The RAM shortage could last years

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/914672/the-ram-shortage-could-last-years

by omer_k • 3 months ago

354 522 3 months ago

theverge.com

ochre-ogre• 3 months ago

can't read the article due to a paywall.

majso• 3 months ago

here is the source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-sk-g...

wolvoleo• 3 months ago

https://archive.is/QGU89

fouc• 3 months ago

I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of Google's TurboQuant[0] introduced 26 days prior.

Given that TurboQuant results in a 6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches and up to 8x boost in speed, this optimization is already showing up in llama.cpp, enabling significantly bigger contexts without having to run a smaller model to fit it all in memory.

Some people thought it might significantly improve the RAM situation, though I remain a bit skeptical - the demand is probably still larger than the reduction turboquant brings.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513475

WesolyKubeczek3• 3 months ago

You can still use as much memory, but fit more things into it, so I don’t think the current market hogs will let go easily.

Bombthecat• 3 months ago

You still need to hold the model in memory. If you have for example 16 GB ram, the gains aren't that much

anon373839• 3 months ago

That's not what consumes the most memory at scale. The KV caches are per-user.

tuetuopay4• 3 months ago

The net effect won’t be a memory use reduction to achieve the same thing. We’ll do more with the same amount of memory. Companies will increase the context windows of their offerings and people will use it.

That is the sad reality of the future of memory.

ehnto• 3 months ago

I am not convinced that more context will be useful, practical use of current models at 1mil context window shows they get less effective as the window grows. Given model progress is slowing as well, perhaps we end up reaching a balance of context size and competency sooner than expected.

lhl• 3 months ago

BTW, a number of corrections. The TurboQuant paper was submitted to Arxiv back in April 2025: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874

Current "TurboQuant" implementations are about 3.8X-4.9X on compression (w/ the higher end taking some significant hits of GSM8K performance) and with about 80-100% baseline speed (no improvement, regression): https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/38479

For those not paying attention, it's probably worth sending this and ongoing discussion for vLLM https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/38171 and llama.cpp through your summarizer of choice - TurboQuant is fine, but not a magic bullet. Personally, I've been experimenting with DMS and I think it has a lot more promise and can be stacked with various quantization schemes.

The biggest savings in kvcache though is in improved model architecture. Gemma 4's SWA/global hybrid saves up to 10X kvcache, MLA/DSA (the latter that helps solve global attention compute) does as well, and using linear, SSM layers saves even more.

None of these reduce memory demand (Jevon's paradox, etc), though. Looking at my coding tools, I'm using about 10-15B cached tokens/mo currently (was 5-8B a couple months ago) and while I think I'm probably above average on the curve, I don't consider myself doing anything especially crazy and this year, between mainstream developers, and more and more agents, I don't think there's really any limit to the number of tokens that people will want to consume.

fy20• 3 months ago

The work going into local models seems to be targeting lower RAM/VRAM which will definately help.

For example Gemma 4 32B, which you can run on an off-the-shelf laptop, is around the same or even higher intelligence level as the SOTA models from 2 years ago (e.g. gpt-4o). Probably by the time memory prices come down we will have something as smart as Opus 4.7 that can be run locally.

Bigger models of course have more embedded knowledge, but just knowing that they should make a tool call to do a web search can bypass a lot of that.

muyuu• 3 months ago

that will only increase the demand for RAM as models will now be usable in scenarios that weren't feasible prior, and the ceiling for model and context size is not even visible at this point

I hate to mention Jevons paradox as it has become cliche by now, but this is a textbook such scenario

gajjanag• 3 months ago

TurboQuant is known across the industry to not be state of the art. There are superior schemes for KV quant at every bitrate. Eg, SpectralQuant: https://github.com/Dynamis-Labs/spectralquant among many, many papers.

Given that TurboQuant results in a 6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches

All depends on baseline. The "6x" is by stylistic comparison to a BF16 KV cache; not a state of the art 8 or 4 bit KV cache scheme.

NooneAtAll33• 3 months ago

6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches and up to 8x boost in speed

mind that you're quoting marketing material that's largely based on unfair baseline testing (like comparing 4 bit vs 32 bit to get "8x speed")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haoAI2lIZ74

ethan_smith• 3 months ago

Your skepticism is well placed. Every time a new quantization or compression technique drops, the immediate response is to just scale up context length or run a bigger model to fill whatever headroom was freed up. It's Jevons paradox applied to VRAM - efficiency gains get eaten by increased usage almost immediately.

tim-projects• 3 months ago

The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.

jeff_vader• 3 months ago

Wait until China invades Taiwan.. (ok, it's not too likely, but what if?)

Renaud• 3 months ago

I think RAM shortages would be the least of our problems…

Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU.

We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…

energy12311• 3 months ago

The chance of significant disruption is higher than the chances of a full blown invasion. China has hybrid options like a quarantine of chip exports.

kylehotchkiss• 3 months ago

Does China need to take Taiwan? American protection of the island seems to be a waning concern. I could see that being a peaceful event now. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj94y87k2ljo

HerbManic3• 3 months ago

I said it for many years that OS developers need to focus on over optimisations. If it wasnt a chip sgortage it would be the ever slowing progress on chip scaling.

But software optimisation helps all hardware and that doesnt drive sales.

Linux however, they dont have to worry about that. Maybe it is finally the era of Haiku OS as the ghost of BeOS rises!

tomaskafka5• 3 months ago

There is almost no way any hyper optimized OS could protect you from Windsurf re-layouting the whole UI 60 times per second because of badly implemented spinner, and taking 8 GB of RAM to show it.

Marsymars2• 3 months ago

I'm skeptical - the apps I use either have a) enough lock-in that they don't have the institutional will to optimize or b) a lack of institutional resources to optimize.

Basically, the optimizing that can happen is that I ditch heavy tools in favour of lighter ones, and hopefully enough other people do the same to help lighter tools with finances/dev resources.

joquarky• 3 months ago

That lock-in is going to have to be very deep to fend off reverse engineered clones.

WesolyKubeczek3• 3 months ago

I fear that the real reason we do have a shortage, I mean, the real reason for the demand, is AI companies scooping what they can so that their competitors, whether existing or incumbent, can’t get to it.

tuetuopay4• 3 months ago

This was one of the theories behind the wafer buyout by OpenAI indeed. Pretty efficient way to make everyone panic and cut off of new hardware.

WesolyKubeczek3• 3 months ago

Was it debubked in any way (e.g. by OpenAI actually showing what they do with the wafers?)

stuxnet79• 3 months ago

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years.

It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all the dry powder out of the private markets. Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue. It is increasingly looking like they might not commit to the purchase order they made which kick-started this whole panic over RAM.

Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?

mschuster912• 3 months ago

Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?

We aren't. The remaining memory manufacturers fear getting caught in a "pork cycle" yet again - that is why there's only the three large ones left anyway.

ahartmetz3• 3 months ago

If they don't expand capacity much, the only negative consequences I foresee happening for them is that they might lose spending discipline, and that systems will be set up to make do with a little less memory. Apart from that, it's just very high profits followed by more or less regular profits.

twic• 3 months ago

Surely this can be solved with financial engineering. The memory makers build more capacity, but they finance it with something like floating-rate notes linked to an index of memory prices, or even catastrophe bonds or AT1s. Or more crudely, set up special purpose vehicles to build the extra capacity, and issue convertible bonds from those; if the memory market collapses, investors don't get paid, but they do get a memory factory.

moffkalast2• 3 months ago

Memory makers did get themselves into this situation by selling all wafers for empty promises and alienating everyone but OpenAI tbh. I do hope they end up holding the bag once again, cause after covid and the cartel thing they don't seem to ever learn their lesson on how to have the tiniest amount of integrity.

gck1• 3 months ago

While we're giving away bags, I'd like HDD manufacturers to get some too.

zeristor• 3 months ago

That wouldn’t help if another one goes bankrupt that’ll only make things worse.

AnthonyMouse10• 3 months ago

Memory makers did get themselves into this situation by selling all wafers for empty promises and alienating everyone but OpenAI tbh.

Wasn't the problem here that OpenAI was negotiating with Samsung and SK Hynix at the same time without the other one knowing about it? People only realized the implications when they announced both deals at once.

kubb2• 3 months ago

I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years.

There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment.

They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they want.

IshKebab• 3 months ago

Maybe if they had no competitors...

SlinkyOnStairs• 3 months ago

I think you're massively overestimating how much money is really accessible here. The parent comment's right that all of the easily available VC & private equity investment is basically used up. OpenAI was struggling to sell $600M of private equity, the big multi-billion dollar investment packages had lots of conditions and non-cash in it.

more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt)

While this is the most reliable funding, it's still not very accessible. OpenAI is a money pit, and their demands are growing quickly. The US government has started a bunch of very expensive spending. If OpenAI were to require yearly bundles of it's recent "$120B" deal, that's 6% of the US' discretionary budget. 12.5% of the non-military discretionary budget. (And the military is going to ask for a lot more money this year) Even the idea of just issuing more debt is dubious because they're going to want to do that to pay for the wars that are rapidly spiralling out of control.

None of this is saying that the US government can't or wouldn't pay for it, but it's non trivial and it's unclear how much Altman can threaten the US government "give me a trillion dollars or the economy explodes" without consequences.

Further deficit-spending isn't without it's risks for the US government either. Interests rates are already creeping up, and a careless explosion of deficit may well trigger a debt crisis.

from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds)

This would be at great cost. OpenAI would need to open up about it's financial performance to go public itself. With it's CFO being put on what is effectively Administrative Leave for pushing against going public, we can assume the financials are so catastrophic an IPO might bomb and take the company down with it. Nobody's going to be investing privately in a company that has no public takers.

Getting money through other companies is also running into limits. Big Tech has deep pockets but they've already started slowing down, switching to debt to finance AI investment, and similarly are increasingly pressured by their own shareholders to show results.

from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards

The practical mechanism of this is "AI companies raise their prices". That might also just crash the bubble if demand evaporates. For all the hype, the productivity benefit hasn't really shown up in economy-wide aggregates. The moment AI becomes "expensive", all the casual users will drop it. And the non-casual users are likely to follow. The idea of "AI tokens" as a job perk is cute, but exceedingly few are going to accept lower salary in order to use AI at their job.

There's simply not much money to take out of people's pockets these days, with how high cost of living has gotten.

from offshore investment.

This is a pretty good source of money. The wealthy Arabian oil states have very deep slush funds, extensively investing in AI to get ties to US businesses and in the hope of diversifying their resource economies.

...

"Was". Was a good source of money.

saidnooneever• 3 months ago

love that theres virtually infinite capital there. meanwhile in the rest of the world there is virtually no food.

torginus2• 3 months ago

China already has a well developed DRAM industry, as DRAM is somewhat easier than logic, and can tolerate a much higher defect rate. The industry will figure this out.

Another point is I often see the money argument - like country X has more money, so they can afford to do more and better R&D, make more stuff.

This stuff comes out of factories, that need to be built, the machinery procured, engineers trained and hired.

platevoltage4• 3 months ago

I'm guessing they become pets.com within the year. At least I hope.

Cthulhu_• 3 months ago

To add a more local hurdle as well, the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection.

That is, memory capacity is reserved for datacenters yet to be built, but this will do weird things if said datacenter construction is postponed or cancelled altogether.

consp2• 3 months ago

That guarantee is not as much of a guarantee as stated in the media. You get a guarantee it will be planned at a certain time (as in looked at), not that it will be build. The cost of doing business is taking risks and mitigating them. There is a reason the nuclear plant in Borsele was build: an aluminium smelter. Maybe you should arrange for something similar as a datacenter (no politician will fall on a sword for that but you can try). The (original) power draw is about the same 80-100MW.

AnthonyMouse10• 3 months ago

the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection.

Are the Netherlands a large proportion of global datacenters?

drnick13• 3 months ago

This just highlights what an utter failure and self-inflicted wound the green policies of Euro countries have been. Europe has already lost the AI race to the U.S. and China.

jaeyson• 3 months ago

That year 2030, man I'm feeling weird on that timeline in general...

broeng• 3 months ago

I think Denmark is in the same situation, and recently gave a timeline of 10 years for new projects to get connected to the grid.

throwaway20377• 3 months ago

I'm not disagreeing with your post, but I did a quick check here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth...

It says that in 2025, Netherlands was a net exporter of electricity (~14,000 GWh). My guess: Where they want to build data centers, the grid cannot handle it, but the overall system has more than enough power to build data centers. Do you think that sounds like a resonable guess?

hsbauauvhabzb2• 3 months ago

The people who fucked over consumers are left holding the back that they sold us out over?

Oh no!

VladStanimir2• 3 months ago

They won't be, prices are high because they are refusing to build capacity for demand that may evaporated by the time they are done. They are holding back and building only enough so when the bubble pops they will be fine.

naveen99• 3 months ago

But wouldn’t you rather hbm prices come down first ? Memory makers will be fine. There is practically infinite demand. Unless you get china style rationing of compute per person world wide.

The real issue is everyone wanting to upgrade to hbm, ddr5, and nvme5 at the same time.

torginus2• 3 months ago

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange.

If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?

cco• 3 months ago

That card only had 16GB of memory; its memory bandwidth was 1TB/s.

tpm3• 3 months ago

1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today

5090 has 1.8 TB/s?

platevoltage4• 3 months ago

I was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.

HerbManic3• 3 months ago

I have been wondering this recently. It was the convention that if you wanted to keep costs down, try to keep the memory bus size down as low as possible. Still remember the awful Radeon 9200 SE - 64bit data bus that strangled an already slow GPU.

Heck, I have a phone with a 16bit memory bus for instance. The high(ish) clock rate only makes up the difference slightly.

But with general prices on all components going up, it might not be such a big factor any more.

HBM migght make sense for higher end products which can free up space for the lower end that will never use the tech.

sidewndr46• 3 months ago

It also does 64 bit floating point I think?

rasz• 3 months ago

And the bottleneck at the time was HBM interposers, not actual ram dies.

parl_match• 3 months ago

why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?

because the gods want it all and are willing to pay top dollar.

whatsupdog• 3 months ago

Supply and demand. The prices are high because of high demand.

mitjam• 3 months ago

Yes, it's interesting that HBM was invented by a collaboration between AMD and SK Hynix. It seems, HBM is the way to go for GPUs, anyway.

The GB202 die that's in the GDDR7 based RTX 5090 and RTX 6000 Pro literally needed to be this big to support the 512bit memory bus. It's probably only getting worse with smaller node sizes. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwgAGG2sZQ&t=65s).

BTW: The 1TB/s is matched by RTX4090 and surpassed by the RTX5090 (1,79 TB/s).

nektro• 3 months ago

the hardware dump once we're through the bubble is gonna be wild

tiberious726• 3 months ago

The fury X was a beast for a consumer card, sadly limited by having a mere 4gb of (hbm) VRAM, and a non-refillable AIO. But back when games could fit in 4gb, it was incredible.

I'd absolutely buy another hbm consumer GPU if it had at least 8gb (and if I got the vibe/hope AMD will actually support for a couple years...)

xbmcuser• 3 months ago

I am betting the pendulum swings faster to the other side to excess capacity as all the construction lies of Altman fall through with financiers waking up the the fact they can't build the infrasctructure as fast nor make any profits on that infrastructure that will get built.

trvz2• 3 months ago

Those financiers can’t risk not being involved in a company with even just a slight potential for AGI.

ece3• 3 months ago

OpenAI does have projections for making money with ads that would make Google and Meta blush.

Rekindle8090• 3 months ago

This will result in demand destruction which will starve the enterprise which will starve the hyperscaler. theres no situation where people not being able to afford hardware for 4 years results in the bubble not popping

fc417fc8025• 3 months ago

I'd expect unaffordable hardware to drive demand for thin clients connected to cloud services which is something that had already been happening gradually prior to this.

quickthrowman• 3 months ago

Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?

I hope they do, they did not have to agree to sell so much RAM to one customer. They’ve been caught colluding and price fixing more than once, I hope they take it in the shorts and new competitors arise or they go bankrupt and new management takes over the existing plants.

Don’t put all your eggs in the one basket is how the old saying goes.

shevy-java2• 3 months ago

Good point. I think both AI companies and hardware makers should pay for the damage they caused to us here.

They act as a de-facto monopoly and milk us. Why is this allowed?

kennywinker2• 3 months ago

Allowed? We live in a neoliberal world where corporate monopolies / oligopolies aren’t even remotely regulated. If you try to do even the gentlest regulation of companies people scream about communism and totalitarianism. Unless the regulation serves the monopolies by making it harder to enter the market.

It started with raegan, and even parties on the “left” in the west believe in it with very few exceptions.

estimator72922• 3 months ago

Because for the last 60 years we've allowed big business to buy and hollow out our legal and education systems.

jonas21• 3 months ago

It's a business with huge up-front capital expenses and typically very low margins. Supply is scaling up slowly because it's hard, and if you overshoot, you go out of business.

Nobody is "allowing" this. It's a natural property of being both advanced technology and a commodity at the same time.

bombcar2• 3 months ago

Don’t the memory makers always get left holding the bag? I feel this has happened at least three times before.

formerly_proven• 3 months ago

DRAM and to a lesser degree storage are notorious for their feast and famine cycles

(Well that and collusion)

whatever12• 3 months ago

All of the capital intensive businesses face this issue. Chemicals, Shipping, Semiconductors etc.

You get market signals that the demand is there, you acquire the necessary capital, you spend 5 years to build capacity, but guess what, 5 other market players did the same thing. So now you are doomed, because the market is flooded and you have low cash flow since you need to drop prices to compete for pennies.

Now you cannot find capital, you don't invest, but guess what, neither your competitors did. So now the demand is higher than the supply. Your price per unit sold skyrocketed, but you don't have enough capacity!

Rinse and repeat.

Capitalists claim that this is optimal.

nostrademons• 3 months ago

What kind of consumer electronics can you build with HBM? That's the startup you should be founding...

daemonologist• 3 months ago

AMD has built some consumer GPUs in the recent past with HBM - RX Vega and Radeon VII (although I assume not all "HBM" is created equal).

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

HBM is just normal DDR RAM that's been packaged with (much) wider-than-usual data buses. That's where the high bandwidth comes from, not from high clock rates or any other innovation or improvement in core specifications.

Very few applications other than GPUs need HBM.

zamalek2• 3 months ago

Anything where there's _at worst_ solder and traces between the compute and the memory. That's why you see it on GPUs (and Apple hardware). DRAMs advantage is modularity.

At least as I understand it.

PunchyHamster7• 3 months ago

They can just switch back to normal DRAM if HBM demand drops, you ain't getting it cheap just coz AI flops

GarvielLoken• 3 months ago

I think the datacenters will simple be repurposed for hardware as a service, specially cloud gaming, sense it will be to expensive to buy a new computer anyway.

elorant• 3 months ago

The market is already stagnated. Even if OpenAI doesn’t buy what they reserved other players will do so. SK Hynix CEO said there is a 20% gap between supply and demand per year. And that doesn’t account the shock effect that will take place the moment prices normalize and everyone and their dog will go out and start buying inventory to avoid the next crisis. I for one would certainly buy more than I currently need just in case.

fn-mote• 3 months ago

I think: s/stagnated/saturated/

Edit: also, that demand pressure is going to be applied constantly; there isn’t going to be a shock, it’s just going to keep prices high longer.

ece3• 3 months ago

The FOMO is strong, but can also indicate a bubble. Demand is from circular deals and APIs are being locked down already.

zozbot2349• 3 months ago

There's actually plenty of demand for LPDDR even in the AI datacenter, because HBM is quite wasteful of area for any given memory capacity.

BeeOnRope• 3 months ago

Wafer area?

danishanish• 3 months ago

I think I’m missing something. Financially, what bag would the memory makers be holding here? I don’t think I’m well informed regarding how these deals were structured.

michaelbuckbee• 3 months ago

Memory makers make capital investements (build different factories, convert physical production lines, etc.) to meet orders that have been place for the next ~5 years.

OpenAI (or whoever) crashes and can't pay for the order leaving the memory makers in a tough spot.

Macha• 3 months ago

Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?

The memory makers specifically did not scale up capacity to avoid being left holding the bag.

eldenring• 3 months ago

Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue.

this view isn't updated correctly post-claude code and codex. there will clearly be sufficient demand.

philistine2• 3 months ago

Seriously? One release is all it took to turn the whole ship around?

metalcrow• 3 months ago

Do the memory makers not have a contract in place for an order this large? I assume that they aren't going to take "trust us bro" as good enough for several million dollars in orders, and even if there is a way to cancel the order it won't be free. I would assume so at least, but i would like if anyone knew for certain.

sebmellen• 3 months ago

* several Billion dollars in orders.

aidenn02• 3 months ago

I was interning at a company that made networking gear that was put out of business when their largest customer canceled an order within a week of the delivery date.

The customer ran out of money. In terms of where you are in line of debtors when you haven't even delivered the product to a customer, it's so far back as to be assured you won't get your money.

If the memory makers got a deposit from OpenAI as part of this deal, that is likely to be the only money they will get for any undelivered memory, particularly if OpenAI runs out of capital.

wmf6• 3 months ago

Instead of canceling the orders, OpenAI could take delivery and immediately flip the DRAM for a profit.

BenFranklin1002• 3 months ago

You can’t squeeze blood from a stone as they say. If AI companies go bankrupt there’s no money to be had.

zamalek2• 3 months ago

Not a rec, but just my source: Atrioc (streamer, YouTuber) is good at gathering all the facts for the rest of us. There's many other things in play, like the Strait of Hormuz (helium, bromine). Ultimately it works out that the shortage, and shortage profits, will continue; the chip makers are probably going to continue to see record profits (as Samsung has).

The specific mix of factors could change at any time, but the supply chain is relatively inelastic, it will take some time to show up on price labels.

diego_sandoval• 3 months ago

Did OpenAI's order actually kickstart the "panic" over RAM?

Are they really such a big RAM buyer?

c22• 3 months ago

Apparently...

OpenAI’s rapid growth, fueled by the success of ChatGPT and other AI products, led to a landmark agreement in October to purchase 900,000 DRAM wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix—amounting to roughly 40% of global supply. This surge in demand, coupled with limited manufacturing capacity, sent prices for memory kits skyrocketing. [0]

[0] https://peq42.com/blog/openai-canceling-many-large-purchase-...

onion2k• 3 months ago

They ordered 40% of the global RAM production for 2025/26. It was a non-binding agreement that either side could easily withdraw from but they're essentially trying to buy about half of all the RAM.

pseudohadamard• 3 months ago

It's not going to last until 2028, it'll last until 'min(AI_bubble_burst, 2028)', which I expect will be a lot smaller than just '2028'. So the real question is, how long will it take to retool for non-HBM, and will there be a fire sale as they scramble to recover?

Which also explains why production is falling behind demand, companies aren't going to sink billions into creating product for a market that could dry up overnight.

PunchyHamster7• 3 months ago

Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years.

It's worse. HBM have lower yields so they are essentially making less GB per wafer too

Se_ba• 3 months ago

not all DRAM capacity can switch to HBM quickly. That lag is where volatility comes from

dpoloncsak• 3 months ago

I'm under the impression OAI wrote Letters of Intent, and are not actually on the hook for the RAM they requested.

The others...they did not. Memory makers won't be holding the bag because Apple/Google/Samsung are contractually obligated to purchase, after the panic OAI caused.

rzmmm• 3 months ago

It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?

danaris3• 3 months ago

The same thing everyone who's paying attention to the real world (and not the financial fantasy world) does: that OpenAI's purchase commitments are wildly unrealistic and unsustainable.

hsbauauvhabzb2• 3 months ago

What’s the lose scenario for them? They’re basically a cartel, and you need ram irregardless. If they make less it’s still a cost:demand, just not the most optimal for them. They’ve done that math, and figure this is the best risk and reward for them. Your goodwill or opinion doesn’t matter to them, because you need them more than they need you.

consp2• 3 months ago

They’re basically a cartel,

The lawsuits in the past prove that statement to not be basically but actually.

Legend24402• 3 months ago

They've been burned before. The DRAM industry has a long history of booms and busts.

Demand increased, everyone built new fabs, then prices dropped and they couldn't pay off their investments. Many went out of business. It happened in the 80s, it happened in the 90s, it happened in the 2000s.

Now there's only three manufacturers left, and they know very well that demand for their product tends to be cyclical.

lizknope• 3 months ago

The semiconductor industry has been a boom and bust industry for over 50 years.

https://imgur.com/a/cDLoeZm

I've been in the industry for 30 years and I've worked at companies with fabs were demand was high and customers would only get 30% of what they ordered. Then just 2 years later our fab was only running at 50% capacity and losing money. It takes about $20 billion and 3-4 years to make a modern new fab. If you think that AI is a bubble then do you want to be left with a shiny new factory and no products to sell because demand has collapsed?

ymolodtsov2• 3 months ago

They're doing this but it takes time and if they overshoot even a little they're screwed.

tomaskafka5• 3 months ago

They are not happy to invest tens of billions for new capacities for Sam Altman’s “I will surely buy once I have money, pinky promise”.

tomaytotomato• 3 months ago

I just checked my gaming PC I built a few years ago with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, its actually gone up in value, that is unheard of generally.

Think I will scrap my PC and sell its parts.

I wonder if there are any niche companies building decent rigs with DDR3 and 5/6th generation Intel CPUs out there, it is cheap and might be a business opportunity?

theandrewbailey2• 3 months ago

I work at an e-waste recycling company. I have several dozen trays of RAM in my inventory, ~90% of it DDR3. DDR3 was selling as of a month ago, but I haven't tried to sell any RAM since. I'm looking forward to doing a huge one this week.

0xDEFACED• 3 months ago

do you have an online storefront?

HerbManic3• 3 months ago

I am still running a DDR3 2nd Gen i7. 32GB RAM, it is surprisingly comfortable but I also dont push it too hard.

edb_123• 3 months ago

Same. Core i7 2600K clocked to 4.4GHz with 32GB DDR3. It still does its job as my stationary DAW, and basically handles anything DAW-related I throw at it with ease. The only issue is its lack of AVX2 support, and since this is required by Ableton Live 12, I'll be stuck at Ableton 11 forever.

Gud• 3 months ago

Thank god they shut down 3D XPoint.

chintech2• 3 months ago

I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of China's new memory companies.

[0] https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...

jeroenhd• 3 months ago

As the article states:

CXMT still trails Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron by approximately three years in advanced DRAM node development, and yield rates on new production lines remain the variable that determines whether capacity targets translate into reliable supply. Liu notes that lines launched in the second half of 2026 are unlikely to change the global supply-demand balance until 2027.

The Verge article talks about demand exceeding supply in 2028. Your article suggests it'll take until 2029 before Chinese production catches up to current technology.

It'll help drive prices down in five yearss, but the Chinese memory production won't be ready and efficient enough to prevent the shortages from continuing to grow.

ghighi7878• 3 months ago

Most people don't need current tech. Ddr4 is good enough

u8080• 3 months ago

You could buy CXMT DDR5 modules like, right now.

Hamuko• 3 months ago

I'm personally hoping that one of the AI or data center companies is suddenly unable to pay for their bills and deflate the entire industry. Probably the only hope of things getting better before the 2030s.

tuetuopay4• 3 months ago

That’s likely to happen if all the talks about OpenAI pulling out of their wafer deals are true.

lousken• 3 months ago

If only we have not allowed oligopolies to exist. Meanwhile, EU is not in the race at all and US has very few fabs.

wmf6• 3 months ago

People don't want to pay more every day so they can pay less in an emergency.

sph• 3 months ago

I fear the author and most commenters are not aware of the law of demand and supply. If there is demand for consumer RAM, there will be supply for consumer RAM. It just takes time and risk-assessment to scale up operations.

We have RAM shortage now, we will have very cheap RAM tomorrow. It’s not like production is bottlenecked by raw materials. Chip companies just need to assess if the demand by AI companies will last so it’s better to scale up, or perhaps they should wait it out instead of oversupplying and cutting into their profits.

rt56a• 3 months ago

We're talking about advanced semiconductor manufacture. It takes years and 100s millions to billions of dollars to scale up operations. That's something you don't do unless you know there's demand to sustain it in future.

eulgro• 3 months ago

The law of supply and demand works in a perfect competition market.

There are two RAM suppliers...

eatsyourtacos• 3 months ago

I fear the author and most commenters are not aware of the law of demand and supply

I cannot stand how you and people like you try to justify everything by supply and demand. Also you act like it's some natural law of nature. It's not a law of nature- if you took an economics class you would realize it's try to maximize PROFIT. It's not for the good of the people.

All of these things are a CHOICE that people are making to now completely screw the average person for, again, the needs of big corporations and the top 0.01%.

shevy-java2• 3 months ago

I want those AI companies that drove the prices up, to pay an immediate back-tax to all of us.

I don't want to pay more because of AI companies driving the price up. That is milking.

WhereIsTheTruth• 3 months ago

Fabricated shortage to fasten US Chip Act and US Chip Security Act

jmyeet• 3 months ago

This is simple extrapolation from current demand, nothing more. And that's a borderline silly analysis because it assumes the AI bubble won't burst. The great misadventure in the Persian Gulf probably accelerates that because we're almost certainly going to be facing a recession.

Another thing I've been thinking about is what happens when the next generation of NVidia chips comes out? I suspect NVidia is going to delay this to milk the current demand but at some point you'll be able to buy something that's better than the H100 or B200 or whatever the current state-of-the-art for half the price. And what's that going to do to the trillions in AI DC investment?

I'm interested when the next bump in DRAM chip density is coming. That's going to change things although it seems like much of production has moved from consumer DRAM chips to HBM chips. So maybe that won't help at all.

I do think that companies will start seeing little ot no return from billions spent on AI and that's going to be aproblem. I also think that the hudnreds of billions of capital expenditure of OpenAI is going to come crashing down as there just isn't any even theoretical future revenue that can pay for all that.

wmf6• 3 months ago

something that's better than the current state-of-the-art for half the price. And what's that going to do to the trillions in AI DC investment?

They'll just spend whatever they were planning to spend and get more performance.

cbdevidal3• 3 months ago

I’m a bit of an optimist. I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well and future apps will necessarily be more memory-efficient.

pron33• 3 months ago

Using a lot less RAM often implies using more CPU, so even with inflated RAM prices, it's not a good tradeoff (at least not in general).

IsTom• 3 months ago

Or just using less electron and writing less shit code.

DimmieMan• 3 months ago

Only if the software is optimised for either in the first place.

Ton of software out there where optimisation of both memory and cpu has been pushed to the side because development hours is more costly than a bit of extra resource usage.

zamadatix2• 3 months ago

The tradeoff has almost exclusively been development time vs resource efficiency. Very few devs are graced with enough time to optimize something to the point of dealing with theoretical tradeoff balances of near optimal implementations.

zozbot2349• 3 months ago

In practice, you generally see the opposite. The "CPU" is in fact limited by memory throughput. (The exception is intense number crunching or similar compute-heavy code, where thermal and power limits come into play. But much of that code can be shifted to the GPU.)

dehrmann• 3 months ago

You're thinking an algorithmic tradeoff, but this is an abstraction tradeoff.

rekabis• 3 months ago

I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well

And hopefully kill Electron.

I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.

api• 3 months ago

The point is being able to write it once with web developers instead of writing it a minimum of twice (Windows and macOS) with much harder to hire native UI developers.

righthand3• 3 months ago

The point is you can be lazy and write the app in html and js. Then you dont need to write c, even though c syntax is similar to js syntax and most gui apps wont require needing advanced c features if the gui framework is generous enough.

Now that everyone who cant be bothered, vibe codes, and electron apps are the overevangelized norm… People will probably not even worry about writing js and electron will be here to stay. The only way out is to evangelize something else.

Like how half the websites have giant in your face cookie banners and half have minimalist banners. The experience will still suck for the end user because the dev doesnt care and neither do the business leaders.

Dylan16807• 3 months ago

You do need a couple framebuffers, but for the most part yeah...

lmm4• 3 months ago

Who cares about 300Mb, where is that going to move the needle for you? And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language then 300Mb is a price more than worth paying. Likewise if the alternative is the app never getting started, or being single-platform-only, because the available build systems suck too bad.

There ought to be a short one-liner that anyone can run to get easily installable "binaries" for their PyQt app for all major platforms. But there isn't, you have to dig up some blog post with 3 config files and a 10 argument incantation and follow it (and every blog post has a different one) when you just wanted to spend 10 minutes writing some code to solve your problem (which is how every good program gets started). So we're stuck with Electron.

brikym2• 3 months ago

It's happening. Cursor 3 moved to rust. A lot of people are using Zed (rust) instead of vscode.

neop1x• 3 months ago

Won't happen. People are ok with swapping to their SSDs, Macbook Neo confirms that

veber-alex2• 3 months ago

As if native apps are any better. Books app on my mac takes 400MB without even having a single book open.

FuckButtons• 3 months ago

Hopefully just kill off the javascript for everything mindset to be honest.

tcfhgj5• 3 months ago

oh that would be a dream

russdill2• 3 months ago

The demand is being driven by inference though. I really don't think there will be much motivation.

sunir• 3 months ago

The large models are incredibly inefficient. We'll be squeezing them down for generations.

est• 3 months ago

like 1973 oil crisis? End of V8 engines (pun intended)

cbdevidal3• 3 months ago

Yeah, like that. Modern engines eclipsed pre-1970s engines in performance, efficiency, and even (yes I said it) in reliability.

At a cost of simplicity and beauty. And two lost decades of mediocre performance. Sigh

fransje262• 3 months ago

Hope dies last, as they say.

Then again, after many, many years of claims that the following year would be the year of the Linux Desktop, there seems to be more and more of a push into that direction. Or at least into a significant increase in market share. We can thank a current head of state for that.

coldtea• 3 months ago

Expect shortages across the board. RAM? That's the tip of the iceberg, think food and gas.

1o1o1o1o1• 3 months ago

Hilarious, The ram in my PC i built 5 years ago is will soon be worth more than i spent on building the whole PC.

aidenn02• 3 months ago

I was about to give away my old PC, but I think it could be worth my hassle to sell it for the RAM now (64GB DDR4).

cozzyd• 3 months ago

I bought a workstation with 3 TB of ram for FDTD simulations last year. Glad I got it then ...

senfiaj2• 3 months ago

I wonder if this might motivate to write more memory efficient software. I mean we have so much memory, but even some trivial programs eat hundreds of megabytes of ram.

phamilton• 3 months ago

I've definitely done some vibe-coding with the explicit intent to reduce memory usage.

senfiaj2• 3 months ago

How efficient is AI at reducing RAM consuption?

fsckboy3• 3 months ago

if a shortage lasts years, it's not a shortage. "The market clearing price of RAM in the face of expected sustained healthy demand should lead to a stable market for years."

even if gaming is and will remain very popular for years, it and the desire to upgrade gaming rigs is still a discretionary activity with more price elasticity of demand than corporate uses for RAM in the dawn of the AI age. gamers live on the margin of this market, where low prices will stimulate upgrades and high prices will lead to holding out. The complaints about price are real, but that segment of the market is some combination of less large and less important.

ls612• 3 months ago

The issue is supply is inelastic so even as prices soar they can only make more so fast and that won’t get fixed until 2028.

philistine2• 3 months ago

Why are you only talking about gamers? Apple, the most cautious planners in the whole industry have straight up cancelled their 512gb RAM Mac Studio. Don’t ask; they won’t sell you one.

Everybody’s getting pinched, not just the gamers.

shash• 3 months ago

It’s not merely a “gaming vs data center“. There’s so many other places DRAM and NVM are needed - mobile, automotive, other consumer electronics,… the current situation is that _all_ of that is deprived of the memory that it needs. And much of this is critical to the real economy.

fsckboy3• 3 months ago

i could have used lemons and lemonade stands to explain supply and demand, the lesson is still the same.

letting the market set prices ensures that the chips go to the critical markets and uses. less critical uses will not allocate funds for purchases.

BirAdam• 3 months ago

Of course, alternatively, the AI companies could go bust before finding profitability. Then, there’d be a ton of supply, prices would crash, and one or two of the current memory suppliers would go out of business. After that, the new Chinese memory companies might be producing at volume, and Renesas could be up and running.

At the moment, nothing is certain. Could this last? Sure. Could it not last? Yup.

bschwindHN• 3 months ago

But thank god we were all able to generate some SVGs of pelicans, right guys?

marcus_holmes• 3 months ago

This could be great.

There's a future where RAM makers tool up for this massively increased demand, then the AI companies go broke as the bubble bursts, so RAM is cheap as. So laptop manufacturers get on that and start making laptops with 1TB+ memory so we can run decent LLMs on the local machine. Everyone happy :)

wao0uuno2• 3 months ago

RAM makers are not increasing their capacity. If AI bubble bursts we might see a momentary drop in RAM prices but it won't be dramatic. Return to "normal" is the best scenario I can imagine but my gut tells me we're probably never going back to early 2025 memory prices.

thijson• 3 months ago

I've read that the chip manufacturers are looking into high bandwidth flash for on package storage of ai models. That would solve some of the cost issue, flash is significantly cheaper than dram.

nilkn2• 3 months ago

As an aside, recently I wanted to refresh my gaming PC, but the price shock and general lack of availability of buying components individually made it seem hardly worth it, so I just kept deferring the project.

Then, mostly by chance, I saw that my local Microcenter had some pre-builts for sale, and I ended up picking one up for <$5k that had "best in slot" components across the board, including a 5090 and even a high-end power supply.

The last time I built a gaming PC was upwards of a decade ago, and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built unless you had a massive amount of disposable income and couldn't spare even just one weekend to dedicate to a hobby project that could benefit you for years. Now, it was absolutely a no-brainer.

Mawr• 3 months ago

and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built

That's still the case, and always will be — with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline.

Beyond that, the chance they've chosen good components and haven't tried to screw you over on less flashy ones like the motherboard and power supply is low.

That's not to say it's literally impossible to ever find a good deal. You very well might have. Doesn't change anything though.

irishloop• 3 months ago

with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline

Except isn't it possible that pre-built companies actually get better deals on hardware bought in bulk, and therefore could offset the labor costs with cheaper materials?

Pay082• 3 months ago

I did the exact same thing during Covid, the prebuilt ended up being ~20% cheaper than buying the individual components (I needed a full upgrade). Maybe a little less since I could have reused my case.

ethersteeds• 3 months ago

I ended up picking one up for <$5k

I'm struggling to put this in context. For comparison, what was your budget for refreshing the pc you had? Were the planned upgrades going to exceed $5k at current prices? Or is the situation that a pre-build machine with far better components was now only marginally more?

Or is it that pre-built gaming PCs have stopped being a joke? I had the experience building a bicycle: I was certain I was taking the frugal path sourcing each component individually and putting it together myself. At the end I was horrified to realize I spent far more than a new bike with superior components. It was pointed out that bicycle makers are buying by the pallet and will beat diy every time — so long as they're building something I want to buy.

vectorhacker• 3 months ago

It sounds to me like an incentive for new companies to make RAM.

alprado50• 3 months ago

Im thankfull for buying 16gb of RAM, but what is gonna happen in 5 years when users PCs start to fail?

fuzzy2• 3 months ago

What do you mean, in 5 years? It's not like everyone just bought a new computer. My gut says it's exactly the other way around: most computers are old. They may fail as soon as today.

All computers in my household are 8+ years old.

wao0uuno2• 3 months ago

There is enough older hardware floating around to last us for decades. You don't need a gaming rig to do 99% of your computing (excluding gaming obviously). Also computers don't really just break. It's mostly the disks that wear out and PSUs that age.

LastTrain• 3 months ago

Something I haven’t been able to reconcile: If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software? This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

locknitpicker• 3 months ago

If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down.

Supposedly AI drives down the cost of producing software,not the "price".

How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software?

Currently, the cost of AI is between $20/month and around $200/month per developer.

I think the huge billions you're seeing in the news are the investment cost on AI companies, who are burning through cash to invest in compute infrastructure to allow both training and serving users.

This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

Who knows? What I know is that I need >64GB of RAM to run local models, and that means most people will need to upgrade from their 8Gb/16GB setup to do the same. Graphics cards follow mostly the same pattern.

zozbot2349• 3 months ago

Who knows? What I know is that I need >64GB of RAM to run local models, and that means most people will need to upgrade from their 8Gb/16GB setup to do the same. Graphics cards follow mostly the same pattern.

Depends how big the models are, how fast you want them to run and how much context you need for your usage. If you're okay with running only smaller models (which are still very capable in general, their main limitation is world knowledge) making very simple inferences at low overall throughput, you can just repurpose the RAM, CPUs/iGPUs and storage in the average setup.

adrian_b4• 3 months ago

You need >64 GB of DRAM to run local models fast.

You can run huge local models slowly with the weights stored on SSDs.

Nowadays there are many computers that can have e.g. 2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs, which allow a reading throughput of 20 to 30 gigabyte per second, depending on the SSDs (or 1 PCIe 5.0 + 1 PCIe 4.0, for a throughput in the range 15-20 GB/s).

There are still a lot of improvements that can be done to inference back-ends like llama.cpp to reach the inference speed limit determined by the SSD throughput.

It seems that it is possible to reach inference speed in the range from a few seconds per token to a few tokens per second.

That may be too slow for a chat, but it should be good enough for an AI coding assistant, especially if many tasks are batched, so that they can progress simultaneously during a single read pass over the SSD data.

tomaskafka5• 3 months ago

I got a 128 GB MBP, and the current models are fit enough to manage the calendar or do research on web (very slowly), not to be useful companions for coding as I hoped.

repeekad• 3 months ago

Analyst says it would require a new $35/month subscription for every iPhone user, or a new $180/month for every Netflix subscriber.

Claude Max subscriptions have gone up, but do you think every Netflix user will pay for one?..

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

avidiax• 3 months ago

This is probably the wrong denominator. There are more than a billion white-collar workers. Making them all just 10% more effective would possibly be worth more than $650B/year (~$650/worker).

lofaszvanitt• 3 months ago

It's a trojan horse. They expect the world will get hooked on it.

NooneAtAll33• 3 months ago

Everyone's betting on Jevons paradox

the hope is that Ai is "the next semiconductor" and "the next internet"

nirui2• 3 months ago

This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand

Not exactly.

LLMs are already quite useful today if you use them as a tool, so they are there to stay. The remaining problem is scalability, a.k.a. how to make LLMs cheap to use.

But scalability is not really a requirement when you look the bigger picture. If smaller software company/projects can't afford to use AI, the bigger ones might just. Eventually they will discover variable use cases for such tech, even if it only serves big firms i.e. defense, resource extraction, war, finance etc.

To the other end, if scalability is achieved, the use of LLM products will be cheaper too, so smaller project can also use them. But of course, if LLM usage is too cheap, then many were-to-be-consumers will just create software projects by themselves at their homes.

rimliu3• 3 months ago

Would they be considered as useful if users are required to pay non-subsidized price though.

tonyedgecombe• 3 months ago

This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand

RAM is built on a foundation of sand.

fransje262• 3 months ago

I laughed.

energy12311• 3 months ago

The usage of LLMs is continuing to increase ~exponentially. I'm going to bet on that rather than some half-baked scenario analysis that only takes into account one scenario and assigns a 100% probability to it.

dannersy4• 3 months ago

The usage of LLMs is continuing to increase ~exponentially

I would like a source for that statement. Additionally, I want to know by who? Because it certainly isn't end users. Inflating token usage doesn't make it any more economically viable if your user base, b2b or not, hasn't increased with it. On the contrary, that is a worse scenario for providers.

zizheruan• 3 months ago

Sad news, I didn't buy enough RAM before....

ares623• 3 months ago

Are we entering the Reverse-Moore's Law era.

5255652• 3 months ago

Can we stop advertising paid Blog/News websites we can't read without a subscription.

librasteve• 3 months ago

The RAM market is a square wave

onchainintel• 3 months ago

Your instincts are likely right on this one OP. Memory prices surged 80–90% in Q1 2026 compared to Q4 2025, DRAM, NAND, and HBM all at record highs. 3 suppliers for the entire planet?

thelastgallon• 3 months ago

It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels.

From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.

ymolodtsov2• 3 months ago

Of course, clearly businesses were just stupid before and only learned how to make revenue in 2021.

energy12311• 3 months ago

When lithium prices decreased over 80% from 2022 to 2025, it was because lithium miners felt altruistic. Car manufacturers were feeling greedy. This is how bad the thinking has gotten.

ponector• 3 months ago

> Cars used to super cheap before covid

Have they really ever been cheap? Also Tesla 3 is cheaper now, Yaris is still cheap as well.

energy12311• 3 months ago

Covid inflation was because of supply chain disruptions, loose fiscal policy (like Biden's ARP which a Central Bank analysis said added a few % to annual inflation), and money supply expansions. There was less goods and more money. When you go and trade money for goods, it should be obvious what happens.

Legend24402• 3 months ago

It won't. DRAM prices are cyclical. They were super high in 2020, then demand crashed in 2022 to the point that manufacturers couldn't sell all their inventory.

Now it's high again, but give it a couple years and it'll once again crash.

p0w3n3d• 3 months ago

We have the saying in my country: The days of things being cheap are over.

cylemons• 3 months ago

When I personally use chatgpt and friends, I am not seeing any slowdowns or anything, meaning that their servers can handle the loads just fine. So then, why are these companies spending so much building new capacity if the current capacity is enough?

goldenarm2• 3 months ago

Frontier labs flagship models are ~2T params at the moment, but they intend to ship 10T models like Claude Mythos, which would require substantial datacenter expansion. Same thing for training.

gozucito2• 3 months ago

Where did you get the 10T figure from? I thought it was a big secret.

rldjbpin• 3 months ago

let the analyst and news say what they want - the entire situation is artificial and is up to the manufacturers.

the current relative spike in the prices misses the medium-term trend of the vast decrease in memory price post-covid that led to the recent surge. the cartel got another opportunity to make bank and they will use that lever to the max.

funnily enough i've been personally stuck with 16 gigs since 2015, across three memory generations! but i am used to the past when you would spend 80-100 on an 8gb stick (jdec timings, nothing fancy but from a major brand) without accounting for inflation.

cicko• 3 months ago

Usually, right after articles like this, things come crashing down.

The RAM shortage could last years

Related Stories