> Reality begs to differ

Honestly you're both wrong. RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason. Market people always want to argue in fundamentals, when in practice *ALL* the high frequency components of the signal are down to a bunch of traders trying to guess where it's going in the short term.

At best those guesses are informed by ground truth ("AI needs a lot of RAM!" "Sam cornered the marked!" "TurboQuant needs less RAM!"), but they remain guesses, and even then you can't tell the difference between that and random motion.

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T-A a day ago | parent | next [-]

> RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

Note how flat the black lines are.

Then note how wide the gray bands are. That makes it very easy to cherry-pick a few examples to present as "supporting evidence" that prices are doing whatever you want to believe they are doing.

	▲	ajross 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW, you're misreading that chart. It shows a wild increase in memory prices, no matter how much you try to cherry pick. An example might help: in July of last year I bought exactly this 2x32 DDR5 kit for $141: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSR14511 It's showing $999 now, which seems about median for similarly-spec'd memory on Amazon. The cheapest slot-and-capacity-compatible equivalent I can find is around $570, even. So 3-5x increase, at minimum. It's true that that's a high error bar. It's absolutely not true that the trend is ambiguous. Can you cherry pick me a $141 kit, please? I mean, it's not an abstract question! I'd buy it from you right now if you had it or could get it, in whatever quantity you can source. No joke.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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cma a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> RAM prices spiked speculatively

Didn't OpenAI buy up 40% of the capacity all at once?

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ajross a day ago | parent [-]

No, they signed a bunch of contracts for future deliveries. That's not a supply constraint. The factories making RAM continued operating and serving their existing deliveries, and in fact they still are.

Freshman economics would say that supply is fine and that prices shouldn't move. But they did anyway. And the reason is speculation.

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leoc a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't get it tbh. What market participants were speculating here? There aren't futures markets in RAM as far I know, though I certainly don't know much. And the supply constraints appear to have been pretty real (though maybe not immediate) if eg. Valve was begging publicly for RAM consignments. Were there pure-play speculators filling warehouses with DDR5?

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notatoad a day ago | parent [-]

>There aren't futures markets in RAM as far I know

sure there is. not formally, but if you hold a contract for x units of future production, you can sell that contract to somebody else who wants those units more than you do.

	▲	irke a day ago \| parent [-]
		That’s a forward contract yeah. They def do exist. Futures are standardised forward contracts traded on exchanges

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drakythe a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The economy is vibe coded at this point.

Have we gotten anymore word on the potential Helium constraints that SK Hynix was making noise about after the strike on the helium plant in the Middle East that suppplied 60% of S. Korea's Helium? Because that could definitely put a kink in things, since SKH is one of the 3 remaining big DRAM producers.

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cma a day ago | parent | prev [-]

According to this he ordered them uncut and unfinished and may just warehouse until needed:

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Its still speculative that OpenAI won't go bankrupt and have to free it back to the market, but if it is holding them unfinished it is a supply constraint on finished RAM chips even if not on wafer output.

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Forgeties79 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ll believe they’re going down when it doesn’t cost $550 for the $105 ram I purchased 1 year ago. Yes consumer prices lag commercial prices yada yada, I think any hot takes are pointless until we see lower prices or far more convincing evidence it’s coming. When it costs basically a MacBook neo for 32gb of DDR5 ram it’s hard to hear “ram is coming down for sure”