My question is, will the ram price go down at some point or is it a point of no return?

gpm 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, we're just hitting the limits of current manufacturing not some fundamental limit like the availability of raw materials. Either demand will wane and the prices will go down, or manufacturing will scale up and prices will go down, eventually. That "eventually" does some work, but it's not remotely a case of "a point of no return".

In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, because we'll make more of it and get better at producing it than we would have without the demand spike. I.e. Wright's Law in action - which is usually pretty good at producing the long term direction of prices of products like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect

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pratyushnair01 2 days ago | parent [-]

Correct if I'm wrong, but without any new entrants, the market effectively cornered by a few players and high demand from data centers, how will the prices come down? Just like the GPU prices post COVID and bitcoin demand, how will there be any incentive to bring down consumer prices? The only scenario I can think of is chinese firms catch up and swoop in to corner the market.

	▲	gpm 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		If demand stays high existing firms will increase capacity to make more money, and then will compete against eachother on price to sell their new extra capacity. They'll do the same to prevent new firms (in other counties or not) from having an opportunity to come into the market and undercut them. An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless. GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.

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glaslong 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They'll come down some day, but between the massive ai co purchases, and how long Micron says it will take to bring up new production capacity... most estimates I've seen are that it stays high (or grows higher still) until at least 2028.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/ram-prices-are-exploding...

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wmf 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, it will go back down eventually.

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cheraderama 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The situation is really sticky, since allegedly fabs are anxious to ramp up production, fearing the AI bubble will burst and they will be left with useless stock. So the usual supply chasing demand doesn't apply here and we might wait for a really long time...