> if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.

RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.

You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access. The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.

If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.

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throw-qqqqq a day ago | parent [-]

> It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket

You don’t know this with certainty, do you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

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quickthrowman a day ago | parent | next [-]

This time is purely supply and demand.

Companies (CRWV, etc) are borrowing at 10%+ interest rates to buy NVidia GPUs that NVidia makes 75% gross margin on. I repeat, companies are selling junk bonds to buy GPUs at a 300% markup. Cocaine dealers probably don’t even make 75% gross margins.

Other companies (OpenAI, etc) are also borrowing at 10%+ interest to rent the GPUs to train LLMs.

All of these GPUs need a ton of RAM. There is a fixed supply of RAM. There is insane demand for RAM.

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brookst a day ago | parent | prev [-]

What in the world does a 20-year-old scheme and prosecution have to do with it?

Besides, when demand outstrips supply you don't have to fix prices. Why would you? They cannot deliver all of the RAM people want. Think about it for a minute: how would price fixing even work?

(and don't get me started on the ridiculous "they're switching from DDR3 to HBM" part of that wikipedia article...)

	▲	throw-qqqqq 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> What in the world does a 20-year-old scheme and prosecution have to do with it? My point is that we don’t know for sure. DRAM manufacturers have admitted to price fixing previously, and it’s the exact same companies that produce RAM today. If you search for “price fixing cases in hardware”, you will find plenty of guilty pleads from other/unrelated HW companies that are more recent. Price fixing happens and sometimes they even get caught doing it ;) > Think about it for a minute: how would price fixing even work? In the past, it worked by manufacturers collectively agreeing on price quotes and margins IIUC. I’m not claiming any foul play. I’m saying we can’t know for sure and it’s happened before.