> 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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
My main desktop has 256GB, and my "router" has 128GB. Mostly used for software builds (I use NixOS as a source distribution) and VMs (which themselves are mostly used for web browsing, surprise surprise). The desktop had been fine at 112GB because that was the max that coreboot could train, but the coreboot code has been updated and used DDR3 sticks are cheap. The goals of the new 192GB machine are more of that existing usage, plus LLM experimentation and possible VFX rendering/video work. It's speculative of course, but as I've said I've never regretted bulking up on RAM. If it ends up feeling too vacant and echoey, I can always grab another motherboard and processor and make two 96GB machines.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
50 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadAnd you can't just manufacture or not the gold supply into scarcity
> 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.
In some cases, firm == family, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
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...
In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just selling the memory.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll bet you'll see a lot more output, esp. with low margins -- to make the market uninteresting for new players.
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...
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?
But it's just not selling. I guess most people don't even check ebay, and go straight to hardware online retailers.
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.
Is it actually standard modules that are high on demand, or are the chips directly soldered to custom mainboards?