What's happening right now is very different than what happened back during the dot com crash. When they were doing price fixing it was because there was a glut of supply and demand was tanking. Prices were falling and they coordinated to keep prices from falling less.
Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.
It would also be dumb to cut production when prices are high because you increase the incentive for one of the outside players to suddenly ramp up production and jump in the market.
Not saying they aren't coordinating in other ways (following each other's leads on price hikes and availability). But again the context here is literally the opposite as last time.
> The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.
I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.
I do not have any particular insight into the market, I was just extremely confused reading this in particular
> Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.
Given this first statement, the last one makes no sense.
Either the demand is limited, giving sellers that undercut the ability to move more products... Or the demand is higher then production, making it nonsensical to undercut anyone, because you'll sell out anyway, no matter if you're cheapest or not
I think implying that the DRAM makers are nefarious is nuts. What would you do in their shoes?
You have to think about what’s happening in the context that its 2025. The US is different… there is no functional financial regulator. The CEO of OpenAI is trying to corner the market and be too big to fail. We’re seeing crazy stock swings with Oracle (whose CEO quit after the September stock event), AMD, Intel, etc. Much of the action is fueled by the circular relationships with OpenAI. Add the drama of malevolent players like Elon & POTUS.
If you’re the CEO of Micron, you’re in a tough spot. You have constrained capacity, delays in your new fab buildout that puts it out of play, and a market that is lucrative, but may be a massive Enron type event.
The people making the shovels need to hold tight. There’s no reason to collude. The smart move is to keep on trucking.
Or they don't want to be the ones holding the bag when all the AI companies that ordered RAM from them end up bankrupt and insolvent ?
The stuff they ordered might even be so custom to be useless to be sold by the creditors, leaving the RAM manufacturers hanging dry with unpaid invoices and idle capacity.
So they just do the old cartel thing and wait it out - with the added benefit of selling the same stuff they have been making for twice the price!
I said this last time, YMTC from China is making NAND and finally crossed the 10% market share. I would not be surprised if they have 30% by 2030. The more NAND Fabs reconfigured to DRAM from Samsung or others the more YMTC will grab NAND market share. So yes naturally those profit current NAND and DRAM player enjoys provides an extra cushion for them to build their Fab which is becoming ever more expensive due it its size and machinery required. But also as war chest. And they know it well.
CXMT's DDR5 and LPDDR5 is also slowly gaining market shares, although not at the pace of YMTC due to yield and cost issues.
Both company are close or already at escape velocity. And then there will be a moment like electric car where DRAM and NAND will oversupply. Which is another reason why DRAM manufactures are eager to move to LPDDR6.
YMTC also announced entry into the DRAM market a couple months back. CXMT recently announced DDR5-8000. Sanctions clearly aren't working to slow progress in China's tech sector, but they seem to be great for the profits of US vassal-states
Every 3-4 years RAM prices spike.
There is always an excuse like a fire in a factory.
I believe the truth is 1) we have little amount of suppliers, and 2) supply is very near the limit of what can be sold.
There's also been not one but two price fixing settlements at different times for the same companies. Almost like every few years they get bold enough to try again, and just settle as the cost of doing business
I ordered 96GB of memory last Tuesday from Corsair. Two days later when I checked the website again, the exact same memory was being sold for twice what I paid for it.
Just throwing another anecdote out there, my Zen 1 CPU (1700) was flaking out and I was kind of thinking of doing an AM5 build, with an IPMI motherboard and some nice DDR5 memory. DDR5 has a quasi-ECC built in, which is good for a server.
Thing is, I have 128GB of memtest86-passed DDR4 RAM, and while I don't need that much, the idea of spending ~$300 on 32GB was ludicrous. So I have a Ryzen 5700G now, and all is well.
I think it's gonna be like with the price spikes around the time of COVID: corpos complained about the global supply chain disruptions and when all of that was over... just left the prices high up.
It's gonna be the same as what you see with food prices nowadays, even fast food - they just increased a whole bunch and nobody can really do anything about it. It's not like there's that many widespread food chains popping up to replace McDonald's, given that most new players in the market are more likely to go bankrupt than anything.
And when it comes to stuff that's actually hard to manufacture, like GPUs and RAM and other components? The corporations will just lie, or in some cases set the MSRP pretty low (e.g. Intel Arc release) and watch the retailers crank up the prices anyways. Even the one case where it did matter a lot was the Intel Core Ultra release where they didn't move units, but only because of AMD CPUs being cheaper, even those prices were known before release. But even so, who's to say that you're not picking the least bad option which still happens to be bad, how close to BOM pricing are those CPUs? And in that BOM, how many middle men are also pushing their own markup?
What are you gonna do about it, since you can't ever look at their books and validate their claims NOR really buy the product elsewhere because like 3 or 4 corps have an oligopoly over the entire planet's supply? Nothing.
Yep, it doubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM
I upgraded my PC by adding 64GB.. two Fridays ago I sold the 32 GB I took out for the same amount of what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
I bought a refurbished laptop with 64gb ddr4 (so-dimm) last week. It was just slightly more expensive than the 32gb variant with same specs. I guess the seller was not yet aware of the high memory prices.
In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just selling the memory.
Bought a 64gb upgrade kit in September for my wife's new PC for $205. The same kit right now on Newegg is $570. That's not even double in 4 months; thats almost triple in 2 months.
I am currently trying to sell a brand new DDR5 6000 64GB CL 28-36-36-96 kit for 100€ below market prices with warranty (I purchased it 3 months ago, and never opened it as I figured I don't need 128GB in my PC.)
But it's just not selling. I guess most people don't even check ebay, and go straight to hardware online retailers.
personally, i always check ebay. but i know general sentiment around "used/like new" items is fairly poor. just ask grand pap sitting in florida, buying half the computer new, because "he would never buy used", aka some returned tower.
The question is how much of this consumer memory is selling either. It may well be that not many people are actually buying DRAM right now, given how much prices have spiked.
I also have a lot more luck selling PC hardware on bespoke forums than on ebay etc.
I looked at sold listings on eBay recently, very little was actually going for the crazy market rate. Plenty had sold at the old prices from sellers who hadn't gotten the memo though.
I have some ram I could live without if it's worth its weight in gold, but if you're going to get ripped off I think people want to avoid the used market and its extra risk.
Isn't this just the normal process of market clearing, if they are still selling out? It may be a bit coarse grained due to long lead times for more supply but still.
Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD...
Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be.
Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...
I am loving my sapphire 9070xt (pulse). It's pretty decent, and gets me ~100 tokens per second on gpt-oss-20b at i think 5bit quant. Bought it for a high high price of 70_000 inr in september
>Memory is being allocated to those with deeper pockets first
Yes, sellers fill the most expensive bids first.
>OpenAI's new "Stargate" project reportedly signed deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month to feed its AI clusters, which is an amount close to 40% of total global DRAM output if it's ever met.
Right, so demand has pretty much doubled.
>In this cycle, manufacturers had cut back production and investment during the last downturn (2022), and they've been slow to ramp back up.
And manufacturers have been burnt by over production before and are cautious
>Another factor limiting supply of standard RAM is that memory firms are diverting their limited manufacturing capacity to the most lucrative products. Specifically, there's a gold rush for HBM, which is a special kind of memory used by AI accelerator GPUs, because HBM commands far higher prices and profit margins than commodity DRAM.
See above about filling the more lucrative bids first.
>I'm not saying that all of these reasons given aren't the cause for the recent price boom, but what I am saying is that it wouldn't be the first time that price-fixing occurred in the memory industry.
Ok so what should be done about it?
>While that second lawsuit didn't hold up in court (and failed in appeal), that ongoing suspicion exists for a reason.
K so there have been 2 claims, one spurious.
>Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove.
See: Have been burnt by over production before. And Unspoken coordination is hardly an issue. Reacting to private information is bad, reacting to public information is normal and expected.
>It's hard not to see this supposedly coincidental aligned strategy of restraint and wonder if there's something more at play. All of these actions support pricing stability (for those companies) and suggests that no one is "breaking ranks" to grab a larger share by undercutting prices.
You are telling me that you are suspicious of an industry that has expanded, caused a glut that hurt their own businesses and killed their competitors, and are shying away from repeating that event that you outline as a clear mistake.
If theres so much money on the table, you will need another vendor. New RAM vendors have to weigh risk, including all the risk you have outlined, against what is likely a very massive capital outlay.
> memory suppliers have both the motive and precedent to coordinate behavior, even tacitly, in order to keep prices high. When only a handful of firms control the taps, it doesn't take a formal cartel for them to collectively benefit from constrained supply. Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove. The backdrop of past cartels makes it hard not to be cynical when hearing that "AI demand" is solely to blame for increased prices. Whether or not any collusion is happening now, it's clear that memory companies are profiting immensely from the current crisis. After bleeding financially during the last oversupply downturn, the major DRAM makers are now seeing record-high earnings in the third quarter of 2025 thanks to the price surge, and to put it bluntly, the shortage is great for business.
A chaebol is a large industrial South Korean conglomerate run and controlled by an individual or family. A chaebol often consists of multiple diversified affiliates, controlled by a person or group. Several dozen large South Korean family-controlled corporate groups fall under this definition.
I don't understand when people blame AI for buying DDR5 DRAM - aren't they mostly interested in HBM? Or is the fab space being diverted to manufacture more HBM than DDR DRAM previously?
Inference, don't need gpu's for inference. Frontier labs are eking out progress by scaling up inference-time compute. Pre-training scaling has kind of stalled / giving diminishing returns (for now).
I work in the refurb division of an ewaste recycling company. I was tipped off to these insane prices about two months ago, and switched focus from laptops to drives and RAM, and I'm starting to make bank. Roughly a petabyte of hard drives showed up two weeks ago, and I'm almost halfway through preparing all the drives. Hopefully I'll be able to finish and sell them in time to have a very merry Christmas.
I keep hearing about how the supply and demand cycles are “lagged” and that this price spike happens every 3-5 years for purely economical reasons. I feel like I’m being gaslit — I don’t recall any such price spikes in the past of this magnitude. You’re telling me that there’s a totally predictable price cycle and NO ONE has prepared for it? Or else prices are just high temporarily and no one can step in to increase supply? Either way, it seems that there’s not enough competition in this market.
I've seen a fair number of articles suggesting that the finances of AI companies have lost touch with reality and that the AI sector is now well within bubble territory.
If AI companies continue to scale up and buy massive amounts of memory as prices spike, how much will that intensify the spike? Could feedback of this nature cause a price shock sufficient to pop the AI bubble earlier than it might have otherwise? How soon might that happen?
Okay, this will be a bit on a conspiracy theory side, but there was a paper recently describing how to do matrix computations on a RAM stick connected to FPGA, and they've shown it's possible to do it cheaper per flop that GPUs. Except, of course, there's a variety of RAM producers.
It might either be artificial to keep GPU prices where they are, or someone already started building their RAM-based AI datacenter.
I’m sad the mid to late 2010s alt reality era has come for HN the last 6 months, after 16 years here.
This was my last respite for intellectual argumentation.
Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it and anyone who does is a grifter and or amateur and or embarrassing and any data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999…so therefore, $X! (In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging)
As my MD friend noted wisely a couple weeks ago: it’s noteworthy how this became a culture after LLMs became ubiquitous and user friendly. It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
(I agree on the DRAM price-fixing hypothesis being wrong.)
We (people writing code) are the ones using it more than anyone else to directly aid in / do our work, we probably more closely understand the limitations of LLM's than people working in other industries that just get fearmongering pseudo-technical babble whispered through streams about the power of the technology while using it as a substitute for Google search (which committed suicide a few years ago).
I also think part of what you're observing is the reddit/hive-mind effect, fear drives the crowd so its consensus will tend to emerge as "Nothing works, nothing will ever work, nothing is even being attempted!"
> As my MD friend noted wisely a couple weeks ago: it’s noteworthy how this became a culture after LLMs became ubiquitous and user friendly. It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
You want intellectual argumentation and then make an asinine claim like this.
First, HN was never a place for intellectual argumentation. It's reddit level dunning kruger with the pseudo-intellectual snobbery of a college philosophy courses. If you don't follow the zeitgeist you dont get to argue anything anyway. This is a terrible place for actual debate and those that do enjoy "debate" here are generally on the same side with a marginal (< 1%) difference in their views. The average HNer is a tech enthusiast, mid-to-far-left reddit poster. If you want some good debate turn on flagged/shadowed posts and enjoy the people who generally do not agree with HN's insane take on almost everything and havent been thought policed by Dang. If you were as smart as your smarmy post implies you'd realize any place with le updoots and le downdoots doesnt allow for spirited debate.
Second,
> Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it
"AI" doesn't work well. I've been a professional software engineer for a long time. The best use case for "AI" is mild code review, writing comments, and stubbing out boring work like initial database table schemas. It absolutely hallucinates to hell with any sufficiently complex problem and if you're not aware of context windows you will walk yourself into a trap. The average person is not smart enough to recognize this. Thus, "AI" doesn't only fail to deliver, it is also dangerous due to it's sychophantic nature. I quote AI, particularly, because LLMs are not artificial intelligence. At least, not anymore than least squares analysis is artificial intelligence.
> data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999
Your rant provides no evidence it is not a bubble. An entirely unprofitable industry attempting to scale to make pennies is not sustainable. The amount of capital pouring into a literal wish is not similar to 1999.
It's similar to the 2008 economic crisis where, when the chickens come home to roost, the government will be bailing out big tech companies with taxpayer money because their infrastructure has parasitically attached itself (via the "cloud") to almost everything we use.
> In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging
There have been two DRAM price fixing scandals. If it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck... well it might be a duck. People are right to infer price fixing. The only difference now is it's "legal" because they announced it via a quarterly report. Every 5 or so years there's always something going on with DRAM. One wonders why.
> It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
Your MD friend should stay in his lane and not weigh in on topics he can't hope to understand. His biggest problem is India, not AI. Just like software engineers. Radiology is outsourced at levels similar to software with the only difference he probably made his nut 10 years ago and software engineers aren't paid anywhere near as much as a good non-outsourced radiologist.
Hey, at least a fab didn't have to burn down this time. That's progress.
I've maxed out the RAM on every (consumer mobo) build I've ever done, and have always ended up appreciating it. I did a Ryzen build with 192GB back in January, so despite the questionable signal integrity of DDR5 especially on AM5 (more than one DIMM on each channel means lower speed) this time turned out to be no exception. I also stocked up on 130TB of HDD and 30TB of SSD, as it was clear we were headed towards some kind of economic disaster. (look, I'm avoiding politics!)
But the best RAM purchase I ever did was during the dot com crash glut a few decades ago. I maxed out my Athlon XP with 3x 512MB sticks for $27 each. A gig and a half of RAM. Those were the days.
Might we perhaps see some meaningful investment into long-term alternatives to DRAM as a result of this price spike? Will Intel bring back their Optane persistent memory? What about HP's memristors/ReRAM? Magnetic core memory/MRAM?
legitster|3 months ago
Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.
It would also be dumb to cut production when prices are high because you increase the incentive for one of the outside players to suddenly ramp up production and jump in the market.
Not saying they aren't coordinating in other ways (following each other's leads on price hikes and availability). But again the context here is literally the opposite as last time.
sc68cal|3 months ago
I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
ffsm8|3 months ago
> Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.
Given this first statement, the last one makes no sense.
Either the demand is limited, giving sellers that undercut the ability to move more products... Or the demand is higher then production, making it nonsensical to undercut anyone, because you'll sell out anyway, no matter if you're cheapest or not
bakugo|3 months ago
Why is demand extremely high right now when it wasn't a couple of months ago? What changed since then that caused it to triple overnight?
Spooky23|3 months ago
You have to think about what’s happening in the context that its 2025. The US is different… there is no functional financial regulator. The CEO of OpenAI is trying to corner the market and be too big to fail. We’re seeing crazy stock swings with Oracle (whose CEO quit after the September stock event), AMD, Intel, etc. Much of the action is fueled by the circular relationships with OpenAI. Add the drama of malevolent players like Elon & POTUS.
If you’re the CEO of Micron, you’re in a tough spot. You have constrained capacity, delays in your new fab buildout that puts it out of play, and a market that is lucrative, but may be a massive Enron type event.
The people making the shovels need to hold tight. There’s no reason to collude. The smart move is to keep on trucking.
m4rtink|3 months ago
The stuff they ordered might even be so custom to be useless to be sold by the creditors, leaving the RAM manufacturers hanging dry with unpaid invoices and idle capacity.
So they just do the old cartel thing and wait it out - with the added benefit of selling the same stuff they have been making for twice the price!
unknown|3 months ago
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unknown|3 months ago
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casey2|3 months ago
ksec|3 months ago
CXMT's DDR5 and LPDDR5 is also slowly gaining market shares, although not at the pace of YMTC due to yield and cost issues.
Both company are close or already at escape velocity. And then there will be a moment like electric car where DRAM and NAND will oversupply. Which is another reason why DRAM manufactures are eager to move to LPDDR6.
elektronika|3 months ago
eb0la|3 months ago
kllrnohj|3 months ago
There's also been not one but two price fixing settlements at different times for the same companies. Almost like every few years they get bold enough to try again, and just settle as the cost of doing business
MotiBanana|3 months ago
Here's some basic analysis it did (AI, so take with grain of salt): https://shottr.cc/s/2zv5/SCR-20251127-fm6p.png
2016–2018 price spike
DRAM prices nearly tripled.
Driven by smartphone demand + server build-out + constrained supply expansion.
Resulted in the 2018 antitrust lawsuit accusing Samsung, Micron, SK hynix of coordinated output limits.
2019 oversupply crash
After the spike, memory makers over-invested capacity.
Demand softened; inventories built up.
Prices fell sharply — ~35–40% decline.
2020 mild recovery
COVID WFH / remote boom → PC sales up → DRAM demand rose slightly.
Prices recovered modestly.
2021 rebound
Data-center and cloud expansion returned.
DDR5 ramping begins.
Market in recovery — but not frothy.
2022–2023 bottom
Smartphone shipments declined globally.
PC demand dropped post-COVID.
OEMs had too much inventory → massive price declines.
Some DRAM sold below production cost.
2024–2025 AI/HBM super-cycle
AI training systems (NVIDIA, AMD, etc.) require large HBM arrays.
Fab capacity reallocated from commodity DRAM → HBM.
AI hyperscalers (OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Tesla) created enormous DRAM draw.
Commodity DRAM restricted → price spike ≥170% YoY.
QuantumSeed|3 months ago
unethical_ban|3 months ago
Thing is, I have 128GB of memtest86-passed DDR4 RAM, and while I don't need that much, the idea of spending ~$300 on 32GB was ludicrous. So I have a Ryzen 5700G now, and all is well.
KronisLV|3 months ago
It's gonna be the same as what you see with food prices nowadays, even fast food - they just increased a whole bunch and nobody can really do anything about it. It's not like there's that many widespread food chains popping up to replace McDonald's, given that most new players in the market are more likely to go bankrupt than anything.
And when it comes to stuff that's actually hard to manufacture, like GPUs and RAM and other components? The corporations will just lie, or in some cases set the MSRP pretty low (e.g. Intel Arc release) and watch the retailers crank up the prices anyways. Even the one case where it did matter a lot was the Intel Core Ultra release where they didn't move units, but only because of AMD CPUs being cheaper, even those prices were known before release. But even so, who's to say that you're not picking the least bad option which still happens to be bad, how close to BOM pricing are those CPUs? And in that BOM, how many middle men are also pushing their own markup?
What are you gonna do about it, since you can't ever look at their books and validate their claims NOR really buy the product elsewhere because like 3 or 4 corps have an oligopoly over the entire planet's supply? Nothing.
minkeymaniac|3 months ago
magicalhippo|3 months ago
Last week it went to $1300 and now it's not available anymore.
Guess I'll just skip AM5 and wait for AM6 at this rate...
andix|3 months ago
In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just selling the memory.
brendoelfrendo|3 months ago
super256|3 months ago
But it's just not selling. I guess most people don't even check ebay, and go straight to hardware online retailers.
derkster|3 months ago
Panzer04|3 months ago
I also have a lot more luck selling PC hardware on bespoke forums than on ebay etc.
duffyjp|3 months ago
I have some ram I could live without if it's worth its weight in gold, but if you're going to get ripped off I think people want to avoid the used market and its extra risk.
GuestFAUniverse|3 months ago
I'll bet you'll see a lot more output, esp. with low margins -- to make the market uninteresting for new players.
mjevans|3 months ago
Trade Mark - as long as dues are paid
Patents a yearly cap of N things and only the most worthy get a 20 year patent, world wide.
Copyright ~ 5 years auto with exponentially more expensive renewals in 5 year blocks.
foobarian|3 months ago
tmikaeld|3 months ago
vlovich123|3 months ago
snovv_crash|3 months ago
okanat|3 months ago
dist-epoch|3 months ago
mindcrash|3 months ago
Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD...
Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be.
Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...
samarthr1|3 months ago
avidphantasm|3 months ago
kristianp|3 months ago
ahartmetz|3 months ago
kwanbix|3 months ago
Last time I checked going from 16 to 32GB in a Mac Mini was more expensive (or as expensive) than buying two 16GB Mac Minis.
protocolture|3 months ago
Yes, sellers fill the most expensive bids first.
>OpenAI's new "Stargate" project reportedly signed deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month to feed its AI clusters, which is an amount close to 40% of total global DRAM output if it's ever met.
Right, so demand has pretty much doubled.
>In this cycle, manufacturers had cut back production and investment during the last downturn (2022), and they've been slow to ramp back up.
And manufacturers have been burnt by over production before and are cautious
>Another factor limiting supply of standard RAM is that memory firms are diverting their limited manufacturing capacity to the most lucrative products. Specifically, there's a gold rush for HBM, which is a special kind of memory used by AI accelerator GPUs, because HBM commands far higher prices and profit margins than commodity DRAM.
See above about filling the more lucrative bids first.
>I'm not saying that all of these reasons given aren't the cause for the recent price boom, but what I am saying is that it wouldn't be the first time that price-fixing occurred in the memory industry.
Ok so what should be done about it?
>While that second lawsuit didn't hold up in court (and failed in appeal), that ongoing suspicion exists for a reason.
K so there have been 2 claims, one spurious.
>Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove.
See: Have been burnt by over production before. And Unspoken coordination is hardly an issue. Reacting to private information is bad, reacting to public information is normal and expected.
>It's hard not to see this supposedly coincidental aligned strategy of restraint and wonder if there's something more at play. All of these actions support pricing stability (for those companies) and suggests that no one is "breaking ranks" to grab a larger share by undercutting prices.
You are telling me that you are suspicious of an industry that has expanded, caused a glut that hurt their own businesses and killed their competitors, and are shying away from repeating that event that you outline as a clear mistake.
If theres so much money on the table, you will need another vendor. New RAM vendors have to weigh risk, including all the risk you have outlined, against what is likely a very massive capital outlay.
teeray|3 months ago
> memory suppliers have both the motive and precedent to coordinate behavior, even tacitly, in order to keep prices high. When only a handful of firms control the taps, it doesn't take a formal cartel for them to collectively benefit from constrained supply. Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove. The backdrop of past cartels makes it hard not to be cynical when hearing that "AI demand" is solely to blame for increased prices. Whether or not any collusion is happening now, it's clear that memory companies are profiting immensely from the current crisis. After bleeding financially during the last oversupply downturn, the major DRAM makers are now seeing record-high earnings in the third quarter of 2025 thanks to the price surge, and to put it bluntly, the shortage is great for business.
walterbell|3 months ago
In some cases, firm == family, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
venturecruelty|3 months ago
anonymousDan|3 months ago
mistercheph|3 months ago
theandrewbailey|3 months ago
mistercheph|3 months ago
groundzeros2015|3 months ago
jandrese|3 months ago
wnevets|3 months ago
arn3n|3 months ago
beloch|3 months ago
If AI companies continue to scale up and buy massive amounts of memory as prices spike, how much will that intensify the spike? Could feedback of this nature cause a price shock sufficient to pop the AI bubble earlier than it might have otherwise? How soon might that happen?
gettingoverit|3 months ago
It might either be artificial to keep GPU prices where they are, or someone already started building their RAM-based AI datacenter.
refulgentis|3 months ago
This was my last respite for intellectual argumentation.
Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it and anyone who does is a grifter and or amateur and or embarrassing and any data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999…so therefore, $X! (In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging)
As my MD friend noted wisely a couple weeks ago: it’s noteworthy how this became a culture after LLMs became ubiquitous and user friendly. It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
mistercheph|3 months ago
We (people writing code) are the ones using it more than anyone else to directly aid in / do our work, we probably more closely understand the limitations of LLM's than people working in other industries that just get fearmongering pseudo-technical babble whispered through streams about the power of the technology while using it as a substitute for Google search (which committed suicide a few years ago).
I also think part of what you're observing is the reddit/hive-mind effect, fear drives the crowd so its consensus will tend to emerge as "Nothing works, nothing will ever work, nothing is even being attempted!"
tonyhart7|3 months ago
the aftermath for tax payer and your 401k would be devastating
stuffn|2 months ago
You want intellectual argumentation and then make an asinine claim like this.
First, HN was never a place for intellectual argumentation. It's reddit level dunning kruger with the pseudo-intellectual snobbery of a college philosophy courses. If you don't follow the zeitgeist you dont get to argue anything anyway. This is a terrible place for actual debate and those that do enjoy "debate" here are generally on the same side with a marginal (< 1%) difference in their views. The average HNer is a tech enthusiast, mid-to-far-left reddit poster. If you want some good debate turn on flagged/shadowed posts and enjoy the people who generally do not agree with HN's insane take on almost everything and havent been thought policed by Dang. If you were as smart as your smarmy post implies you'd realize any place with le updoots and le downdoots doesnt allow for spirited debate.
Second,
> Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it
"AI" doesn't work well. I've been a professional software engineer for a long time. The best use case for "AI" is mild code review, writing comments, and stubbing out boring work like initial database table schemas. It absolutely hallucinates to hell with any sufficiently complex problem and if you're not aware of context windows you will walk yourself into a trap. The average person is not smart enough to recognize this. Thus, "AI" doesn't only fail to deliver, it is also dangerous due to it's sychophantic nature. I quote AI, particularly, because LLMs are not artificial intelligence. At least, not anymore than least squares analysis is artificial intelligence.
> data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999
Your rant provides no evidence it is not a bubble. An entirely unprofitable industry attempting to scale to make pennies is not sustainable. The amount of capital pouring into a literal wish is not similar to 1999.
It's similar to the 2008 economic crisis where, when the chickens come home to roost, the government will be bailing out big tech companies with taxpayer money because their infrastructure has parasitically attached itself (via the "cloud") to almost everything we use.
> In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging
There have been two DRAM price fixing scandals. If it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck... well it might be a duck. People are right to infer price fixing. The only difference now is it's "legal" because they announced it via a quarterly report. Every 5 or so years there's always something going on with DRAM. One wonders why.
> It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
Your MD friend should stay in his lane and not weigh in on topics he can't hope to understand. His biggest problem is India, not AI. Just like software engineers. Radiology is outsourced at levels similar to software with the only difference he probably made his nut 10 years ago and software engineers aren't paid anywhere near as much as a good non-outsourced radiologist.
mindslight|3 months ago
I've maxed out the RAM on every (consumer mobo) build I've ever done, and have always ended up appreciating it. I did a Ryzen build with 192GB back in January, so despite the questionable signal integrity of DDR5 especially on AM5 (more than one DIMM on each channel means lower speed) this time turned out to be no exception. I also stocked up on 130TB of HDD and 30TB of SSD, as it was clear we were headed towards some kind of economic disaster. (look, I'm avoiding politics!)
But the best RAM purchase I ever did was during the dot com crash glut a few decades ago. I maxed out my Athlon XP with 3x 512MB sticks for $27 each. A gig and a half of RAM. Those were the days.
e145bc455f1|3 months ago
Juliate|3 months ago
Mistletoe|3 months ago
deadbabe|3 months ago
type0|3 months ago
andix|3 months ago
Is it actually standard modules that are high on demand, or are the chips directly soldered to custom mainboards?
downrightmike|3 months ago
And you can't just manufacture or not the gold supply into scarcity
knowitnone3|3 months ago
andix|3 months ago
danishSuri1994|3 months ago
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zozbot234|3 months ago
leoc|3 months ago
andrewmcwatters|3 months ago
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alan-jordan13|3 months ago
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