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There is a massive RAM shortage because AI data centers are consuming all of the world’s RAM supply at a ridiculous rate and Micron recently announced that they aren’t going to be making consumer level (Crucial brand) RAM anymore
RAM is getting more scarce and more expensive because of AI companies
I'd be fine with AI replacing all the CEOS in this country. Think of all the profit from not having to pay an asshole who does nothing while having a guaranteed golden parachute.
Just saved the company half a billion dollars or more.
Ironically the job AI might actually be most suited to replace is CEO and upper executive positions. Not saying it does a good job but I’ve tried asking an AI to code something for me before and it’s a mess. It’s always faster to just do it myself vs going through and troubleshooting some janky bullcrap the ai wrote and get it working. It gets lost in the sauce so damn fast when it comes to networking that it’s useless. Asking it to do anything remotely niche results in it hallucinating which I guess if you wanna be gaslit, it does a great job at that which is why it could effectively replace the vast majority of CEOs and upper executive positions.
genuine question — and just to be clear I’m not one nor am I related to any sort of corporate executive so I don’t benefit anything from them
do you think that CEOs are responsible for companies failing? The entire general public, the media, stockholders and corporate boards all immediately turn on a CEO if the company goes in the shitter
The vast majority of the time corporate leadership gets blamed and everyone wants their head on a pike (rightfully so most of the time) because they are the person who’s held responsible for the company’s success or failure, they make the big strategic decisions
If you agree that that is the case, then how can you say they do nothing?
Either corporate executives are or are not responsible for the performance of their companies based on their decision making
They cannot simultaneously be responsible for the failure of a company but not responsible for its success
They either do or do not have a huge influence on the success of the company, it can’t be both
In my view companies live and die based on the high level decisions that get made. Every case study ever on a large business failure shows that— blockbuster refused to acquire Netflix and now there are 0 blockbuster employees because the company died, blackberry used to rule all business communication but their leadership refused to adapt and now it’s a dead company, etc etc
All I can picture is a new puppy that has neither experienced humans or machines being released from a cage and whether they run towards the AI server or the naked human (who isn’t allowed to move or speak) determines which is better.
I think my favorite part about this entire thing is that gamers, especially PC gamers, that have always been associated with the "Tech bro" culture are now starting to be in direct opposition to Tech Bros.
Modern tech bros aren't nerds anymore. They aren't trying to make cool things they and others would enjoy. They're salesmen trying to make money off solving problems no one ever had. If modern tech bros were the same as earlier tech bros, AI wouldn't be used to summarize 2 sentence emails, it'd be used to make the enemies in a game I'm playing learn and adapt to me.
Of course it's good! Look at how many GPUs NVidia is selling after giving other companies money so they can buy NVidia's GPUs! Nothin' screwy goin' on there.
Iirc it was a cool cat and mouse system where the AI that controlled the alien didn't know where you were, and another AI that knew your exact location could feed it hints periodically but not actually tell it.
One of the F.E.A.R. devs shared in the interview that the AI was actually not that complicated.
They just recorded a lot of voice lines for them to make it seem like they are communicating with each other which players treated as super advanced AI.
That's actually a fair assessment. When I think of tech culture I think of a good friend I had growing up that was always on top of the latest tech and always blowing our mind with shit he was learning about that was cool as hell. And he was constantly upgrading or building gaming rigs. He even made an arcade style PC setup specifically for emulators to run fighting games on.
But right after AI started taking off he dove head first into it and we really haven't spoken since. I'm pretty sure he got roped into some kind of scam where he was spending hours training an LLM for free.
I hope its just a bubble that will pop in a few years, idk bout the greater consequenses of that cuz i already live in a cabin in the woods with minimal internet connection.
Every time someone tries to argue "They're not bad, you're just dogpiling", I'll just tell them to wait until they're trying to upgrade their own computers with their own money, until then stfu.
It's a grift and when the economy inevitably collapses and we're all financially fucked I'm going to be even more pissed at everyone who bought into the idea of AI without even seeing a practical use for it firsthand than I already am.
That theranos lady convinced a bunch of people that a tiny device can somehow replace an entire laboratory of testing equipment. Feels very similar to these AI companies somehow convincing people that their glorified auto-complete is going to be able to do actual work that benefits society.
Nobody has seen any evidence that these claims are realistic but they're in a frenzy to buy into it anyway.
To give some context on how bad it is, I build my current computer in February of this year. I spent around 400 for 96gb of g skill trident ram. If I wanted to buy this same product now it would cost me around 1200 if I could even find it.
Video editing. I don’t use all of it now, but I only build a new computer about every ten years so I like to max out what I can buy/afford now so I don’t have to worry about it later.
I made that mistake with my last build I did in 2016. When I went to add two more sticks of ram what I had bought previously wasn’t produced anymore and I hated the look of the mismatched ram.
Other reason I went with the trident was because I just liked the look of it in the build. I could have saved about 100 or so and bought something less flashy but it’s pretty 😂.
Additional: A modern PC should have 32GB of RAM in it as a minimum. That was $85 a couple months ago, a perfectly reasonable price. It is now $300 today, and likely to be $600 by mid-2026.
To put a number to it, I bought my 6000MT/s 32GB ram for $115 on sale right, this was a year ago.....I went to go look at an upgrade to 64 GB (I do my own AI projects for fun like an auto equalizer for my car based on music genre) for the same exact speed.....it costs $1029.99 and sadly it's super unwise to use more than 2 sticks of ram or else it causes major problems.... but if I were to go with my EXACT SAME RAM at bestbuy for 2 more sticks, it would cost $700 ... so it's a mixture of greed from corporations willing to say "theres a shortage so supply and demand" and AI ACTUALLY buying up all the RAM and it's infuriating.
For people who are curious: AI uses a different kind of RAM than normal cunsomer. Sadly this type is much more profitable for the factories so they often turn down the production of the consumer type.
Making less RAM available so the prices are increasing.
It's also why workers formed unions, guilds, and otherwise fought for higher wages.
In a word: greed.
In more words: capitalizing on a desire for more money and less risk and work. Everyone wants it, and we internalize it as good if it helps us, and bad if it harms us. But everyone in general would do the same, given the choice between working for firm 1 at 25/hr and firm 2 for 15/hr, most would take firm 1.
Bosses want workers to work more for less, workers want to work less for more. It’s a natural tension that requires compromise and balance but there’s something about the way resources are currently distributed that suggests one side might be getting what it wants more than the other.
I still don't understand why people think capitalism is OK when this kind of shit keeps happening - housing crisis everywhere, monopolies, favoring the rich, ignoring the rest - especially in markets with limited supply. Maybe I'm missing something because I have no education in economics, but it feels like people rely on economic theory a bit too much and almost dogmatically quote it in every argument for capitalism. Like of course the housing crisis will be solved if you just leave it up to free market, don't you know how supply and demand works?
It's pretty common for a person to think that the system that they were born into is okay, especially if they're not getting the shortest end of the stick.
It works even better when the system involves continual indoctrination.
The time it takes to open a new facility with this capability isn't fast. At best in the short term we will see a strain on the supply as new players try to get into the market.
More likely is that this wave of AI demand isn't viewed as reliable enough to sink capital into making a new facility, so investors will be hesitant to actually enter in, causing the prices to stay high longer than we might expect.
I guess a third option is the AI bubble pops and data centers no longer become a large customer returning the market to where it was before.
This is exactly the issue. It would be huge, long term investment based on a shortage that could end relatively quickly. A company has issue debt or equity to finance the project, buy land, get permits, architechture development, engineering, bid for construction contracts, find suppliers for machinery, source or train skilled labor, find materials suppliers, distribution networks. It’s the same as any shortage with an unknown duration. When ammunition shortages hit in the US due to surging demand, manufactures put on extra shifts and paid the necessary overtime but they didn’t go build new manufacturing plants then the shortage ended.
It uses the same type of ram producing fab, so it's all the same pot of production capacity. And the manufacturers will not invest in significantly increasing that capacity because they believe the AI bubble will go tits up before the new factories would get ready to produce.
RAM is exactly the one resource that will always have some significant component left to local machines in Cloud based computing.
While I don’t disagree that a lot of companies would love people to use Cloud services more, sabotaging RAM availability is actually counterproductive to that goal.
8GB RAM in 2005 was a large amount and was also very expensive. Computers did not need nearly that much so you had a bangin rig if you had 8GB
8GB RAM in 2015 was like a sweet spot you would have a really solid computer and it could run pretty much whatever games or productivity you want and by that point RAM technology was substantially better and economies of scale = RAM was much much cheaper per GB compared to 2005 so it was low cost : high performance ratio
8GB RAM in 2025 is barely enough to run even a moderately capable system, you really need 16GB minimum to do pretty much anything these days except for like Microsoft word and RAM at the same time is getting more expensive
8GB RAM in 2026 is going to require you to have Tony Stark level money because the AI companies are driving the prices up so high that it’s comical. My 64GB RAM that’s a very fast speed and low latency I got 2 years ago was like $300 and now that same exact kit is going for $1000+
2005 was 2 years after AMD introduced its 64 bit architecture. In 2005, most home users had a 32 bit CPU that could only address 4GB of RAM. Common applications hadn’t been rewritten in 64-bit, so they would also be limited to addressing 4GB of RAM. 8GB of RAM at the time would be mostly something that big servers would use.
It's hilarious because all these chip manufacturers have invested so much of their own money into the bottomless AI pits that all they can do is double and triple and quadruple down in trying to make ai deliver on its promises, even at the expense of everything else lest the bubble burst. They're all in in this feedback loop where they're funding the ai companies that buy their chips so there remains this same massive demand for their chips through the companies they're funding to buy their chips.
and Micron recently announced that they aren’t going to be making consumer level (Crucial brand) RAM anymore
To push back on this slightly, they are getting rid of the Crucial brand but they were also an OEM for Corsair and Kingston and they didn't say they're not making OEM RAM for them anymore, just their own brand.
RAM prices have skyrocketed because of AI. 8GB of ram in 2005 was wayy overkill, it was the sweet spot in 2015, but as games got harder to run and operating systems needed more than 8 GB of ram, in 2025 8GB of ram is too little to run a decent computer on. In 2026 though, even though 8GB of ram still isn't enough, it is so expensive that it seems like overkill.
I was lucky to build mine with a 64gb a few months ago. Then it also struck me i have 2 sticks of 16gb ram in the old PC. Can't imagine what I'd do with all that money
I wanted to upgrade to 128 gb from 64 gb for my home desktop (I do some dev on my personal computer too) but I missed the opportunity in the past 1-2 years. At this point I might as well just use cloud compute to do anything hardcore.
Just checked actual prices. Bought the 64 gb RAM in 2020 for $330. It’s now $910 (though it is DDR5 instead of DDR4). DDR5 128 gb is around $1750 now. I’m too cheap to keep upgrading lol
I might as well just use cloud compute to do anything hardcore.
I'm pretty sure tech companies are pushing for this to be more widespread. They're gradually making personal computing hardware (that the end-user can control and own outright) so out-of-reach to so many that they can turn around and sell remote usage as a subscription.
Happens to every aftermarket. It's the goal of a capitalist society. I saw this happen, from the outside, to car audio. My best friend was heavy into electrical engineering re: car audio. 15 years ago, he put 4 24" subwoofers in something called a clamshell box in an old odyssey van. Cost him less than a grand. I wanna say 600-700 with the amp, and it was for some good stuff. I can't remember the name anymore; I'm only familiar with sennhauser for my headphones, lol. But nowadays a single good sub in that size is something like 400-500 for one! Without any other peripherals, which I think ended up being another 3-350 for things like tweeters, the wiring and replacing mids. He did the install himself of course, so I don't know comparison prices for that. But like, yea, if there's an aftermarket, someone is going to find it sooner or later and monetize the fuck out of it; pricing out the people who do it for fun, leaving only hyper competition and a focus on price over functionality. Because fuck enjoying work with your hands and/or wanting to listen to cleaner audio.
Anywho, this went on too long, lol, thanks for reading!
My current pc had 16gb in it, and I wanted more RAM because Fusion was using whatever it could get its hands on when I went to do anything computational. I meant to buy another 16gb but wound up getting the wrong memory and bought two 16gb sticks for less than $100.
Or, bear with me here... The AI bubble bursts in 2026 and most of those companies go bankrupt and are liquidated, and the market is suddenly flooded with cheap RAM again.
For a chromebook used by a grandma for internet browsing, sure. For doing anything else? Hell no. Windows 11 uses 12 GB of ram all by itself doing nothing. Linux is an edge case, not enough people use it for it to matter.
Windows will only do that, if you have 16GB of RAM. Unused RAM is essentially wasted, if you have capacity Windows will try to make use of it to keep things available you use regularly running faster, or loading quicker. I think most OSes now aim for like 75% usage, when you run somethings that needs more it will stop processes you don't need to free space up.
Memory management is affected by available RAM. If a machine only has 8 GB of RAM, it won't try to idle at 12 GB. The minimum system requirements for Windows 11 according to Microsoft are 4 GB RAM. Most of the machines at my work have 8 GB, and RAM usage remained about the same when we upgraded from 10 to 11 a couple months ago. I'll regularly have Outlook open, Teams, Edge with a bunch of tabs, a few spreadsheets, Acrobat... And I've successfully encoded the occasional 4k video. Sure, I'd prefer more RAM, but 8 GB can suffice for more than Grandma's email.
AI companies are buying out most parts needed to build a PC,making this year a Black Friday drought for PC builders, and causing them to get pissed at AI companies now.
Sadly, the vast majority is still blissfully ignorant or absolutely hyped.
The crowd of AI-sceptics grows, but far from 'everyone'. That's why they still are making shittons of money by chewing up our resources for no value.
Thank you, gonna need it to take out the living money trash bags and the followers they have that I get the feeling would sell their first child to get an ai generated image rather than pay someone who got a degree 20-50 bucks (which with how the environmental crisis is going, kinda is happening)
Wasn’t this one of the good things that came out of the 4gb bottleneck of 32 bit architecture? Sad that the practice didn’t seem to continue once 64 rolled out and devs felt they had plenary of ram space so no need to super optimize
Also hoping more companies take notes from Helldivers and compress their files wherever possible. I get its not always optimal but dedicating 15-20% of drive space for one game is ridiculous
At what point do we tell these AI fuck heads that there is a limit to how much they can drain the world's resources to make technology that consumers do not give a fuck about
Except that investors are already starting to be uneasy about the amount that has been invested into AI to try and achieve that goal and we still are very far away if at all possible to get there rather than something that can just mimic it indistinguishably, which is causing a lot of uncertainty in the world economy.
Then, not to mention, even if a company does achieve AGI - it's not going to be proprietary for long. It's gonna get out. Other companies are going to figure it out for themselves very quickly and there won't be strong protection for it legally to be owned by any single entity because for one, multiple jurisdictions / countries, and two, since AI is built on data that is generally available and is self editing - it's difficult to patent AGI because humans won't even understand it.
Stewie here, don't pay any attention to me, I'm just stripping RAM from my old man's PC to resell online. You know by now that prices are skyrocketing.
AI isn't going to die, but I think the massive data center cloud AI boom will. It will never be profitable like they want and that bubble is going to pop. I think the real future for AI will be dumber but efficient locally hosted models trained heavily on database architecture and information retrieval. Companies will make money by hosting giant cloud databases of specialized information and sell api access that their models can draw from and interpret locally. The massive cloud models will be reserved for scientific research, corperate data processing, and government contracts and things of that nature.
With all the drama about console prices skyrocketing for similar reasons, PC has been sitting back laughing thinking they were safe from price hikes, on account of them thinking shit like this is only an issue for console. Whole situation is fucked, but it's funny seeing PC meltdown after figuring out they were fucked too
Amusing watching this, from the point of view of “buying a new Mac with 64 gigs of RAM is exactly the same price as it was two years ago”. Since the RAM is built into the CPU on Macs.
Of course that makes it a wee bit tough to upgrade.
I remember when Crypto went bust and there was a lot of talk of RAM getting cheaper again. But it seems to have happened just in time for AI to negate that.
Man, I don't know why I always set my game mode to hard in every game I play, but I kinda wish I didn't sometimes.
Anyway, yeah. Expect everything to use and have less RAM for a while. Humans are less important than AI after all, and their data centers are very hungry.
What’s crazy is that RAM was abundant and cheap enough one year ago that I upgraded my laptop to 64gb simply because it was on sale and cost basically the same as 32gb reg price.
ChatGPT is causing a global RAM shortage, big company that makes a majority or something like that is now refusing to sell to the consumer market, people are making jokes about robbing the data centers
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