The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

N_Lens

The big companies are insulated because they've locked in multi-year supply contracts with ram manufacturers - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon (All on 3-5 yr contracts). OAI's deal with Samsung & SK Hynix is also colossal - locking up roughly 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of world output (Stargate project). Apple got caught out because it had a shorter contract that ended in the beginning of Q3, and they've tried to source their RAM from Chinese CXMT who declined because all capacity was already locked in contracts. They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia. Overall the consumer segment is completely neglected, companies don't care about end users in the current market conditions.

MiroslavPokorny

Its a good thing the data centers in the Gulf states didnt get bombed.

shoobiedoo

On the bright side, this will further accelerate the retro computing scene as people throw their hands up at the thought of building something shiny and new

cryptoegorophy

When will supply catchup with demand?

bigglebear

I think it's time we start talking about putting limits on how much compute AI companies can purchase or own, relative to the rest of the world. It's not fair that they can use trillions of dollars of investor billionaires money to consume all of the resources that everybody needs. Where is fair distribution? What about all of the industries they're destroying in the process by hoarding it all for themselves? Otherwise, there will be no end to this. There are no hard limits on the speed of a parallel bruteforce. It's an infinite complexity problem class. The more parallel bruteforce power you have, the more likely you are to be able to solve a problem. So there is no world where demand ends. So if something isn't done about this, we'll have million dollar GPUs and RAM sticks because they've priced everyone out of the market and are the only ones able to afford them. Say goodbye to owning your own hardware at that point.

xbmcuser

I called this almost a year ago that the way things are going that home users and pc enthusiasts will be priced out of computing. And the best thing for the rest of the world is China reaching on parity on node side and crash the market. What would be the prices today if Chinese companies were not forced to build their own chips.

Barrin92

we're driving consumer prices up and delaying the climate transition for Rube Goldberg slop machines. In case any future historiographer decides to go with the title "the age of intelligence, our stupidest period yet" I'd like some royalties

smy20011

The good thing is that we no longer consider RAM is free and forced to develop more efficient program (hopefully)

p0w3n3d

What about Samsung Hynix cartel? Were they punished already?

SillyUsername

Pretty soon we'll see a renaissance in the tech that we gave up years ago or can still be improved - memory compression algorithms - alternative LLM architectures that don't rely on memory or GPUs - compatibility hardware (like DDR3 to DDR4 boards) - distributed computing improvements, both at local GPU and networking levels (SLI for AI) - GPU hacks to add more memory or support older architectures I'm personally looking forward to the new LLM architectures that don't require as much compute, e.g. DLLMs, which can be good enough for CPU usage but lack the accuracy of frontier models currently. When this happens the bottom will fall out of the GPU and memory markets, putting a glut of cheap hardware out there. Doom mongering like this never seems to include these as viable future alternatives, which is standard market adjustments, I wonder who the doom narrative helps? :)

haakon

I can't even read this blog post because Cloudflare's "security verification" fails over and over again. The internet sucks now.

YuechenLi

DRAM pricing has historically been cyclical in nature, and the only reason for the current high DRAM pricing is that current AI inference is unnecessarily RAM intensive/inefficient. Interesting effect is that since DRAM production tooling has been switched from DDR/GDDR to HBM, we may finally see the proliferation of HBM in consumer GPUs/accelerators after the bust cycle starts.

Catloafdev

I fear that, whenever consumer-facing supply finally starts to return, the opportunity cost will be priced in. Consumer RAM may end up being nearly as pricey as HBM for a while, and I don't see any reason why it would ever go back down on it's own, unless there are entirely new fab processes that don't meaningfully overlap HBM.

uejfiweun

This article is certainly a bit light on details. I'd prefer some more fine-grained and thorough analysis when it comes to this. Like, honestly, I'd have learned more by just asking Claude.

belZaah

This assumes the current demand will continue. Which is unlikely given the order of magnitude difference between capex by the Big Folks and the revenue generated by that capex. Given they now need to fund this spend from money markets, they are likely to be told off pretty soon. Feds go “ooh” and Google goes “aah”.

alanfranz

What kind of article is that? No explanation, no thoughts, just an empty "trust me bro" prediction from a website that usually publishes consumer hardware reviews. And the article doesn't even appear in their homepage. And the author is somebody from a company that "provides you with quality RAM" Flagged. How did this even get to HN ?