?

outside12342• 8 months ago

They don’t capture anything going up because that would shame dear leader

kragen5• 8 months ago

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today.

So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year.

That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%.

Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.

antisthenes• 8 months ago

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM

We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today.

Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it.

Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser.

What does your math say about that?

mxfh3• 8 months ago

To put this in long term relation.

Even current DDR4 3200 DIMM prices are at an all time high.

These are 6+ year old chip specs now!

I even thought stuff was overpriced four years ago in mid-2021 already, but this is a whole new level.

Some sample long term data for those:

https://geizhals.eu/?phist=2151624&age=9999

thescriptkiddie• 8 months ago

anyone want to buy a 2x16 GB DDR4-3200 kit that only fails memtest86 some of the time?

krackers• 8 months ago

I wonder if semi-reliable RAM could be made to work for training. After all gradient descent already works in a stochastic environment, so maybe the noise from a few flipped bits doesn't matter too much.

deltoidmaximus4• 8 months ago

Have you tried underclocking or loosening the timings?

wrxd• 8 months ago

Sorry but I am looking for reliability. Do you have any stick that fails 100% of the time?

honeycrispy• 8 months ago

Dang, I'm going to have to put my old RAM on ebay. I thought it was worthless, but I was clearly wrong.

wtallis2• 8 months ago

Between inflation generally, and DDR4 being obsolete and unsupported by current desktop or server CPUs, it would be unsurprising for DDR4-3200 DIMMs to be at an all-time high even without the current DRAM price shock. You can never count on old memory types dropping to bargain prices, because the major manufacturers are always eager to migrate the bulk of their production capacity to current-generation memory.

mxfh3• 8 months ago

That process usually takes years.

Here the price hike was pretty instant as secondary effect of DDR5 evasion in two waves. I July and now in October.

There is usually no shortage of old working PC components as they also are avalable used and tested from people decommissioning and upgrading systems. These are not some rare parts in normal market situations.

I made a habit of maxing out motherboards a year or two before upgrading to an new platform. This was always dirt cheap until like 5 years ago.

blackenedgem• 8 months ago

Yeah the cheapest time to buy old tech is always just when the new stuff has come out. That's when suppliers are trying to shift old stock at cheaper margins.

You can take a look at the 5800X3D and how it was at its cheapest about 2 years ago when AMD was winding down production and Zen 4 had been launched.

PeterStuer4• 8 months ago

Now happy I bought that 256GB of DDR4 with the MB/processor combo of ebay last summer.

kasabali7• 8 months ago

Had CXMT not stop DDR4 manufacturing earlier this year, they'd at least cornered that market.

Unfortunately now they're too late on making the bank with DDR5, too: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/chinas-chip...

blindriver• 8 months ago

My 64 GB of DDR4 3200 RAM has tripled in price to $600. I am seriously considering selling it and just waiting for prices to drop again.

wnevets2• 8 months ago

If these prices don't return back to normal I just don't see how Valves steam machine is less than $1,000 USD.

teaearlgraycold• 8 months ago

They would already have contracts in place.

wkat4242• 8 months ago

For a while, yes. But I'm sure they will want to sell it for longer than a year or so.

Even Samsung is running into this issue now: their own internal foundry is refusing to give them a long term contract now so the S26 series will become more expensive.

If this happens to Samsung, what leverage will a player like Valve have?

energy1238• 8 months ago

That's their costs, not our costs. Regular PCs will cost more, which means Valve can price their consoles higher and collect margin, because there's no other competition/substitutes.

jmb99• 8 months ago

As someone currently dealing with pricing changes for DDR5 volume contracts (admittedly, only ~30k DIMMs, but still), those contracts are a lot less rigidly priced than we (engineering) realized at the time - “agreed price” is a lot more... flexible... until the pallet is delivered. Especially because our contract is with our manufacturer who has their own contract with a DIMM manufacturer who has their own contract with the DRAM manufacturer. DRAM is substantially more like a spot market than the average consumer would expect (at least at my volumes). The same is true for my HDDs (~100k unit/year contract) and my CPUs (10k unit/year contract). At least for HDDs our contract quantities are getting honoured (and we actually still have Seagate and WD fighting for our business), which I’ve heard hasn’t been the case for smaller orders.

smallmancontrov• 8 months ago

When Gaben's 11 organize a heist to steal the RAM wafers from the high-security vault in Sam Altman's basement, the price of the steam machine will drop below $1000 USD.

delfinom2• 8 months ago

In before Valve releases a video of their own DRAM manufacturing plant because "they always wanted to have one"

nick494881712• 8 months ago

Apple system config upgrades not looking so bad anymore

nntwozz• 8 months ago

Came here looking for this comment.

I wonder how much price increase it takes for Apple to raise theirs.

shpx• 8 months ago

On this graph, the most expensive RAM is $12.5 / GB ($400 for DDR5-6000 2x16GB). Apple charges

- $25 / GB ($200 for 8 GB for the M5 MacBook Pro and the M4 MacBook Air)

- $16 / GB ($400 for 24 GB for the cheapest M4 Pro MacBook Pro)

- $12.5 / GB ($200 for 16 GB and then $800 for 64 GB more for the most expensive M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros)

and Apple's RAM is faster than PC RAM.

bean469• 8 months ago

Apple's RAM is faster than PC RAM

Are you sure about that? The M5 memory has a max bandwidth of ~150 GB/s, meanwhile there is PC memory that reaches 200 GB/s

baq6• 8 months ago

Exactly. Gotten from ‘price gouging’ to ‘not unreasonable’ in a couple months.

oefrha• 8 months ago

Guess that’s the flip side of selling sometimes three to four years old hardware with zero price cut (I know they’ve been doing better in the M-series era)—the price also stays there when it’s skyrocketing elsewhere.

stmw• 8 months ago

Time for Intel to re-enter the memory market?

outside12342• 8 months ago

Stagflation!

nullify88• 8 months ago

A possible answer as to why this is happening. https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su...

bilsbie• 8 months ago

Is he saying the supply of ddr4 went down because they’re switching to ddr5?

loeg5• 8 months ago

Scroll down. The same trend is happening for DDR5 prices. It's AI demand.

delfinom2• 8 months ago

More specifically, it's OpenAI quietly contracting away 40% of global DRAM capacity, only to build wafers of memory and shove it in a warehouse.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

StrLght• 8 months ago

That's from June 2025. It's not relevant to current situation — prices have been rising since October 2025 due to agreements that became public in the same month.

jakebasile5• 8 months ago

I hate this. PC gaming is my hobby, the only one that’s lasted my whole life. It’s always been there. It’s how I met my wife. It’s how I relax after a long day. It’s how I’ve participated in so many stories that stick with me and given me so many memories.

All of it is being murdered by the AI bros. Before them it was the crypto bros. It’s one thing after the other and I hate it so much.

lupire• 8 months ago

There is more than a lifetime of incredibly great PC games that run on your existing hardware, and if this is your life's hobby, then paying an extra $100 or so every year or few is a drop in the bucket of your gaming expenses

jakebasile5• 8 months ago

I can afford it. Other people cannot, and the hobby is driven by a market existing for games. If newer people don’t enter the hobby as others die out, it fades away.

edm0nd3• 8 months ago

I mean its pretty rare to buy more RAM after completing your PC build + that single PC is going to last you 5+ years. Also mobos usually only have 4 slots in total so its not like its even going to take a lot. I'm rocking 2x48gb sticks and that's plenty for gaming.

The prices are wild tho.

I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL

jakebasile5• 8 months ago

It’s frustrating that it’s been one thing after the other, seemingly aimed directly at the thing I enjoy most.

Ninjinka2• 8 months ago

Increased demand for computer components for purposes other than gaming constitutes "AI bros murdering your lifelong hobby"?

PC gaming is not "murdered", it's doing better than ever.

In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.

The inflation-adjusted price per gigabyte of RAM has dropped from $3/GB to $2/GB over the last 10 years, even including the recent price hikes.

So spare me the hysterics, your hobby is fine.

And you know what? The increased demand for compute always spurs innovation, so you'll probably get a better computer in the end as a result. You're welcome.

platevoltage4• 8 months ago

In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.

This is like saying "Spotify's subscriber count grew by 800% over the last 10 years. Music is doing better than ever!"

loeg5• 8 months ago

Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.

jakebasile5• 8 months ago

Hopefully this blows over in a few years and you’re right and I’m just catastrophizing.

pbhjpbhj2• 8 months ago

Yh, my moderately capable machine is from 8 years ago and had already waited for an upgrade. Was going to be this Black Friday. Crabcakes.

platevoltage4• 8 months ago

The silver lining could be that game developers spend more time on actual gameplay, and less time on chasing graphical fidelity.

Silksong is playable on an 8 year old Nintendo Switch.

jakebasile5• 8 months ago

Yeah. Thanks for trying to keep me positive.

Hopefully this all calms down eventually. But it's hard not to feel like shit in this situation.

jmspring• 8 months ago

As I mentioned in a prior post 7/18/2023 - G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6000 - $253.

Today - G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 5600 (PC5 44800) Desktop Memory Model F5-5600J3636D32GX2-RS5W - $620.

Prices from Newegg.

walterbell4• 8 months ago

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

  On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other's deal was, nor how close to simultaneous they were. And this secrecy mattered. It mattered a lot.

  Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain…and it's worked so far...

  OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules!  No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM!  Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!

llama0523• 8 months ago

The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.

walterbell4• 8 months ago

If manufacturing fake demand (warehousing 900,000 memory wafers per month?) doubles and triples customer prices, it would decrease real demand, hurting the manufacturers after the artificial demand ends.

Aurornis10• 8 months ago

Fake demand? Either they’re selling the RAM or they’re not. They don’t make money by pretending to sell into fake demand. They make money by selling chips. A sale is a sale.

jandrese• 8 months ago

while also making OpenAI look good on paper

On paper this makes OpenAI look like absolute assholes. Like they have realized that all of their potential competitors will be memory constrained and have poured billions of dollars into making sure that happens instead of using that money to improve their own product.

ctoth• 8 months ago

Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different

Wouldn't this be ... collusion?

Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something.

OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.

amenaijp• 8 months ago

They have, rather famously, been caught doing financial shenanigans before. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

walterbell4• 8 months ago

A competitive auction would not be collusion.

zarzavat3• 8 months ago

No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal.

OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.

sophrosyne4210• 8 months ago

Every normal market interaction could be described by scary monopoly-sounding words. You heard about you're friend's salary in the same industry, and ask for a higher salary next time you negotiate. You're colluding with your friend to price gouge your employer!

In reality, so-called collusion is normal and unobjectionable. But when price surges happen, often due to factors outside of the seller's immediate control, people look for any reason to find an ethical dimension and find how to place blame, because this is more convenient. Things that were normal become abnormal and suspicious. It is in consumers economic self-interest to act in this way, because it often secures favors to them from various economic policies that they don't normally get when the market is "normal". This is no less a form of collusion than what sellers might do to secure their economic advantage. But a key difference for these anti "gouging" policies is that it gives consumers a special privilege and makes market pricing less able to fulfill its social functions.

VladVladikoff• 8 months ago

Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?

mistercheph• 8 months ago

shorter traces than soldered DIMM allow higher MT/s, this is fixed by CUDIMM/CAMM2, the other part of this is # of memory channels on the board, not sure why, but most consumer DDR5 boards have been 2 memory channels, you need to go to threadripper to get 4 or 8, It's unclear to me if this will still be an issue with future platforms.

tuetuopay2• 8 months ago

That's what HBM is actually. The memory dies are directly next to the GPU die, on the same substrate. The main difference between Apple SoC and GPUs is the former use regular LPDDR while GPUs use HBM.

One of the key points of HBM is that dies are stacked up with many, MANY, more signals and channels. That's how NVIDIA has a memory bandwidth an order of magnitude higher than M4: 550GB/s for the M4 Max, 4.6TB/s for H200. And yes, that's bytes per second, not bits per second.

kllrnohj2• 8 months ago

How does Apple do it?

Apple uses off the shelf LPDDR modules. They have nothing whatsoever special about them.

Apple gets high bandwidth out of these modules not with high bus speeds, but with a very, very wide bus. This is expensive on the SoC side (requires a large die, which is why others don't necessarily do this), but allows for commodity memory modules.

energy1238• 8 months ago

Only 50-60% of the recent price appreciation is after October 1st, so this is not likely the biggest direct cause, more likely it's everyone buying the finished stock on the market in a frenzy because they anticipate things like this will impact availability in the future, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

HenryMulligan• 8 months ago

Sounds like OpenAI might be trying their hand at TPUs, like what Google has. They are one of Google's biggest advantages in AI right now. It would also give them insurance against Nvidia being everybody's hardware supplier.

mike_d3• 8 months ago

This actually points the opposite direction, to doubling down on commercial GPUs.

NVIDIA recently told their board partners that they will need to source their own RAM and will not be bundling it with chips anymore.

If there is a supply crunch on DRAM, commercial GPU production lines will start having idle downtime. That is literally the worst possible thing that can happen to a company that has invested heavily in tooling and they will negotiate at or below cost production runs to fill the gaps if a customer can bring their own DRAM to the table.

kccqzy2• 8 months ago

What do you mean “might be” trying their hand? It’s been widely reported that they are doing exactly that. It’s even known that they are doing it with Broadcom.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/openai_broadcom_deal/

alecco• 8 months ago

That's blogspam. Actual Tom's Hardware article from October 1st:

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

kasabali7• 8 months ago

That's not blogspam. There's a lot more in the mlid post than the linked news item above. Whether it's commentary or speculation I urge everyone to read and decide for themselves.

pengaru• 8 months ago

In case you needed more confirmation OpenAI has no IP moat...

zahlman• 8 months ago

What specifically happened in June to set this off? It can't just be "waves hands AI/LLMs" because ChatGPT has existed for years.

cogman10• 8 months ago

"Waves hands at AI/LLMs"

The problem is that training these models and using these models has required exponentially increasing amounts of memory.

ChatGPT has existed for years and in those years it's userbase and model size has increased tremendously. Not to mention the fact that a lot of competitors have sprung up in the wake of GPT. Including the likes of cloud based open model hosting services.

AdieuToLogic5• 8 months ago

What specifically happened in June to set this off?

Tariffs implemented by this administration:

  "Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff 
  pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic 
  strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While 
  services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration 
  in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of 
  greater price pressures to come. The Fed will want to hold 
  steady as it awaits more data."[0]

0 - https://www.reuters.com/business/us-inflation-expected-rise-...

IAmGraydon• 8 months ago

Afraid not. This has not happened across the board to all components.

pprotas• 8 months ago

Why did European prices have the same increase then?

pjc502• 8 months ago

The tariffs are bad, but you're simply wrong here - US tariffs do not affect global prices, it's OpenAI buying up production in advance and cornering the market.

eru• 8 months ago

Perhaps some tariff shenanigans?

Maxion3• 8 months ago

OpenAI bought up a big chunk of global DRAM production:

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

donohoe• 8 months ago

Who are the main players that make or benefit from these inflated DRAM prices?

cubefox• 8 months ago

Make? The market of course.

Benefit? The manufacturers of course.

didgetmaster• 8 months ago

I upgraded my pc about this time last year (new CPU, RAM, and motherboard).

I was originally going to just get 64GB of DDR5-6000, with the option of adding another 64GB later, thinking the price might drop even further. At the last minute, I decided to get the whole 128GB instead. Glad I did.

neom• 8 months ago

Funny how many dot-com esq things are popping up.

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

Aurornis10• 8 months ago

The big news story this cycle is that OpenAI secured two large contracts with two separate DRAM companies at the same time, carefully timing the deals so that neither DRAM company knew about the deal with other. Had either company known about the true demand from OpenAI they would have charged a lot more, but each only saw about half.

In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were both caught off guard and left a lot of money on the table.

The current price increase is the result of the huge demand spike. Production takes years to ramp up, but demand has spiked rapidly. Supply and demand.

pmontra• 8 months ago

And when demand eventually crashes, all the new production capacity is left without buyers to sell to, so maybe it does not even make sense to create it.

cm2187• 8 months ago

One difference that strikes me with the .com bubble is that I don't remember the .com companies having sustained multi-billions losses / cash burn. They were not profitable but this is quite different. If (or when) the music stops, won't OpenAI go bust immediately? That's quite a counterparty risk those companies are taking.

PeterStuer4• 8 months ago

You have to wonder whether they realy intend to use the ram, or they just spotted an opportunity to corner an essential market and choke/extort in resale.

nebula88043• 8 months ago

They are not going to repeat the Windows 8 debacle again are they? (Over producing in response to perceived demand only to not get the demand when they are ready to sell) Didn't that bankrupt some memory manufacturers?

AndrewDavis• 8 months ago

To those who haven't heard how colossal the size of OpenAIs contracts are.

900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity.

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

redwood4• 8 months ago

I find it very hard to believe that two South Korea based Chaebol memory producers would have no wind of this from the other.. more likely is that they both agree that it is not in their or the nation's interest to take on too much of a risk profile... while also balancing the risk of appearing to be colluding.

bigbadfeline2• 8 months ago

Supply and demand.

Fake demand - fueled by ponzi debt financed by other debt.

Oh, forgot to mention - fake supply too. China was doubly-excluded from the RAM market by using both equipment export bans and tariffs - ensuring the supply is frozen solid.

I'm pretty sure this isn't a coincidence or due to incompetence.

somenameforme• 8 months ago

I don't understand this. I'm looking at prices on some Asian store fronts and it's nowhere even remotely near these. I'm looking at DDR5-6000 2x16 for about $130, with no apparent limits.

Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?

mondojesus• 8 months ago

Is it possible they are fakes?

cncjchsue7• 8 months ago

Aus stock was cheap a couple of weeks ago, it's caught up though. I'd snatch it up if you need it.

nodja• 8 months ago

The current prices are a response to future stock, not current. It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap because they know there will be limited stock in the near future. Asian retailers may be more honest and keep their margins the same, but will catch up in a month or two.

zozbot2346• 8 months ago

It's just surge pricing to manage demand, not "price gouging". Being able to buy RAM at high prices is a lot better than being unable to source it at all because everyone else is panic-hoarding.

Aurornis10• 8 months ago

It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap

The retail price of a product is a function of the market rate at the intersection of supply and demand. The price paid for inventory on the shelf doesn’t matter.

It works both ways. If retailers bought a lot of RAM at high prices and then the market suddenly dropped, they could have to sell it at a loss.

Some people get irrationally angry at this, but you do it too. If you bought a house for $500K and the market went up such that it was worth $700K, you wouldn’t think it was “price gouging” to list it at market rate. You’re just trading an asset for cash at the current price. The price you bought it at is irrelevant to the price you’re going to sell it for.

csomar• 8 months ago

The market is inefficient. Also, if you are in a small country, the demand is not there. So the seller will sell with regular prices. The stock will also be very low to export it back to where it came from.

filloooo• 8 months ago

Yeah, that's the spot market price, small sellers are more nimble, big platform sellers however probably feel the need to price in supply risks.

Shouldn't be recycled chips too, as those were always older gens. I bought one ddr3 dirt cheap and no issues.

lmc• 8 months ago

I just checked my go-to stores in Europe. Holy shit. I bought a 5200-speed 16GB DDR5 kit in October for 55 eur. Now it's selling for 240 eur. The 6000-speed model is now 390 eur.

Semaphor2• 8 months ago

July: 172,38 € for a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit

Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €

darkstar_16• 8 months ago

I've been meaning to get more components for a diy NAS since atleast the last year and just been pushing it lazily. I'm literally kicking myself now when I actually started looking up deals for this black friday.

shantara• 8 months ago

The kit I bought last year for €200 is around €800 now. Crazy!

Macha• 8 months ago

Been watching 2x32GB DDR5-6000 go from €360 to €920 on a local retailer over the last two weeks

They even have one SKU of 2x32GB DDR5-6400 that’s gone to… €4480

bluescrn• 8 months ago

Starting to make Apple's RAM upsell prices look competitive...

omgmajk2• 8 months ago

I just checked our local apple store website and going from 48gb of ram on a M4 MacBook Pro it's 1500€ to get 128gb. Seems about the same :E

ivanjermakov• 8 months ago

I bought a post lease mini PC with 16GB 4 months ago for the todays price of its RAM.

thelastgallon• 8 months ago

So, RAM outperforms stocks, gold, bitcoin, NFTs, real estate?

baq6• 8 months ago

DDR5 is digital silver

drewda• 8 months ago

Maybe this is a "strategic inflection point" for Intel... to get back into the DRAM business?

zozbot2346• 8 months ago

They should get back into the Optane business first. Take the existing Optane memory to a modern PCIe 5 bus, and it will be competitive with lots of uses for DRAM. PCIe 5 gives you basically DDR4-like transfer bandwidth, and the Optane media has better latency and far better DWPD endurance than existing NAND SSD's. It's a total no-brainer.

renewiltord• 8 months ago

Got real lucky. I was trying to negotiate a guy down on RAM. I wanted a server without as much RAM. In the end, I had to take the 768 GB. It only cost $1k more than 192 GB at the time. Unfortunately I can’t really sell off the excess because I need to substitute down the RAM modules to fill all 12. Ah well.

wwwlouishinofun• 8 months ago

It hasn't been long since this happened The price hasn't been rising all year For d4 it's June, d5 is September so what happens

Snoozus2• 8 months ago

Maybe it's time we make a simple web page 100KB again? Is there some kind of CDN minification, adblocking and compression service? Maybe even server side rendering of websites?

Then a smartphone would work fine with 1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy.

Maxion3• 8 months ago

Simple web pages can be made small with modern tooling, e.g. AstroJS.

The problem is that most web pages these days fundamentally are not simple.

Rather than trying to make web pages small, the real effort would be in designing web pages to be simple.

The large majority of software devs, PMs and the like don't really know how to do anything else than a Node + React webapp.

sksksk• 8 months ago

I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs.

I often regret in my career not pushing back more on "requirements" that ended up requiring a more complicated app, whereas the customer would have been happier with a simpler solution.

Snoozus2• 8 months ago

I agree, most websites allow complex flows. But I suspect, that most loads don't ever touch those. There is probably an automated way to deliver just a flat page, and maybe even allow for the top 5 interactions without loading all the frameworks and libraries.

gloxkiqcza• 8 months ago

Obligatory mentions:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

zozbot2346• 8 months ago

Obligatory mention: https://www.downloadmoreram.com

markbao8• 8 months ago

Most people have phones that can handle webpages with 1-5MB JS bundles. Why artificially limit what you can do on the web? Why limit ourselves to 1GB RAM when more resources means tech becomes more useful?

Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case for most people.

Most people want their cars to be safe and convenient, and their webpages useful and rich, more so than they want to return to some idealized simplicity.

A simple webpage or blog with minimal styling that runs as an ARM binary on a TV remote is cool and fun but it’s not economically useful. It’s the equivalent of a manual scooter. We can build better apps (in the same way that car manufacturers can build less crappy infotainment systems) but optimizing for scarcity isn’t the answer in a world where abundance tends to grow.

(Edit: your downvotes mean nothing to me, I’ve seen what gets upvoted!)

suddenlybananas• 8 months ago

You can do a lot with little, it just requires investing more in development which understandably most companies are uninterested in. Besides, plenty of websites are bloated as all hell. Why does a newspaper website, for example, have to be very much more than plain html?

kortilla5• 8 months ago

Your mistake is assuming there is some correlation with usefulness and size.

The JS Gmail UI from 15 years ago was just as functional as the one today.

Websites that are supposed to be simple lists end up bloated and laggy because of really poor JS that makes one request per item iteratively to populate a list.

jdthedisciple• 8 months ago

Actually a plain car would be great

I crank the window up and down 3x faster than the little button

And I could adjust my damn seat before electricity is available... sigh

capyba• 8 months ago

I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more.

I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.

When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.

More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.

yourusername2• 8 months ago

And if someone could make a chat program not use 1 GB of RAM that would be great.

m-schuetz• 8 months ago

The majority of space is usually ads and I doubt websites want to reduce that.

immibis9• 8 months ago

Apple could make it happen. For some reason when an iPhone won't load something, people blame the thing instead of the phone. If they made Safari show an error page when a page used more than 256MB of RAM, suddenly the problem would disappear overnight.

M95D2• 8 months ago

1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy

I remember a time when I was surfing the web with 256MB and a 5KB/s modem.

oblio7• 8 months ago

True, but I don't want to go back to that. Bloated web pages suck. But hi-res, true color images and videos don't suck.

tim333• 8 months ago

I was a bit shocked the other day when Chrome gave me a complaint about memory shortage and said I had something like 200GB in website data on my 256GB laptop(!) All put there by various web pages without my knowledge.

venturecruelty4• 8 months ago

Maybe it's time to not let a single company buy all the RAM.

mrandish• 8 months ago

Been planning to build my daughter a gaming PC for Xmas. Feel lucky I found a pre-built with 32GB RAM in a warehouse store on black Friday that hadn't been marked up yet. First pre-built desktop I've bought in decades and it was actually cheaper than I could build myself due to the crazy RAM prices.

tills13• 8 months ago

Why is it that consumers always get shafted here and we just keep going on like "it's just business"

Why isn't some consumer protection regulator going "actually no, OpenAI, you can't corner the market for the foreseeable future"

Hell, make OpenAI pay for this shit up front. You want to corner the market? Put up the money you don't have.

throwthrow_• 8 months ago

I asked ChatGPT if it can generate a bunch of RAM for me. He says this is some kind of famous joke or something.

(I’m sorry I couldn’t resist)

tgsovlerkhgsel• 8 months ago

"Downloading RAM" is more feasible than people think.

The seek time of a consumer-grade hard disk is said to be on the order of 10 ms. That's roughly the latency of a very high quality FTTH connection. Meaning that if you run a HDD rather than an SSD, a swap file in the cloud could potentially be faster than a local one (especially when you consider multiple reads/writes that could be done in parallel).

It's not exactly downloading more RAM but decently close to call it that for the joke.

Tepix• 8 months ago

Yeah, not exactly just 1 million times slower.

vlabakje90• 8 months ago

Someone managed to boot a machine from a file system on Google Drive.

https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

HenriTEL• 8 months ago

Increasing swap is more like adding more HDD. It won't help memory pressure issues.

rolandog• 8 months ago

I wonder who the "visionaries" were that set the marked increase trend of max prices near 2024-12-09 for DDR4-3600 2x32GB and DDR4-3600 2x16GB?

I think that acted as a dog whistle for the rest of the market signalling there'd be no consequences for ripping other people off.

Also relevant: https://youtu.be/B7sB1-8jKno

Havoc2• 8 months ago

Really hoping this comes down again soonish. My desktop doesn’t have many years left :/

baq6• 8 months ago

it's a commodity, it'll come down eventually, but soonish? depends completely on if/when AI bubble deflates and datacenter projects get cancelled.

energy1238• 8 months ago

12-24 months is my best guess. I bought some at inflated prices today at a retailer that failed to update to the latest market price by 15%. I'm not waiting that long only to be faced with a dilemma about waiting even longer for DDR6 to become reasonably priced.

jl6• 8 months ago

How to get every tech enthusiast in the world to root for OpenAI to implode in order to release the RAM hostages.

shevy-java2• 8 months ago

Not only that - I think OpenAI and all those other AI blobs must pay compensation damage to The People for inflating the prices here and skyrocketing costs.

shevy-java2• 8 months ago

I think most of us came to the conclusion that the AI hype is heavily responsible for this.

I want my money back. There should be an extra-tax on all those AI companies - they are heavily responsible for DRAM costing more now.

kevin061• 8 months ago

GPU prices never went down after the crypto rush replaced GPUs with ASICs. I hope this does not repeat with DRAM and AI.

rjh29• 8 months ago

I picked up a pretty cheap second-hand GPU after the mining boom ended!

supermatt• 8 months ago

Well, I guess one way these AI companies can stop us meeting our needs with local models - make it so we just cant get the hardware to run them...

yahoozoo2• 8 months ago

Man, fuck these AI (and crypto) companies causing the rise of prices in GPUs and now memory.

christophilus• 8 months ago

It’s not clear to me how long the contracts last. The Tom’s Hardware article linked below mentioned “in 2025”, so, do we know if this monopolistic DRAM grab is nearly over or only just beginning?

merpkz• 8 months ago

If things go the way they are, I wonder how long until buying a used Playstation 4 (8GB DDR5 RAM) at around 100USD a piece to put Linux on it and use as a server in cluster will become viable thing to do? Bring back console clusters!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

H8crilA• 8 months ago

Or just remove the RAM and put it in more useful hardware.

officeplant• 8 months ago

8GB GDDR5* Ram. Huge difference and one of the reasons the PS4 slapped the Xbox One around.

greatgib• 8 months ago

Somehow another sign that our world is collapsing.

We have more and more wars, less free trade and international spirit, freedom and privacy is going down the sink, "everything is going down", and now ram is a good example of things that use to be abordable and with price going down, becoming expensive luxury good.

One could say that RAM price is just a special temporary event not related to our down trend but a decade ago major players would not have left a profitable consumer market without new actors coming to fill in.

But now we prefer restricting offer instead of increasing production...

bobson381• 8 months ago

Net energy surplus had to end sometime, we have just decided to speed run it for some reason. Looking forward to sledding down the other side of the carbon pulse!

rglynn• 8 months ago

I think "collapsing" might be hyperbole.

It certainly seems clear that a purely upward trajectory of peace and living standards in the West was not supposed to last. History has its ebbs and flows, I'm sure we have a long way downhill to go, but I suspect there are peaceful times on the other side.

mks_shuffle• 8 months ago

What could be the potential impact on smartphone and tablet prices in the coming months or years? I am assuming that laptop prices will start increasing next year.

toss1• 8 months ago

Moore's Law has been reversed. Instead of doubling transistors or capacity every 18 months, it is halved.

This is some kind of fundamentally different era for the tech industry, but ...

immibis9• 8 months ago

So it's doubled. From the complaints you'd think it was more like 10x.

ortusdux• 8 months ago

Some stores are going to a 'market price' system because the are tired of constantly printing new price tags.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984629/ram-is-so-expensive-...

agigao• 8 months ago

I was planning to upgrade my PC 2 months ago, Corsair Dominator DDR5 96GB was ~ $400, and I thought it was a bit too much.

Well...

htk• 8 months ago

I remember when crypto ruined the market for GPUs, and now AI is ruining the market for DRAM. Darn you, fads.

ge96• 8 months ago

what's funny for me, I bought this nice ram a while back but my CPU caps its speed so it's stuck at 2400mhz like ugh

nickpsecurity• 8 months ago

At these prices, it might pay off to start an open-ish, non-profit, DRAM company to produce chips good enough for these purposes. They can sell a certain amount above cost for consumers and small businesses. Full price with guaranteed volume for some, enterprise suppliers.

The profits might be used to port the DRAM to multiple foundries to gradually increase supply. Alternatively, they can shift to produce other components, like VRAM. Make the low-to-midrange accelerators with larger VRAM more available at reasonable prices.

Just speculating. I don't know silicon economics well.

estimator7292• 8 months ago

Man, we can't even buy bare DRAM chips at work. Nobody will sell us anything. The whole US electronics industry has suddenly been put in a chokehold for.... perpetuating the AI bubble?

Man it'd be great if these AI assholes could stop absolutely trashing every single part of society, the economy, and the physical planet at large.

khaki54• 8 months ago

The actual headline here is sort of misleading -- the 4x price increase is over the past 3 months!

subarctic• 8 months ago

I mean I wouldn't say it's misleading, it just says what the graph contains. It's important that it shows 18 months so you can see how flat it was before

zeristor2• 8 months ago

On the flip side should the AI bubble burst won’t these be cheap if the data centres are liquidated?

Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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