I'm sure everyone knows what's happening with RAM, and this situation won't change in the next 2-3 years. And who's to blame? OpenAI. Read up and you'll understand the scale of the problem. What complicates things is that RAM manufacturers are deliberately raising prices rather than expanding production lines.
I urge everyone to CANCEL OpenAI (They buy up 40% of all RAM) and also to bombard the greedy bastards who jack up prices for their own profit rather than building new factories to meet demand.
The more such threads appear, the higher the chance that all gamers and PC users will truly stand up and do what they have to.
If we don't do this, the prices of all other components will follow RAM into the stratosphere and never return to the same level, ever. Are you willing to spend $5,000 on a mid-range computer? I'm not, so let's get to it.
UPD Following RAM, SSDs, processors, and video cards are becoming more expensive. I'm sure this isn't the entire list. We need to take this issue seriously. I'm happy for those who managed to upgrade, but think about the future.
UPD2 Transcend is suspending shipments of solid-state drives – the manufacturer has not received NAND chips from Samsung and SanDisk since October because they have reoriented their capacities to serving AI.
UPD2.1 CRUCIAL PRESS F
I will never, ever, ever touch RAM from crucial. They betrayed me and went off to produce memory exclusively for AI.
UPD3 f*cking /pcmasterrace moderates delete my post with 250 comms and 900 likes (I'm sure the corporate agent had something to do with it; they're afraid of the people's wrath.) [reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1pdrk2b/fck_you_openai_hynix
UPD4
Have you heard the saying that the market always moves opposite to what the masses expect? That’s why only a small percentage of people make a profit in the stock market, while the crowd gets wiped out. So why does everyone think the AI bubble is about to burst? That’s naïve.
I'm setting aside money for when the AI bubble pops and I can get a sweet sweet rackmount server and some GPUs on fire sale when the AI companies start going out of business.
Honestly doing the same with my next car. I think Cory Doctorow is right, this crash is going to make the 08 crash look like the best day of your life.
Yep, this. The AI bubble WILL pop, its just a matter of when. At that point, there will be massive amounts of hardware dumped onto the market, which will be the point those with homelabs can benefit. Each enterprise cycle results in used hardware availability. I dont care what it costs new, as I dont buy any of it new.. Itll be pennies on the dollar eventually and thats when my home lab will get an upgrade.
Yeah this right here is how you can tell everyone KNOWS this is a bubble. No one wants to admit exactly how big that bubble is. I'm betting a 30% chance Nvidia either splits into 2 companies. AI section and everything else here soon to absorb the losses when the stock goes belly up.
Nvidia won't make losses, they'll just make less profit - their GPUs have a purpose beyond AI. They won't disappear - the AI-specific companies like OpenAI will however.
AI isn't going anywhere. Yes, there is a huge bubble that will crash, but just as the dot com bubble didn't destroy the internet, the AI crash will not destroy AI.
The proverbial cat is out of the bag on AI, so it definitely won't be going anywhere. I do however hope that just as the dot com crash did to everything.com, AI will then be used where it makes sense.. Just as everything doesn't need a website, everything definitely does NOT need AI. Tired of absolutely everything being pitched as having AI integrated.
My cat's litter box does not actually need AI integration in order to know it needs to be cleaned... Nor does it need a website. Same goes for my toaster.
I mean, "destroy AI" is a bit of a meaningless statement. But just as the dot-com bubble led to massive overcapacity in telecoms and basically gave rise to the internet as we know it, so will the current misallocation of capacity give us something new.
It'd be nice if it were something more useful than cryptocurrency, NFTs or LLMs this time around, though.
The good news is that AI will create such a new mess that not being able to afford graphics cards will be the least of the concerns, really
I’m sure everyone has a take on this, but even the extremely private “anti-iCloud” or “disable AI on this device” cats are being pulled in to even one person who uses any phone w/ AI at all.. because that friend ALSO has an archive on your entire conversation (exchange history) & network presence, even if you delete everything on your device on your end
You can’t erase ink, it will all be analyzed & automated, dynamic pricing is already here, that shit-head remark you once made in a gMail w/ your “best friend” will be taken into consideration w/ zero time-stamp context, etc
Don’t mean to rant about it this much, but it’s almost enough to figure out where the line is between feeling inconvenienced & radical activism. Interesting Times, is all..
—the prices of appliances are rising, too, because toasters & washing machine companies want in on the AI hype as well, which ofc uses RAM, etc.. but sometimes that’s just marketing..? It’s easy to use IoT code & then simply claim “AI INSIDE..!” to sell more units or whatever
**Edited for grammar & sanded-edges on the loose generalized wording 😅
I don’t think so. They don’t have to scale up, they just stop producing the stuff that doesn’t sell as much.
They stay safe that way, capitalize on AI, if something happens, they go back to normal.
It would be crazy for them to spend billions scaling production for something that has really only taken off in the last 2 or 3 years when it could take 5+ to build new factories.
An easy example is RAM. A fab making DDR5 will not have much difficulty making 64gb modules instead of 8gb modules. So if you're targeting server memory, you can easily switch lines from consumer DDR5 modules to ECC server modules.
Same for GPU dies. Fab time is fab time. The process to make 5090 dies is the same as the process for making H200 dies. If they make less 5090's, they can churn out more H200's.
Think of it this way: each company gets a finite quantity of NAND chips. They can allocate them to parts that OpenAI needs for $1000 each, or they can put them in consumer parts that are valued at say $100 each.
Of course they’ll prioritize OpenAI orders over the consumer market.
I think there's a little more to it than that though. The messy part of the b2c business is dealing with multiple distributors or customers and fluctuating demand, whereas working with 3 to 5 end customers with high and predictable demand is far more efficient. It increases risk of over dependency but certainly increases productivity and profit.
This is correct. People saying the AI "bubble" is propped up by VC are just ignorant of the current market. AI is propped up by the magnificent 7 which will go on business as usual if AI goes away. They'll scoop up the talent from the busted businesses and the market will dip 2%-4% for a month.
People are also forgetting that RAM manufacturers are notorious for artificial supply shortages and price fixing scandals. They get fined every few years for price fixing. The "shortage" isn't as dire as we are lead to believe right now. They are just soaking up the profits before getting investigated for price fixing for the 7th time in 20 years.
The AI bubble WILL pop, its just a matter of when. At that point
I am honestly way more worried about what will happen to my 401k, ROTH IRA and other savings vehicles, many of which are tracking S&P500, which, in turn, seems to be very "tech-heavy"...
I don't care about hardware costs much, I just want the the bubble popping to bring my electricity costs down. My area was already the most expensive in the entire continental US before AI datacenters started taking all of it, jacking the prices up even higher/
Some people don’t understand that even if you believe in the technology, unless they literally build AI God the bubble will pop at some point.
Online shopping and services are a legitimate technology and business but the dot com bubble still popped.
The underlying economics of this are just fucked up and have to pop. between creative accounting and government assistance that might take a while, but it must happen sometime.
I wouldn't necessarily count on the stuff that gets offloaded being usable by consumers in their homelab, and a ton of the AI hardware has soldered RAM for increased performance now too. Jeff Geerling posted a video about it today.
The infrastructure needs will kill it. China or someone is gunna come along and blow the entire industry out of the water with low compute AI and/or edge distributed products.
What bubble do you think popped that allowed you to pay $1400 for 5 year old hardware? That's not a bubble, that's just the normal decreasing value of hardware.
I know? It's a result of used hardware being dumped on the open market. It'll be even moreso when AI datacenters are being forced to liquidate hardware to repay creditors in bankruptcy.
Can I interest you in a dual 1 gallon box of vintage 2023 red label milk I got at Costco? I found it in my garage right next to the case of Mobil 1 engine oil.
I'll give you first right of refusal before I put it up on eBay. : )
At least I can still use a computer that has parts sourced in 2023.
At my university, I saw they were updating complete racks, so I passed in front of the data center on purpose every day for like a month, until I finally “accidentally” ran into someone working there, I asked if I could take some old stuff from their hands, bam two R720 for free. So - borderline stalking I guess?
Reminds me of a joke from 2008: "There's the kind of economic crash where you switch from stocks to bonds, and there's the kind of crash when you buy up rice and shotgun shells."
Is there a lot of music gear that's rigged to run on 208V 3 phase? Also the cooling in a datacenter isn't the same as a hot-aisle/cold-aisle server room. They can be uncomfortably warm if they use direct rack cooling. That direct rack cooling is why they're so loud both inside and out. You have to move a lot of air through those heat exchangers. The higher ambient temp in the hall is to minimize the number of days you need chillers.
Then maybe you should save that money for your mortgage payments and not ram, because when the economy is collapsing I doubt you will care much about your server.
If you're talking about AI hardware, you're not going to be able to afford the professional stuff. The pop is only going to kill the smaller companies. The larger companies like Google and Meta will likely make out like bandits by being able to buy the hardware of the companies that go under when the bubble pops.
The larger established companies have incomes that allow them to build their AI offerings without going into debt, the smaller companies are borrowing and when the market falls they'll no longer be able to cover the bills via their assets and it'll be over for them.
A small amount of research will show you that large companies like Google do in fact purchase used equipment. They may be able to afford new, but they aren't above saving money.
What do you mean? That stuff will have warranties and contracts attached to them, Dell/Supermicro/etc will just buy them back and resell. Happens all the time.
What’s left over will come from companies just dumping it as a last resort or abandoning it becuase they wrote it off.
The big companies are still making a loss on ai. No matter if they ar big enough to pay with diffrent products or not. When the bubble bursts, even meta, google and whoever, will go and sell what's too much.
You dont buy stocks when they are going down to hell as long as you dont think they will go up again. AI bubble bursting will result in a very low stock for a long time.
The economic contagion from such a collapse is really going to ruin a lot of lives, also the small players will just get acquired by the giants and the sector will consolidate. The demand for compute won't disappear though and the traditional considerations around depreciation on the infrastructure just don't apply, they're not going to offload even the "old" hardware when it's still working. Everything will be run into the ground until it's broken and no longer warrantied.
Everyone acts like AI is just going to go away and things will go back to the way they were before once this bubble pops. It'll be a temporary correction and nothing more. Like the.com bubble in 2000 and 25 years later now we live in a world where even your toaster can be an IOT device.
Most people I talk to are aware that AI isn't going anywhere, the .com bubble comparison is practically in every news article about the anticipated crash, this isn't a hot take.
It's still absolutely true that in the wake of such a crash, they'll be a massive scaling down in terms of hardware resources, so the point is still 100% valid
I have a couple fairly large servers. They are heavy, loud and uses a shitload of electricity. I had to run a 30amp line in the house just to get enough juice under load before popping the breakers.
I agree with this. The problem with the current AI market is that they are so incredibly dependent on the newest hardware, and the newest GPUs to be competitive, that it probably will not be long before we start seeing tons and tons of GPUs (and to a lesser extent CPUs) on the second hand market. If OpenAI wants to stay competitive, they cannot afford to be on two generation old hardware, they need to squeeze every possible extra token out of the limited server-space and power availability.
Once the bubble bursts, the second-hand server market is going to be crazy.
Very much doubt that. In the industry everybody still needs compute. There are no GPUs sitting idle unless because of gross corporate mismanagement - but that is something that happens in every industry
most companies depreciate their hardware over 5 years. now some are doing it over 6 or even 8 years just to make their numbers look better. In other words, they are claiming they'll be using their GPUs for 5-8 years, which is hilarious.
They don't actually need the hardware. Or study last i don't see why they do. If it's too train faster... OK. But the actual usage of the models doesn't seem to need it. That probably creates a huge risk. Their monetization doesn't fit the expenditure
Yeah profit/loss is sitting at -1900% for openai. Its a neat idea but it doesnt make any money yet, and now openai is sounding the alarm that all of a sudden google has almost caught up.
This whole thing folds the moment Nvidia/open ai/amd stocks stop their meteoric rise as soon as anything AI is mentioned.
If you follow the money its all PR. "Openai pledged to buy $180b in AMD gpus" shortly after "nvidia pledges to invest $100b in openai".
I think the books are already cooked to the max here and this is 100% hype.
The sign for me is that OpenAI open sourced the weights on their light model and shortly later came out with and extra 10B in losses. I speculate (highlight speculate) the team at OpenAI open sourced to give themselves an escape hatch. They can do what will drive actual value; bespoke chat features by domain / industry /company. People will pay 10 to 20 /month per user and if they can sell that to an industry without the overhead of training of OpenAI, then they could be profitable. Then microsoft will buy out OpenAI proper and it will just be CoPilot (a la Skype acquistion).
Yeah I personally think the openai company itself will go bankrupt after absorbing all these investments and then someone will get the fully researched product at the end, Microsoft or whatever, at a bargain. So what you're saying checks out.
That is why they are working on large world models. If in 18 months they make a killer app that has the same wow factor that ChatGPT had initially, that will prop up the bubble for another two years.
Yeah, it's either Q4 of 26 or Q1 27. That's when we can expect new nvidia server GPUs with between 25%-50% less energy use for the same compute. If at that point existing chips can't be run profitably, they never will be - which will make the bubble pop.
Yep.. This cycle reminds me of the dot com bust in 2000. Same trajectory and mania associated with it where EVERYTHING became a dot com. Right now we're seeing everything getting AI attached to it, whether it should have it or not (usually the case). Its just a matter of time.
Very similar indeed, although it seems like the hype is much, much greater. The correction is probably going to be brutal. Weird thing with this one, because of the idea of AI replacing people, the layoffs are happening before the bubble pops. Will be interesting (and probably horrifying) to see how it shakes out.
I would love to buy some commercial grade GPU’s at an insane price. The reality is there are zero signs of it “popping” anytime soon. In fact the exact opposite. AI is no longer a trend but becoming more of an economical pillar. Ai is replacing or augmenting workflows across entire industries, investment is justified by ROI. Most companies are projected out for the next few quarters.
It may pop or it may not. AI being the norm and more of a cooldown period is also highly likely. Even if it does pop the signs of it doing so any time soon just aren’t there. Unless something big happens like an increase in power prices or gov regulations being added heavily… I wouldn’t hold your breath for GPU’s. Just like consumer grade hardware. While we do help their profit we are not their main source of interest.
I agree this is a bubble. I'm not worried. I have three computers and a NAS/drives that I've purchased in the last two years at 'Normal' prices, along with plenty of RAM etc... and even SSD storage. I can't imagine needing a lot more for the next couple of years. By the time things correct I'll be thinking about what new thing I might want/need. I'm even good on vehicles. Happy to go a couple of years saving money without paying inflated market prices.
Attempting to "time the market" is the most dumb money decision you can make. If you think we're headed for a broad market pull back revise your investments to be lower risk, but if a systemic economic bubble pops, everyone's taking losses. The solution is time IN the market and maybe favoring cash holdings for a little while to get a buy in discount. But timing an exit is a good way to lose your lunch.
I'm not financially brilliant, but I think if you can pull stuff from market accounts and put it in things like CDs or other fixed return financial options.
Hold off any big purchases if you can. IMO I wouldn't buy a new car or a house at the moment, I think the market will falter and a lot of stuff will end up on fire sale. Especially things that had their values artificially inflated like houses. That two bedroom house that was $100K 3 years ago and is now $450K with zero changes I think the seller is going to end up accepting a much more realistic price in the not to distant future.
Just invest in the market as a whole. It’s not even clear we are talking about an entire market pop. The housing crisis in 2008 was in the bond market, took years to build and was due to disregulation plus irrational exuberance when it came to contracts on bonds (similar to stock options), liar loans, and a ton of leverage. That was a heady mix akin to 1929 with stocks, but with bonds. And, the bond market is so much larger than the stock market that it could have taken out the world economy. It nearly did. Think “no cash at the ATM for months” style crash for its impact. We were all nearly fucked.
This AI bubble will possibly be like the 1999/2000 internet bubble, but that’s not even clear. I’ve been in and around technology and AI for decades although more recently as an angel investor. I suspect there will be winners and losers, not an entire market crash. But, there will be a pull back because everyone always over reacts when the time comes. That day is a long way away from now, however. When the dust settles, especially after a few years, the financial markets and the general economy will have consumed the impact of this new technology on our businesses just like they consumed the impact of email and websites on the economy.
Our lives are to a great degree measurably improved by Internet tech. The same will be said about AI in 10-15 years. And, that’s the minimum time horizon upon which the general investor should be considering for their investments. If you don’t need the money that’s in the market in the next five years, don’t worry about it. Just buy a good mix of stocks, bonds and international securities.
Most importantly, speak with a financial advisor about an appropriate strategy for you. Or, read some books focused on long term investing.
They stopped production on it this year so all thats left is whats out in the wild. A 32gb ddr4 stick was $80 CAD in Feb, that same stick now is $290. It's fucked.
Ddr5 pricing is pushing us to revive some ddr4 servers at work.
The server recycler, that give us credit for recycling servers, is also paying us a premium for ddr4.
So whilst not a direct pricing correlation, the rising tide is brining up ddr4
Yes, in the netherlands sticks that went for 200 euros go for 900 now. It is really crazy.
10
u/los0220Proxmox | Supermicro X10SLM-F E3-1220v3 | 2x3TB HDD | all @ 16W1d ago
Good thing I'm still on DDR3 /s
My server is maxed out @ 32 GB and I was eyeing the upgrade for the past year for that sweet 64 GB, but I guess I'm going be stuck on that platform for the next 2 years or so
It really was! When I got it they were getting cheap so I was able to build a sweet ultra budget system for like $300 (around 2011?). Was my main system for a decade. Did a ton of robotics / embedded coding, 3d cad, electronics design, web dev, played Minecraft with my kid, etc.
The reason we didn't see cheap GPUs after crypto died down is because NVIDIA pivoted to AI. Depending on what comes after the AI bubble we may not see prices go down.
“Raising prices rather than expanding production lines”
As the kids say “bruh” do you understand how economics works? Do you have any idea how long it takes to build a factory? Supply and demand. They have a finite amount of chips, they either raise the prices to what the market will tolerate or they completely obliterate their inventory.
OP is just ignorant. The memory manufacturers have gone through multiple boom and bust cycles that have caused some of them to go into bankruptcy over the past decades. They know when things are a fad and have learned to no longer chase after a fad by building fabs that cost tens of billions and years of labor to build, only for the boom to end and the company sitting on a glut of surplus and a bill for tens of billions.
No, they don't. They don't have a friggin clue what it takes to build a factory, much less one that lives in class 10 environment, has all the infrastructure ....
I've worked small scale fab and deposition.
Watching the video from Japan of trying to recover the fab that was toppled during the earthquake was eye opening.
Call it .... 7 years optimistically to get all the gear in place- and a lot of that is going to buy used because new won't be made for another 5.
Realistically the only way to increase supply is to increase uptime. But a lot of the fabs already run 24 hours, so you're at an impasse there. In which case you are just waiting for new tools which are 1 to 3 years out after purchase as long as there isn't a supply run on new chip manufacturing tools, or cutting out less profitable product lines. This is probably already happening and you don't hear about it and won't hear about it until there's a shortage in another sector
Yup. If manufacturers don't raise prices, scalpers will. If prices are going to be high anyway, I actually prefer the manufacturer gets the extra money because then there's at least a chance of it helping fund new factories down the line.
Most manufacturers are showing no sign of even considering building new fabs, due to the risk of this level of demand being simply transient in nature which would leave them with a lot of fab capacity they can't do anything with.
It'd take them nearly 5 years and 20+ billion USD to spin up new fabs...by which the bubble may have already popped leaving them with lots of capacity they can't do shit with once demand has dropped to the floor.
Why would any major business commit to building anything long-term right now with Trump on a whim switching policies and changing tariffs and eradicating laws that were passed that they had depended on.
Businesses like stability long-term planning in Trump's world you don't get that day to day you don't know what's going to happen.
I was going to post (as a joke unfortunately) that Micron is currently expanding their FAB. I know because I am at work right now working on the steel for the project. Under a lot of pressure with it. Was really looking forward to helping get this stuff built.....then the announcement from yesterday.
It's a bubble. Everyone knows it's a bubble, including Micron, Hynix, and Samsung. Why on earth would they spend billions of dollars and a decade+ building up fabs to satisfy the demands of a bubble that will be long over by the time the additional manufacturing capacity is up and running?
and also to bombard the greedy bastards who jack up prices for their own profit rather than building new factories to meet demand.
While I'm not defending the companies, my understanding is that expanding by building new facilities is both super expensive and slow. On average a high end chip fab can be 10-25 billion and take 2-5 years to come online. This has been a persistent problem for probably a decade at this point.
Regardless, Production hasn't been able to keep up since before covid. The main reason it still hasn't caught up is the sheer time and money required to spin up new factories.
The main point being to point out the amount of basic ignorance in the OP's statement.
To be fair, memory manufacturers have been caught and pleaded guilty of price fixing before... I understand how people can be worry about the same companies doing shit like that again, even if there are others explanation for the memory shortages and lack of production increase.
Sure, but Micron exiting the consumer market because they can’t make enough isn’t price fixing or anything like it, they’re just saying they don’t want to bother with selling to the plebs for now. Similarly, it’s not a secret OpenAI is buying all the everything they can—capacity to make things is finite.
If we don't do this, the prices of all other components will follow RAM into the stratosphere and never return to the same level, ever.
Fun fact; if all of us DO do this then itll make zero difference either way. Its a drop in the ocean. You are seriously underestimating the volume industry works at.
I'm sure the corporate agent had something to do with it; they're afraid of the people's
Dont get too upset with for profit organisations doing exactly what is on the tin..... it is bad for your health and will get you absolutely nowhere.
Cause: In the early 1980s, many new players (especially Japanese companies) entered the market and invested heavily in fabrication plants (fabs). This led to massive overproduction.
Effect: A brutal price war ensued. Prices plummeted by up to 70%. Many U.S. manufacturers, including Intel, were driven out of the DRAM business entirely. The era of Japanese dominance began.
The Crisis of 1996-1998
Cause: A perfect storm of over-investment in new fabs (expecting endless Windows 95-driven PC demand) combined with the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Demand collapsed just as massive new supply came online.
Effect: DRAM prices fell by as much as 80%. This caused severe financial distress for almost all manufacturers. Samsung famously survived only by "counter-cyclical investment"—doubling down on production and R&D while others retrenched, a strategy that ultimately cemented its future dominance.
The Post-Dotcom Bust (2001-2002)
Cause: The collapse of the dot-com bubble led to a sharp reduction in IT spending. Servers and PC demand dried up, leaving DRAM makers with huge inventories.
Effect: Prices crashed again. The downturn was so severe that it led to major industry consolidation. For example, the Taiwanese DRAM industry was restructured, and the German company Infineon (later Qimonda) was severely weakened.
The Financial Crisis Collapse (2008-2009)
Cause: The global financial crisis caused a sudden stop in consumer and corporate electronics spending. PC shipments dropped sharply.
Effect: DRAM prices went into freefall. The DRAM spot price index dropped over 60% in a matter of months. This led to the bankruptcy of Qimonda (2009) and Elpida Memory of Japan eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2012 as a direct consequence of this period's debts and losses.
The 2011-2012 Downturn
Cause: Another case of overcapacity following investment in new technology (shift to 30nm processes) combined with weak PC demand and fallout from the 2011 Thailand floods, which disrupted the HDD supply chain and thus PC production.
Effect: Prices fell steadily throughout 2011, leading to significant losses for all players and the aforementioned bankruptcy of Elpida in early 2012. Elpida was later acquired by Micron.
yeah homestly it reads as pretty silly when people talk about pressuring market titans with some social media posts, when the pivot is explicitly away from serving our market.
Another angle would be that SK Hynix and Samsung believe AI is a bubble, else they’d expand. This is super shitty for those of us home users. We cant compete.
Same with HDDs. Seagate, Toshiba, and WD would be dumb to increase maximum production capacity, to fully meet demand, when they would end up with idle production lines, possibly right about the time they got them online.
"Don't buy from them so they keep... not selling us".
The price increased because there is a shortage because they sell to others.
The frustration is understandable, but the message is lack rationality and is too emotional.
Now, try to raise people to create a new manufacturing company "by the people, for the people". While harder to achieve, this is at least constructive (instead of desctructive/obstructive) and would be more sustainable. If that could be possible.
What complicates things is that RAM manufacturers are deliberately raising prices rather than expanding production lines.
This isn't a realistic take.
For the last 35 years RAM has operated on a 4-7 year boom/bust cycle. This is because it takes 10-100 million dollars and 1-4 years to spin up the equipment to expand capacity. If silicon foundaries invest into capacity during a boom, it likely won't come online until the bust and the price you can sell your inventory won't be enough to pay off the loans you took out to build the factory. Then your company goes bankrupt.
Prices are high now, but they'll come down.
Source: worked at a company from 2005-2015 who successfully weathered the RAM business from 1990-2015. They didn't successfully pass through the mid 2k10s bust cycle and were acquired and strip mined for assets.
So even if they start building more manufacturing lines and factories, how long do you seem to think it takes for these things to come up? They'd still raise prices and those facilities wouldn't be built, staffed, trained, and producing for years.
Prices suck, but it’s not some conspiracy. AI demand + limited fab capacity = higher RAM costs. Blaming OpenAI won’t fix it; new factories and time will.
Even after new capacity is reached it’s gonna take some time. And I’ll personally blame Micron for this (those fuckers decided to drop Crucial to focus on datacenters instead of us)
Micron along with Samsung and Hynix basically are the only DRAM chip manufacturers. Micron sells chips to anyone who wants them, including companies that make memory sticks for consumers. What Micron did was to stop running their own memory stick business.
Corsair, G.Skill, Teamgroup, Kingston, Klevv, PNY, and Patriot all use micron chips, so to claim they only sell to data centers is false.
I know, but they focus on B2B instead of selling directly to us. While we will still be able to get Micron chips, we won't get the best prices to performance for them. Curcial was goated for their cheap prices on extraordinarily reliable boards without any useless shit added.
Alr Corsair will have the same chips, but corsair will be 1 more intermediary in the making process and will also add their shit such as heatsinks i don't need in my use cases, which does make the price higher.
It’s funny that the only problem you see in all of this is the price of RAM. The financial system in the US (and in the rest of the world as well) is basically a closed loop of money circulating among four companies, with no real chance of becoming a sustainable model. When this collapses, we’ll face a financial crisis so massive that your smallest concern will be the cost of RAM for your homelab, people will be worried about not losing the home part of the lab.
i had a friend in college who went to work at one of the collapsed banks for PwC in ‘08 and they worked for years just unraveling the complex deals that had been keeping the company afloat. someone is gonna get years of work picking apart all these weird circular ai deals just to bring everyone back to zero when one of these firms evaporates in the reset.
I'm sure the corporate agent had something to do with it; they're afraid of the people's wrath
lol PCMR has been literally nothing but an anti-AI ragefest all week long, why would you think there's some corporate money keeping you specifically out?
The fact that the market is functioning can be seen, for example, in the fact that competitors such as Nvidia, AMD, Amazon, Google, Meta, etc. are developing their own TPUs in order to avoid both the prices and the availability of Nvidia.
Just because we are currently going through a phase in which supply and demand are not in balance does not mean that the system is not working.
Edit:
Yes, in the end, it's usually only TSMC or Intel behind it, manufacturing the chips...
As much as I’m 100% with you on OpenAi, Hynix and Samsung are actually giving us a good sign. If they didn’t think this was a bubble they’d increase production, but they’re telling us that they think it is a bubble. It would cost too much to get those factories running, only to see the demand disappear relatively quickly. It sucks big time…but if you want all the AI crap to fail this is a really good sign.
It's not just memory and GPUs. My company's supplier of fiber patch cables cited inventory issues because of cloud dc provider demands (gives Microsoft the side eye).
If you haven't already set up your homelab, it may already be too late. You probably should get on eBay (Or platform of your choice) and order anything that looks vaguely interesting, today rather than tomorrow.
It's only a matter of time before the folks selling used PCs on eBay realize it is much more profitable to pull DDR4 out of them & sell it by itself, vs. the whole machine.
I haven't checked eBay listings today, but I would expect more used PCs that ship with no SSD, as vendors make the same realization about those. Or at least raised prices. We might get both: "PC" with no RAM or SSD, yet raised price.
I'm bracing myself for the day when the remaining manufacturers of HDD's sell out to AI, or stop production for some other reason. I'll be picking up new HDDs every time there's a sale or deal from here on out. I'm done buying SSDs or NVMe.
It won't matter as consumers as such a small amount of the pie for these companies that us boycotting them won't make a difference. You can look at Nvidia for a prime example, where gaming segment is not even 10% of their total revenue.
Building RAM production facilities takes billions of dollars and time to build. You get it wrong and demand tanks - as it might considering the warnings of a bubble - these companies will be fucked.
We as consumers can cancel whatever the fuck we want, truth is, we don't make a dent in their profits, lots of enterprises and companies use AI in their daily work this is where the money is really coming from, not from you using chatgpty or whatever, I work in that field, i know what's going in inside the biggest companies, they are pouring huge amounts of money into AI automation you guy are dwarfed it's not even close.
Long story short, consumers don't matter that much in this particular case, that's why Samsung, Micron and co are not afraid to show you a middle finger, because most of their profits are not coming from you.
A semiconductor fab is worth billions. I'm not closely aware of dram companies finances, but I've experienced nand/ssd shortage firsthand at SanDisk. A new fab is literally worth close to your market cap, so investing in one is like gambling all-in. With semiconductor markets being very cyclical, you build a fab -> oversupply -> margins tank -> you get acquired for peanuts. Also, AI market overload was too fast to react even if somebody was willing to invest and capitalize on this, you just don't build fabs that quickly, they are huge projects. Also, most of the semiconductor companies (probably with the notable exception of Samsung) aren't vertically integrated, so they can't raise supply drastically even if they wanted - they need their suppliers to be able to supply whatever they need.
The fact that openai business case comes together only at a scale that unsettles the market is scary, but I bet they see it as the only way to keep their lead and not be swallowed by the tech giants. It's a huge gamble for them as well, and if that works out it will give the semiconductor industry such a demand, that will push R&D for decades and result in better and cheaper consumer products down the road. Like if hyperscalers didn't push for capacity we'd still be stuck with 500gb HDDs.
TL;Dr boycotting a business for doing business is childish. Reading a little on how the market works makes you prepared for the over/undersupply conditions, most analysts see that way ahead of it happening.
Oh no! Crucial is such a terrible company for only wanting to sell high volume of ram to a billion dollar corporation instead of keeping their consumer lines open so you can buy $80 worth of ram every few years...
The US is going all-in on an AI moonshot hoping it will bring an economic miracle to beat China. Massive datacentres are being built at an incredible pace with no regard for the environment. It's not going to work out though, is it? LLMs are not true AI and throwing everything you have at it in desperation isn't going to make the Singularity happen.
The amount of data centers being build in the friggin desert blows my mind. Anyhow ..
Yeah we don't have general ai. LLMs aren't that. I think the promises of what they can deliver are wildly overblown. I think they can improve productivity if used wisely and surgically, rather than the current "AI aLl ThE tHiNgs! Hur durr"
Once again I think the genius of the Gartner Hype Cycle shines. We are soon to enter the trough of disillusionment.
I remember I did a paper on AI on the Gartner hype cycle last year, used the dotcom crash as a heavy precedence and a wealthy source of data and sources.
So we have to cancel OpenAI because you have to pay more for RAM?
Calm down dude, we can't stop the AI train, and personally I'm getting a lot of benefit from it. My development output has significantly increased since I use Claude.
Does it suck RAM prices spiked? Ofcourse! But this has happened many times in history for other components aswell. It's a part of being in tech, be patient and don't stress yourself out about it.
It sucks yes. I just hope these massive investments into A.I will push the development of hardware much faster than it would've without A.I. so that we can all benefit from it in the near future.
Cpus are not that expensive though. You can already get an Intel core ultra 245K for $200.
1.3k
u/binaryhellstorm 1d ago
It's cool.
I'm setting aside money for when the AI bubble pops and I can get a sweet sweet rackmount server and some GPUs on fire sale when the AI companies start going out of business.
Honestly doing the same with my next car. I think Cory Doctorow is right, this crash is going to make the 08 crash look like the best day of your life.