> Dell wanted >$90K a couple months ago to add 256GB to each node.

RAM is expensive, but not THAT expensive. I just bought 128Gb for about $5k for our build cluster (it's not even for AI, sigh). Even if you need larger-sized DIMM sticks, it's still going to be in the vicinity of ~15k tops.

It was crazy. I found the part on the open market for a lot less but the edict from the Customer was to buy from Dell to keep the support entitlement intact. That inflated the price to an astronomical level to be sure.

I haven't had problems w/ Dell support and 3rd party memory, personally, but given the machines' application I understood the concern.