AI companies must compensate us for this outrage.

A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought some DDR4, 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid you not - the local price here is now 2.5 times as it was back in 2023 or so, give or take.

I want my money back, OpenAI!

▲

h2zizzle 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is important to point out. All the talk about AI companies underpricing is mistaken. The costs to consumers have just been externalized; the AI venture as a whole is so large that it simply distorts other markets in order to keep its economic reality intact. See also: the people whose electric bills have jumped due to increased demand from data centers.

I think we're going to regret this.

	▲	amarcheschi 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Americans are subsidizing ai by paying more for their electricity for the rest of the world to use chatgpt (I'm not counting the data centers of Chinese models and a few European ones though)

▲

Uvix 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

DDR4 manufacturing is being spun down due to lack of demand. The prices on it would be going up regardless of what's happening with DDR5.

▲

Forgeties79 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am so glad I built my PC back in April. My 2x16gb DDR5 sticks cost $105 all in then, now it’s $480 on amazon. That is ridiculous!

▲

basscomm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm also glad I overbought RAM when I did my last PC upgrade in January, because who knows when I'll be able to do that again.

The 96GB kit I bought (which was more than I needed) was $165. I ended up buying another 96GB kit in June when I saw the price went up to $180 to max out my machine, even though I didn't really need it, but I was concerned where prices were going.

That same kit was $600 a month ago, and is $930 today. The entire rest of the computer didn't cost that much

	▲	Forgeties79 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I do regret not going 64GB when it was so cheap but honestly? 32 has been fine. I had already pushed the budget to future-proof critical things (mobo, PSU, CPU, etc.) and ram hopefully one day will drop to sane prices again. I doubt I'll feel the strain for 3-5 years if at all. It's mainly a gaming rig right now

▲

toss1 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup.

And even more outrageous is the power grid upgrades they are demanding.

If they need the power grid upgraded to handle the load for their data centers, they should pay 100% of the cost for EVERY part of every upgrade needed for the whole grid, just as a new building typically pays to upgrade the town road accessing it.

Making ordinary ratepayers pay even a cent for their upgrades is outrageous. I do not know why the regulators even allow it (yeah, we all do, but it is wrong).

	▲	moregrist 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Usually the narrative for externalizing these kinds of costs is that the investment will result in lots of jobs in the upgrade area. Sometimes that materializes. Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our expensive infrastructure and we’ll take all your jobs. It’s a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV AI barons will have at the end of the day.
	▲	fullstop 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I bought 2x16 (32GB) DDR4 in June for $50. It is now ~$150. I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what it was then. My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.

▲

bell-cot 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is further upstream. Capitalism is nice in theory, but...

"The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn greedy." - Herbert Hoover, U.S. President, 1929-1933

And the past half-century has seen both enormous reductions in the regulations enacted in Hoover's era (when out-of-control financial markets and capitalism resulted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression), and the growth of a class of grimly narcissistic/sociopathic techno-billionaires - who control way too many resources, and seem to share some techno-dystopian fever dream that the first one of them to grasp the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc... trophy will somehow become the God-Emperor of Earth.