> 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

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 21 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.