This reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk

Spoiler, but the answer is basically that old hardware rules the day because it lasts longer and is more reliable of timespans of decades.

DDR5 32GB is currently going for ~$330 on Amazon

DDR4 32GB is currently going for ~$130 on Amazon

DDR3 32GB is currently going for ~50 on Amazon (4x8GB)

For anyone where cost is a concern, using older hardware seems like a particularly easy choice, especially if a person is comfortable with a Linux environment, since the massive droves of recently retired Windows 10 incompatible hardware works great with your Linux distro of choice.

I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware.

[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.

Think the article should also mention how OpenAI is likely responsible for it. Good article I found from another thread here yesterday: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

The article suggests that because the power and cooling are customized, it would take a ton of effort to run the new AI servers in a home environment, but I'm skeptical of that. Home-level power and cooling are not difficult these days. I think when the next generation of AI hardware comes out (in 3-5 years), there will be a large supply of used AI hardware that we'll probably be able to repurpose. Maybe we'll sell them as parts. It won't be plug-and-play at first, but companies will spring up to figure it out.

If not, what would these AI companies do with the huge supply of hardware they're going to want to get rid of? I think a secondary market is sure to appear.

Can someone explain why OpenAI is buying DDR5 RAM specifically? I thought LLMs typically ran on GPUs with specialised VRAM, not on main system memory. Have they figured out how to scale using regular RAM?

Anyone want to start a fab with me? We can buy an ASML machine and figure out the rest as we go. Toronto area btw

I wonder how much of that RAM is sitting in GPUs in warehouses waiting for datacenters to be built or powered?

"dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year."

You don't need a new PC. Just use the old one.

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again.

I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

My understanding is that this is primarily hitting DDR5 RAM (or better). With prices so inflated, is there an argument to revert and downgrade systems to DDR4 RAM technology in many use cases (which is not so inflated)?

I wonder if Apple will budge. The margins on their RAM upgrades were so ludicrous before that they're probably still RAM-profitable even without raising their prices, but do they want to give up those fat margins?

> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market.

I wouldn't ascribe that much intent. More simply, datacenter builders have bought up the entire supply (and likely future production for some time), hence the supply shortfall.

This is a very simple supply-and-demand situation, nothing nefarious about it.

time to stop using python boys, it's zig from here on out

I just gathered enough money to build my new PC. I'll even go to another country to pay less taxes, and this spike hit me hard. I'll buy anyway because I don't believe it will slow down so soon. But yeah, for me is a lot of money

Companies are adamant about RAMming AI down our throats, it seems.

This is ultimately the first stage of human economic obsolescence and extinction.

This https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2... will happen to every class of thing (especially once it hits energy, because everything is downstream of that).

> maybe it's a good time to dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year.

Always good advice.

I am very excited for a few years when the bubble bursts and all this hardware is on the market for cheap like back in the early to mid 2000's after that bubble burst and you had tons of old servers available for homelabs. I can't wait to fill a room with 50kW of bulk GPUs on a pallet and run some cool shit.

I think we kiss of deathed the article haha. Here's an archive https://archive.is/6QD8c

If the OpenAI Hodling Company buys and warehouses 40% of global memory production or 900,000 memory wafers (i.e. not yet turned into DDR5/DDR6 DIMMs) per month at price X in October 2025, leading to supply shortages and tripling of price, they have the option of later un-holding the warehoused memory wafers for a profit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142100#46143535

  Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain..

> As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs. → Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.

I can't help but be the pessimist angle. RAM production will need to increase to supply AI data centers. When the AI bubble bursts (and I do believe it will), the whole computing supply chain, which has been built around it, will take a huge hit too. Excess production capacity.

Wonder what would happen if it really takes a dive. The impact on the SF tech scene will be brutal. Maybe I'll go escape on a sailboat for 3 years or something.

Anyway, tangential, but something I think about occasionally.

I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing.

I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for most people.

Micron has already decided to just eliminate the Crucial brand (as mentioned in the post). It feels like if this continues, once our nice home PCs start to break, we won't be able to repair them.

The extreme version of this is that even dumb terminals (which still require some ram) will be as expensive as laptops today. In this world, our entire computing experience is connecting a dumb terminal to a ChatGPT interface where the only way we can interact with anything is through "agents" and prompts.

In this world, OpenAI is not overvalued, and there is no bubble because the large LLM companies become computing.

But again, I think this is mostly a dystopian sci-fi fiction... but it does sit a bit too close to the realm of possible for my tastes.

Is this a shortage of every type of RAM simultaneously?

I grabbed a framework desktop with 128GB due to this. I can't imagine they can keep the price down for the next batches. If you bought 128GB of ram with "close" specs to the one used just that would be 1200 EUR at retail (who are obviously taking advantage).

Pricing compute out of the average persons budget to prop up investment in data centers, stocks, ultimately control agency

If an RTX 5000 series price topped out at historical prices no one would need hosted AI

Then it came to be that models were on a path to run well enough loaded into RAM... uh oh

This is in line with ISPs long ago banning running personal services and the long held desire to sell dumb thin clients that must work with a central service

Web developers fell for confidence games of old elders hook line and sinker. Nothing but the insane ego and vanity of some tech oligarchs driving this. They cannot appear weak. Vain aura farming, projection of strength.

I'm way ahead of all of you, I'm hoarding DDR2.

panem et circenses

But what will happen when people are priced out from the circus?

The big 3 memory manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron) are essentially all moving upmarket. They have limited capacity and want to use it for high margin HBM for GPUs and ddr5 for servers. At the same time CXMT, Winbond and Nanya are stepping in at the lower end of the market.

I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore.

Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.

> Micron's killing the Crucial brand of RAM and storage devices completely,

More rot economy. Customers are such a drag. Lets just sell to other companies for billion dollar deals at once. These AI companies have bottomless wallets. No one has thought of this before we will totally get rich.

32GB should be more than enough.

You can go 16GB if you go native and throw some assembly in the mix. Use old school scripting languages. Debloat browsers.

It has been long delayed.

Every shortage is followed by a glut. Wait and see for RAM prices to go way down. This will happen because RAM makers are going to overproduce units to reap profits from the higher price.

Very happy to have bought a MBP M4 with 64 gb of Ram last year.

I mean what's the big deal, can't we just download more ram

Ha! Maybe Javascript developers will finally drop memory usage! You need to display the multiplication table? Please allocate 1GB of RAM. Oh, you want alternate row coloring? Here is another 100MB of CSS to do that.

> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies.

So it's the Bitcoin craze all over again. Sigh. The bubble will eventually collapse, it has to - but the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent... or, to use a more appropriate comparison, have a working computer.

I for myself? I hope once this bubble collapses, we see actual punishments again. Too-large-to-fail companies broken up, people getting prosecuted for the wash trading masquerading itself as "legitimate investments" in the entire bubble (that more looks like the genetic family table of the infamously incestuous Habsburg family), greedy executives jailed or, at least where national security is impacted due to chip shortages, permanently gotten rid of. I'm sick and tired of large companies being able to just get away with gobbling up everything, killing off the economy at large, they are not just parasites - they are a cancer, killing its host society.