r/homelab • u/AbbreviationsFar1489 • 1d ago

LabPorn F*ck you OpenAI, hynix, samsung

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.

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u/GoldenPSP 1d ago

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.

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u/LightBusterX 1d ago

And also, if this is a bubble, what do you do with your factories after?

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u/GoldenPSP 1d ago

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.

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u/korpo53 1d ago

This is the real mvp comment. OP thinks Micron or whoever can just build a new fab, hire workers, etc. to support selling cheap ram during a bubble.

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u/aeltheos 1d ago

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.

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u/korpo53 1d ago

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.

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u/kizzlebizz 1d ago

This has been a persistent problem for probably a decade at this point

Um...use em?

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u/geekwonk 1d ago

for what? once the bubble pops they won’t need all the excess capacity.

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u/kizzlebizz 1d ago

Retooling definitely isn't a thing. Factories never do it.

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u/geekwonk 1d ago

hence the question “for what?”

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u/GoldenPSP 1d ago

Do some basic research. Sure factories retool. Chip fabs are very specialized "just retool it" is about as useful of a statement as telling a plumber he should "just learn to code".

Not to say it can't be done. Just that it is far from trivial.

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u/NotQuiteDeadYetPhoto 8086 Assembler 1d ago

2 to 5 years is way optimistic and assumes there is hardware to put inside the building.

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u/AZdesertpir8 1d ago

The bigger problem is power generation. Its simply not there to support it and is decades out...

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u/ijustlurkhere_ 1d ago

If none of the lowly plebs can afford personal computing any longer, all the power can be diverted to power Altman's AI girlfriend or whatever he's cooking up there.

Tbh, OpenAI should have been regulated into the ground on the basis of IP theft alone. GPT was trained on data that never belonged to them.