I've heard it was Sam Altman and OpenAI basically buying every wafer available from both Samsung and SKHynix at the start of October.

Neither company know of the other purchase until it was a done deal.

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Panzer04 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Kind of funny to see manufacturers get screwed by their own opaque pricing policies for once.

All well and good when you're dictating terms with dozens of buyers, but probably not so much when a single buyer is dictating terms to a couple of sellers.

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Scaevolus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The CEO of OpenAI and OpenAI didn't coordinate?

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ndriscoll 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Samsung and SK Hynix. OpenAI made deals to buy almost half of manufactured DRAM in the world. There's speculation that after this was announced, other companies started making their own deals in a panic, further driving demand.

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lucb1e 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> after this was announced, other companies started making their own deals in a panic, further driving demand.

Oh ffs it's like the toilet paper thing. I was amazed how long that continued despite credible sources saying there is no shortage, just insane demand from the loonies that don't believe it would return to normal instantly if they would just stop buying more and more extras because "see, it's out again!"

	▲	zozbot234 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is almost certainly what's going on right now in the retail market. OTOH it's also a semi-rational response to volatility and uncertainty as to future wholesale prices, due to, e.g. the projected build-out of future AI datacenters. As with any durable good, whenever the price might be expected to rise in the future, people will want to hoard stockpiles and the expected price rise will be brought forward to the present.

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lysace an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Is DRAM built using the same process/node as GPUs?