I just checked how much I paid around 12 months ago for Crucial 96GB kit (2x48GB ddr5 5600 so-dimm). Was $224, same kit today I see listed at $592, wild :/
Just bought that exact kit for my Minisforum 790S7 build at the eye watering $592... Kicking myself as I was just starting to contemplate it early Oct but not yet seriously looking
Built my son's first gaming PC 2 months ago. Figured it would be cheaper around Black Friday, but the prices were reasonable enough that we didn't wait. Turned out to be a huge savings to buy that fast DDR5 in September.
This is really crazy. I built my first computer not too long ago; like I'm talking less than a month maybe, definitely less than 2. I paid $320 for 64GB Kit (CMK64GX5M2B5600C40) at Microcenter. It is now sold out in Chicago store and listed at $530.
I wanted to build a gaming PC around summer, to be able play with my son, but I postponed it for no real reason. I built this PC a 2 weeks ago, so instead of paying 250 pln (~$70 usd) for 32 GB RAM, I paid 899 pln (~$250). Now, exactly the same RAM costs 1099 pln (~$300).
It will be interesting to see the knock on effect of some upcoming consumer electronics; for example Apple was rumored to be working on a cheaper MacBook that uses an iPad CPU, and Valve is working on a SteamOS based gaming machine. Both will likely live/die based on price.
I bought 32GB of DDR5 SODIMM last year for 108€ on Amazon. The exact same product that I bought back then is now 232€ on Amazon. I don't like this ride.
Yeah, similar for me. I bought 64 gigs of DDR5 laptop RAM about a year ago; it ended up costing about $190. Now the exact same listing is going for $470. https://a.co/d/fJH1GkW
I guess I'm glad I bought when I did; didn't realize how good of a deal I was getting.
That's a an analogy-- a literary technique the writer is using, to show the correspondence between the price of a specific amount of DDR5 RAM to a fully integrated system, so the reader can follow the conclusions of their article easier.
Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-term contracts with the memory manufacturers which give them the confidence to invest in new fabs and increased capacity. That would be great for everyone. Additionally, we're likely to see Chinese fab'd DRAM now, which they've been attempting since the '70s but never been competitive at. With these margins, any new manufacturer could gain a foothold.
If LLMs' utility continues to scale with size (which seems likely as we begin training embodied AI on a massive influx of robotic sensor data) then it will continue to gobble up memory for the near future. We may need both increased production capacity _and_ a period of more efficient software development techniques as was the case when a new 512kb upgrade cost $1,000.
I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was <$0.50.
The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.
I picked up a PS5 today on a Black Friday deal for 350EUR. 32GB DDR5 is at around 280EUR at the moment.
I have a gaming PC, it runs Linux because (speaking as a Microsoft sysadmin with 10 years under my belt) I hate what Windows has become, but on commodity hardware it’s not quite there for me. Thought I’d play the PlayStation backlog while I wait for the Steam Machine.
So, like, we were already pretty much priced out of higher-end graphic cards, and now it's happening to RAM. All this while jobs are disappearing, layoffs are ongoing and CEOs are touting AI's 'capabilities' left and right.
Next is probably CPUs, even if AIs don't use them that much, manufactures will shift production to something more profitable, then gouge prices so that only enterprises will pay for them.
What's next? Electricity?
Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world? /rant
> Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world? /rant
It may have been a bit self-deprecating, but I think your “rant” is a more than justified question that really should be expanded well beyond just this matter. It’s related to a clear fraud that has been perpetrated upon the people of the western world in particular for many decades and generations now in many different ways. We have been told for decades and generations that “we have to plunder your money and debase of and give it to the rich that caused the {insert disaster caused by the ruling class} misery and we have to do it without any kind of consequences for the perpetrators and no, you don’t get any kind of ownership or investment and we have to do it now or the world will end”
After the supply constraints of the post-covid period, are graphics cards really that more expensive?
How long do you estimate this period of supply constraint will be? Will manufacturers continue to be greedy, or will they grow less greedy as the supply improves based on the price signals the high price indicates?
Drive prices have already exploded. New hard drives have doubled in price since the beginning of the year. I haven't checked SSD prices, but why would they not be crazy, too?
The AI bubble has also pushed up secondhand prices. I work in ewaste recycling. Two weeks ago, a petabyte's worth of hard drives showed up. After erasing, testing, listing, and selling them, I'll have a very merry Christmas.
That and water. Electricity: Google made a post about scaling k8s to 135.000 nodes yesterday, mentioning how each node has multiple GPUs taking up 2700 watts max.
Water, well this is a personal beef, but Microsoft built a datacenter which used potable / drinking water for backup cooling, using up millions of liters during a warm summer. They treat the water and dump it in the river again. This was in 2021, I can imagine it's only gotten worse again: https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/industrial-water/microsof...
Is any datacenter's water use significant compared to other industrial installations? According to that article, all datacenters in North Holland use 550 Ml/yr. North Holland has 2.95M residents [0], who use 129 l/person-day [1], 47 Kl/person-year, 139,000 Ml/year for the whole region. So the data centers use an estimated 0.4% of the region's water. Data centers use about 3% of the Netherlands' electricity.
Why do you think this is a lot of water? What are the alternatives to pulling from the local water utility and are those alternatives preferable?
Lots of people are speculating that the price spike is AI related. But it might be more mundane:
I'd bet that a good chunk of the apparently sudden demand spike could be last month's Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-support finally happening, pushing companies and individuals to replace many years worth of older laptops and desktops all at once.
I worked in enterprise laptop repair two decades ago — I like your theory (and there's definitely meat there) but my experience was that if a system's OEM configuration wasn't enough to run modern software, we'd replace the entire system (to avoid bottlenecks elsewhere in the architecture).
I have no idea about the number of people this has actually affected, but this is exactly my situation. Need a new workstation with a bunch of RAM to replace my Win10 machine, so I don't really have viable options than paying the going rate.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 97.1 ms ] threadBad time if you need to build a computer.
I guess I'm glad I bought when I did; didn't realize how good of a deal I was getting.
That's a an analogy-- a literary technique the writer is using, to show the correspondence between the price of a specific amount of DDR5 RAM to a fully integrated system, so the reader can follow the conclusions of their article easier.
If LLMs' utility continues to scale with size (which seems likely as we begin training embodied AI on a massive influx of robotic sensor data) then it will continue to gobble up memory for the near future. We may need both increased production capacity _and_ a period of more efficient software development techniques as was the case when a new 512kb upgrade cost $1,000.
https://www.trendforce.com/price/dram/dram_spot
A Japanese factory that made epoxy resin for chips was destroyed and the price of SIMM chips skyrocketed (due to lack of availability).
I remember being very upset that I wasn't going to be able to upgrade to 4MB.
The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.
> Memory: 16 GB GDDR6 SDRAM
So unless the RAM price jumps to 4x the price of a PS5, getting a PS5 is not the most cost efficient way to get to 64 GB of RAM.
In comparison, PS3 has been used to build cheap clusters[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_5
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
I have a gaming PC, it runs Linux because (speaking as a Microsoft sysadmin with 10 years under my belt) I hate what Windows has become, but on commodity hardware it’s not quite there for me. Thought I’d play the PlayStation backlog while I wait for the Steam Machine.
Next is probably CPUs, even if AIs don't use them that much, manufactures will shift production to something more profitable, then gouge prices so that only enterprises will pay for them.
What's next? Electricity?
Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world? /rant
That'll come with the bubble bursting and the mass sell off.
Yes. My electricity prices jumped 50% in 3 years.
It may have been a bit self-deprecating, but I think your “rant” is a more than justified question that really should be expanded well beyond just this matter. It’s related to a clear fraud that has been perpetrated upon the people of the western world in particular for many decades and generations now in many different ways. We have been told for decades and generations that “we have to plunder your money and debase of and give it to the rich that caused the {insert disaster caused by the ruling class} misery and we have to do it without any kind of consequences for the perpetrators and no, you don’t get any kind of ownership or investment and we have to do it now or the world will end”
In the hands of the owners of the AI, as a direct consequence of the economic system. It was never going to play out any other way.
next?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/data-centers-are-concentrate...
AI will lead to abundance. For those that own stuff and no longer have to pay for other people to work for them.
How long do you estimate this period of supply constraint will be? Will manufacturers continue to be greedy, or will they grow less greedy as the supply improves based on the price signals the high price indicates?
The AI bubble has also pushed up secondhand prices. I work in ewaste recycling. Two weeks ago, a petabyte's worth of hard drives showed up. After erasing, testing, listing, and selling them, I'll have a very merry Christmas.
That and water. Electricity: Google made a post about scaling k8s to 135.000 nodes yesterday, mentioning how each node has multiple GPUs taking up 2700 watts max.
Water, well this is a personal beef, but Microsoft built a datacenter which used potable / drinking water for backup cooling, using up millions of liters during a warm summer. They treat the water and dump it in the river again. This was in 2021, I can imagine it's only gotten worse again: https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/industrial-water/microsof...
Why do you think this is a lot of water? What are the alternatives to pulling from the local water utility and are those alternatives preferable?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Holland
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
[2] https://www.dutchdatacenters.nl/en/statistics-2/
AI/LLM companies will pay TSMC more than Apple is willing to further subsidize this neat little box.
I'd bet that a good chunk of the apparently sudden demand spike could be last month's Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-support finally happening, pushing companies and individuals to replace many years worth of older laptops and desktops all at once.