Submitted 3 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
I LOVE FREE MARKETS!
I LOVE FREE MARKETS!
I LOVE FREE MARKETS!
I LOVE FREE MARKETS!
I LOVE FREE MARKETS!
I LOVE FREE MARKETS SO MUCH!
Can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst and we can all buy RAM at auction for $2 plus a 28% buyers premium.
Even in 2025, emerging industries are like “what’s an environment?”
Can’t blame this on not knowing. It’s all just negligence and evil now.
This bubble cannot burst soon enough
It can’t pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.
The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn’t pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they’re doing.
We’re increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government needs to maintain the illusion of control over the public.
You don’t hate AI slop enough…
Well if you know of a better way to generate pictures of comically obese bearded men gayly dancing, I’d love to hear it.
DMing you my patron
hmm I got 2 8bg ddr4 sticks, anyone wanna make an offer?
Huh, you got 2 sticks of RAM? That’s some next level gaming rig you got there. What do they cost ya?
$3.50
Dammit monster! Get off my lawn! I ain’t giving you no tree-fitty!
That’s crap. They’ve loaded their stock on a certain price and they want to surf the high wave while they can.
That’s Free Markets, baby!
They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I’ve worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I’ve never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it’s going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I’m selling you now.
I don’t have any insider insight into other companies’ operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.
Almost all retailers inventory on consignment. So, no.
No they don’t. They purchase at a fixed rate.
I think what we’re seeing is the result of their stock depleting actually. AI has been buying up supply for a while, and I don’t think the consumer markets are able to compete.
I wonder how long ill be staying on my AM4 motherboard… those updated CPUs for gaming that AMD came out with might be my only option for a long time.
Ffs I keep delaying a rebuild of my PC because of crap like this. I don’t use it for gaming nowadays since I have a console but even Sony is bringing their stuff to PC so I was looking to upgrade. Now it’s been pushed even more.
Hang in there my 8 GB ram PC with GTX 960…
so i switched myself and my parents to arch linux over the past 3-4 months and I can say definitively that those specs are fine for CachyOS (an Arch Linux distro). My mom is using my hand-me-down 970 with its lovely “we charged you for 4gb of vram but actually only 3.5 of it is fast haha sucker” and it runs great paired to an old i7 6700k
If you got good internet you could look into GeForce Now as a stopgap / headstart.
If you have 8gb ddr4 you can probably get a decent deal on a used 8gig stick. Even that would be quite aboost.
The 64GB kit I purchased Aug 2024 for $195 is now listing for $540
What market are you shopping at?!
I swear I bought some RAM just at the start of October for reasonable prices. Did it change so quickly?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssss.
For real. I’ve been building a completely brand new computer for my husband for a couple months now. Buying a new piece each paycheck, then I get paid this week and I discover I can’t buy the RAM… It’s fucking half way finished and the only 2 parts left to buy is GPU and RAM.
Unfortunately those are the most expensive parts right now because they both require memory chips. Perhaps consider buying used, might be tough to find DDR5 DIMMs but used GPUs are plentiful.
I was told I was probably overdoing it putting 96GB in my PC a year or two ago. Be that true, but if this pricing doesn’t ease up by the time it becomes a server, my ZFS cache will love it!
Bitch, are you surge pricing ram? Cuz it looks like you’re surge pricing ram…
There should be laws capping how much of something you can sell to a single greedy person/purpose. It’s common fucking sense.
Sure. Not for RAM, though. It ain’t water, friend.
This is crazy, not displaying the price of an item in a shelf or display is against consumer laws where I live. And if the price on display is not updated the store is required to sell by the price on display.
So with things like fish that can change day to day are they required to just update it every day? that sounds nice.
It’s blatant price-gouging. Any stock in the store has already been sold to them at an agreed price. They can set a number and make their set margin.
Updating prices after each delivery might make sense (if their procurement department is absolute dogshit at negotiating contracts), but updating prices throughout the day is just someone trying to see how hard they can push their margins to drain every cent out of their customers.
That’s probably one of those toothless laws that can be easily bypassed on a technicality. Like, just say the shelf is for “storage” and not “display”.
Some places try to argue something like that, but if you push back a little they cave. The law estipulates a fine ranging from 74 to 1 000 000 USD for visible products in shelves or display without a visible price tag. And since its a fine, the government is eager to get his piece of the por.
Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, “I’m only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It’s DDR4, can’t be that expensive”.
Yeah… It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.
That’s insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
yep. i took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc, knowing this ai shit along with the tariffs was going to make prices bonkers af, and i needed an upgrade anyway. 8% interest on a couple grand personal loan is better than paying 4x the price in cash
Love Keepa!
Isn’t this the new first party price chart Amazon is testing out?
Im still running off DDR3
and feelin fine
Lived in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s, when the price of RAM exploded with the web, armed robberies of manufacturing plants and warehouses for RAM became a thing for a few years.
Insert <Aw shit, here we go again . meme>
I think the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).
Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.
That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.
But now the surveillance capabilities of both the state and large corporations have been ranked up to infinity and beyond. I’m expecting a partnership announcement between Micron and Raytheon any day now, where Raytheon gets free DDR5 and Micron gets armed and autonomous security drones.
Kind of \s, kind of not
I think that in the long run, the RAM shortage will turn into a glut of much faster and larger DDR5 RAM sticks. Provided if you can wait for the transition to AM6, an AM5 endgame system will have pretty good RAM.
They are going to pivot all that processing to the next snale oil scheme. Do you think its a coincidence that rhe AI hype came immediately after crypto crashed?
I view AI to be like the printing press: It is good for the everyman…if that everyman was willing to own and make use of it. By ceding AI to oligarchs, society would be allowing the 1% to have more tools to do stuff, while denying the public from making effective use of them.
The answer isn’t to reject AI, but to fund publicly developed and owned AI. Every minority who has 95% of Disney’s legal acumen in their pocket, will be able to more effectively resist Kavenaugh Stops in court. An AI can scour the web and spot discounted goods that a person actually wants, and create a shopping list that is cheap and convenient. People can have a competent teacher, if their rural household lacks a school. All these things lend a little extra agency to ordinary people.
My point, is that we shouldn’t refuse tools. Instead, we should adopt them on OUR terms, not the techbro’s.
Guess I should have bought the 128GB 3600 kit earlier.
Are DDR4 also affected?
Speaking as someone with 128gb DDR4 3600 RAM and uses mid-size AI like GLM Air, it is too slow to have much fun with. I suspect that a lot of hobbyists will adopt and discard DDR4 in short order, so you can probably get a good deal if you buy used.
Sadly I am not in a location where people just discard useful parts.
If I were to try buying 2nd hand here, I would most probably end up with stuff that has some or the other kind of of damage.
For instance, in one of the companies I worked at, their policy for getting rid of stuff was:
And the auctions occurred years later after much red tape…
Mostly bought by other companies, who get to do more red-tape stuff to buy it.
While on one hand, this is a good thing, reducing wastage, it also means that I have no way to get 2nd hand stuff for hobbyist usage.
In case we do get 2nd hand stuff, it is usually through a 2nd hand dealer, who then ends up with a higher asking price than what it’s worth.
Ddr4 is apparently out of manufacturing at a lot of places now, so it’s even more affected (at least in my market, prices rose more then ddr5)
Yeah, just checked the 2 sites I use for computer components.
1 had no RAM listed.
The other had 32GB DDR4 at 2x the price and no 128GB kit (96 was the highest, 64 for DDR4)
RAM is not really expensive. You get enough RAM for most tasks the use of which you can understand, as a fraction of the normal amount for any machine.
You can load a can’t stress how good planetary map into RAM wholly, without paging it.
Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.
That there’s much demand from some other side - oh yes.
BTW, I just got a thought that this might be aimed at hurting China and East Asia in general, when the bubble pops, in the west it’ll be just investors losing what they deserve to lose, but in East Asia it’ll be actual production rebuilt for the bubble dying in pains.
What? You might want to proof read that. The only thing I got from your text is that text editors load an entire file into memory, which has been the case for decades unless you go with a special purpose editor.
for decades
One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you’re using the vlf package or similar.
teco and ed might not.
The only thing I got from your text is that text editors load an entire file into memory, which has been the case for decades unless you go with a special purpose editor.
Holy crap, and these people think they have right to talk about computers.
You can have a 12G text file, logs, suppose, you are going to load the entire file into memory? And you think it’s normal?
You might want to proof read that.
I think you might want to put more effort into reading. This seems to be your weak side.
If this bubble doesn’t pop soon, I expect a memory card thefts to start making the headlines. Small and easier to carry off while being more expensive than some jewelry of the same size.
As someone buying load of secondhand tech, you don’t need the latest and greatest
My husband and I have been using computers we built 15 years ago and we decided this year we’ll finally build new computers… Lmao sucks to be us :( already built mine, his is almost done but missing a key component… RAM lmaooooo
Just get the least necessary and hope that prices will drop :(
I can never get people to understand this. I’ve got servers running on i7 8th gens, with stock 16GB ram. I could upgrade, but no need. People thinking they need 128GB to plays games are delusional.
To run games, you might need at least 32Gb. 64 Gb is sufficient in most cases. Still expensive af
Corporal_Punishment@feddit.uk 3 months ago
You can get 32gb of ram in the UK for the equivalent of $130…
You guys are being ripped off
Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I can see ddr4 at that price not ddr5
arin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Just coz a few stores have not updated their prices doesn’t mean the demand will stop. It will be gone unless the ai bubble pops
Corporal_Punishment@feddit.uk 3 months ago
Or its affecting America more because of a combination of tariffs and profiteering.