Submitted 1 month ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/tech/880812/ramageddon-ram-shortage-memory-crisis-price-2026-phones-laptops
The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn’t really exist to be put into GPUs that haven’t been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven’t been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn’t actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible.
😎
All that to create Artificial Intelligence that isn’t really intelligent.
What do you mean?
Just walk the car wash!
The price crash is going to be great. Such a massive yo-yo. Most of the AI companies will just completely eat shit out of it.
Yes and no. The hardware companies have already said that they’re not interested in expanding production. They know it’s a bubble, and don’t want expanded production now to cause a glut in the future when the inevitable pop happens. So prices may not actually drop, (even after the pop), because the companies still won’t be producing more hardware than they currently are.
On the bright side, at least the entire global economy isn’t ridiculously overextended on this delusional bubble.
Did you use ChatGPT to write this?
Don’t be fooled: if RAM had the chance it would kill everyone and everything you’ve ever loved.
My uncle was killed by a ram
You wouldn’t download an uncle would you?
At least he wasnt goated…
They can be mean…
Was it one of those lighting rams from the DLC? Man fuck those guys
Does this mean no smart fridges?
Coz that would be cool
i’d be willing to suffer another year of ram shortage if that meant all smart devices fucked off
maybe we could even see actual physical buttons on devices again! i miss buttons and toggles
Mr Brightside checking in
You think companies would cut off ad revenue and pass cost savings to customers?
Fridges will get MORE expensive to ensure that you see ads on your fridge.
No, it means your smart fridge be AI enabled and you’ll have to prompt the goddamn door open.
Also, it costs $3000 and it’s the cheapest model.
Going to be fucking hilarious when all the western companies get fucked by China taking over the market they don’t seem to care about.
Don’t count on China. They are going to invade Taiwan next year and the global trade embargo will be a rounding error to the destruction of the tmsc factories during that war. Or they will capture the fabs and prohibit export to the US. Loose loose for us.
“China, a country that hasn’t invaded another country in 50 years, is going to invade this country” said the country that invades a country once a decade.
They’ve been going to invade Taiwan next year for the last 30 years
If they do it Trump strikes “a deal” to give them Taiwan. That’s my bet.
What is loose, certainly not your anus right? Or, maybe it is!
I don’t understand this thing about anyone destroying those factories for any reason. I don’t think that would happen.
AI is the last great bubble.
And it, like all bubbles, will pop.
You are already seeing the people in the know flee the field.
You see reports that every company that has adopted it has at best changed nothing, at worst lost money on it.
Outside of the psychotic linked in CEO bubble, literally no one wants AI. And every day its generating more and more hate due to its halucinations, mistakes, and bullshit.
Its a dying star, and people are frantically trying to harvest the last bits of warmth from it before going off in search of new horizons.
I can only assume you haven’t used it for anything it’s good at lately. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Just like we still have websites after the dot com bubble, there will still be LLMs after the AI bubble pops.
They’re wealthy but absolute fucking morons. The people who fall for the “they have money so they must be smart” are such gullible buffoons. CCP is much more competent than American oligarchs, running what could’ve been great with better policy into the ground.
It’s almost as if socialism makes for a better capitalistic system. It’s a lot better when the oligarchs fear the government rather than the government fearing the oligarchs.
Hmm I know China has a big push for AI as well, I wonder what their market is looking like.
What’s your source for that. China has no more reason to invade Taiwan next year than they have at any point in the last 30 years
China has been wanting to reunite with Taiwan ever since the founding of the PRC. the reason has always been there, and right now they are more ready than ever.
keep a close eye on what Chinese military is doing.
Umm hundreds of Chinese ambassadors to Xi Himself. How many do you want I’ll start pulling them.
Why would they need to invade Taiwan? They already have their own companies making RAM.
I wish Sam Altman to encounter difficulties every time he had to use bathroom and increased chance of his phone fell to the toilet.
I’m so glad I bought this book years ago
I was saving it for a retirement hobby project but looks like I will have to open it sooner than I thought.
IDK at the current price trend, maybe we’re approaching a point where having sweatshops make ferromagnetic memory modules in GB sizes. I’d better start building a couple of hangars for my GPU memory.
Fuck Sam Altman
My most recent hobby has been an old Suzuki Samurai that I dragged out of the woods a few years ago. It doesn’t use much RAM. It doesn’t even have fuel injection.
I’ve also been getting back into archery with my kid.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think that making it harder to get a computer and play games is a huge miscalculation. If everyone is distracted by Call of Battle: Dutyfield then you have fewer bored assholes casting about for something to do, and if people can still play Factorio, you don’t end up with bored, autistic, organized assholes casting about for something to do.
Back in my day, we downloaded ram. 8GB at a time.
I downloaded a gallon of cum and my parents got really mad
Kids these days don’t know the pain of LimeWire
Which was used to then download a car.
I believe that’s the plan for the future, too. Conglomo A owns all the RAM, but we can rent access.
I hate that this is the plan. Time to burn it all down
. . . And then the market will be flooded with RAM that companies preordered and can’t pay for, because the AI bubble burst before it could be manufactured.
Hey, I can dream, right? And seriously, I would be quite happy if this causes an increase in dumb appliances, devices, and cars in the meanwhile.
Most of the lithography that is dedicated to RAM is being done for HBM modules, which are not consumer grade. So more likely it will end up in landfills.
I would LOVE to believe this will force automakers to return to using buttons instead of touchscreen.
Yeah, I know. But I’d sure love to believe it.
And they told me I was crazy for putting 64 gigs into my machine back in early 2021. I “only” paid about 200 USD
Go ahead, make a lucrative market for consumer ram, see how fast china figures out how ot start filling that need :)
“everything you care about” - Time to change hobbies and care about things that don’t have RAM then.
It’s not just desktops, it’s phones and laptops and consoles
Good thing I don’t care about any of those things enough to pay the rip-off prices. I’m fine with my 4 year old phone and 10 year old PC. If they crap out then I’ll replace them with some cheap old crap. I don’t need high specs, there isn’t much worth running these days.
What if the unintentional consequence of hardware hoarding by AI companies is we have fewer devices being made that spy on us, like smart TVs and appliances.
First the rich took our data. Then ownership, privacy, money, rights, now RAM. next will be our organs.
AI’s are more important than humans now. I guess we should get used to this. Line must go up.
Our last, best hope for the subsidy model was Valve, a company that famously rakes in money hand over fist and launched the original Steam Deck at the unbeatable price of $399 through a “painful” amount of subsidy. If Valve did the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could have legitimately competed with the PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.
But Valve has all but dashed those hopes through a series of moves. In late December, it discontinued the $399 Steam Deck, raising the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that the Steam Machine had been delayed due to the memory shortage and that the company would have to reset expectations on pricing. And now, even the $549 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock specifically because of the memory crisis.
I was pretty confident that Valve was not going to subsidize the Steam Machine form the start, even before it said that it would be priced comparably to a PC and even before it said that it was delaying determining pricing (which was a good sign that it hadn’t locked in a contract price on components). I commented along those lines.
Consoles can do the razor-and-blades model because they are a closed platform. If you buy a Playstation, it doesn’t do you much good unless you use it to buy Playstation games.
But the Steam Machine is open. I can go run whatever on it. And if Valve subsidizes it, people will just buy it instead of a comparable PC and then run whatever they want on it. Doesn’t make much sense for Valve, just because of the nature of the machine.
MY CLASSIC SCI-FI SOFT COVER BOOKS!!??!1
If I become anarchist, trying to burn data center with AI inside, will I be Robin Hood?
Guess it’s time for everybody to find some grass to touch.
I’m aware, thanks.
Now I’m just contemplating whether I should upgrade from 32 GB DDR4 to 64 or 128 while it’s still within the realm of possibility, or bet on memory prices coming back down within the next few years, and upgrade to an entirely new platform with DDR5 then.
I find myself at a point where I don’t actually want any new computing devices, partly because of this, and partly because, well, what I have works fine for me.
I have an M2 MacBook Air that is still as solid as the day I got it (Sequoia for life) for the majority of my personal needs, plus a 2014 Mac mini running Mint as my home server, an M1 Mac Mini my dad gave me that runs my Home Assistant, and an old(er) PC that has a GTX 1060 GPU that’s capable of playing most of the games I care to play. My phone is a Pixel 9 running Graphene which is a year old and nowhere needing a replacement, and I have an iPad mini that I barely use these days anyway.
I guess I’m lucky enough that my shit is new enough that it’s still usable, and my use-case is light enough on resources that the older gear still works perfectly well for what I need.
My wife, however, needs a new PC…
Most of the stuff I care about is like 30 years old so prob not.
On the bright side it’s being used to artificially prop up a technology that nobody actually needs or even really wants
I think sir misunderstands how malleable my hobbies and interests are and completely fails to see where my priorities are. You can’t eat RAM and it will never love you back. It’s almost irrelevant even when it’s not supply crunch’d.
What I’m surprised hasn’t happened yet is RAM ICs being recycled at the retail level. As in, you could bring in an old laptop or phone with 32GB of soldered RAM and it would be desoldered and sold for cash or possibly even soldered into a new device you buy from that retailer.
I wonder how close we are to that business model arriving.
bonenode@piefed.social 1 month ago
I think calling it a RAM shortage is a bit incorrect. It is not like we are running out of raw materials or something else in the supply chain is broken. It’s shitty AI companies buying RAM that is not existing yet with money they don’t have. Unfortunately there’s no good term for that, I guess.
kingofras@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s called Imaginary Economics.
It tends to happen right before a capitalist system fails.
victorz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
How often does this happen that we can claim this correlation? 🤔
blah3166@piefed.social 1 month ago
Can I coin the term imagineomics?
boatswain@infosec.pub 1 month ago
[citation needed]
1984@lemmy.today 1 month ago
When has this happened before?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m not holding my breath.
We’ve been hearing about an AI crash practically since the hype train started.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Is this a thing? Because what comes to mind for me is “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” which just happens sometimes
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The term was well established centuries ago.
FRAUD
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Yes there is: it’s a Ponzi scheme (AI companies will fail when they get no new funds to pay off the stockholders)
jaybone@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Are they paying off stockholders?
dust_accelerator@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
I like electron finance
Their exact location cannot be pinpointed; instead, they exist in a probability cloud where they are likely to be found at any given time.
That’s what this hype cycle is founded on. If I lend you $5, you have $5 you can lend further. Now, we each still have a right to $5, so we can lend that debt obligation again for $4.50. Now we have, somehow, a market value of $19.
Until someone looks, then it’s probably 0.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s a racket, plain and simple. There used to be laws against this sort if thing.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Keyword: used to
I hope that it was worth it, and that America is great again. Let me just check some news articles… Oh my
gressen@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
It is a shortage caused by artificial demand rise.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A mismatch between supply and demand is called a shortage. The source is irrelevant.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Supply monopolization?
Consumer fraud.
Sherman Act cartel market manipulation.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
We have RAM supply shortage.
Now better? god…
0x0@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
It’s greedy manufacturers selling it all to them in the first place and other market segments be damned.
I’m no AI fan but the manufactures aren’t angels either.
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The shovel makers and shovel sellers always get rich in a gold rush
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If your boss offered you a raise for the same work, would you turn it down?