I wonder if Apple will budge. The margins on their RAM upgrades were so ludicrous before that they're probably still RAM-profitable even without raising their prices, but do they want to give up those fat margins?
I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware.
[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.
> Micron's killing the Crucial brand of RAM and storage devices completely,
More rot economy. Customers are such a drag. Lets just sell to other companies for billion dollar deals at once. These AI companies have bottomless wallets. No one has thought of this before we will totally get rich.
Ha! Maybe Javascript developers will finally drop memory usage! You need to display the multiplication table? Please allocate 1GB of RAM. Oh, you want alternate row coloring? Here is another 100MB of CSS to do that.
The big 3 memory manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron) are essentially all moving upmarket. They have limited capacity and want to use it for high margin HBM for GPUs and ddr5 for servers. At the same time CXMT, Winbond and Nanya are stepping in at the lower end of the market.
I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore.
Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.
My understanding is that this is primarily hitting DDR5 RAM (or better). With prices so inflated, is there an argument to revert and downgrade systems to DDR4 RAM technology in many use cases (which is not so inflated)?
I just gathered enough money to build my new PC. I'll even go to another country to pay less taxes, and this spike hit me hard. I'll buy anyway because I don't believe it will slow down so soon. But yeah, for me is a lot of money
I can't help but be the pessimist angle. RAM production will need to increase to supply AI data centers. When the AI bubble bursts (and I do believe it will), the whole computing supply chain, which has been built around it, will take a huge hit too. Excess production capacity.
Wonder what would happen if it really takes a dive. The impact on the SF tech scene will be brutal. Maybe I'll go escape on a sailboat for 3 years or something.
Anyway, tangential, but something I think about occasionally.
I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing.
I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for most people.
Micron has already decided to just eliminate the Crucial brand (as mentioned in the post). It feels like if this continues, once our nice home PCs start to break, we won't be able to repair them.
The extreme version of this is that even dumb terminals (which still require some ram) will be as expensive as laptops today. In this world, our entire computing experience is connecting a dumb terminal to a ChatGPT interface where the only way we can interact with anything is through "agents" and prompts.
In this world, OpenAI is not overvalued, and there is no bubble because the large LLM companies become computing.
But again, I think this is mostly a dystopian sci-fi fiction... but it does sit a bit too close to the realm of possible for my tastes.
If the OpenAI Hodling Company buys and warehouses 40% of global memory production or 900,000 memory wafers (i.e. not yet turned into DDR5/DDR6 DIMMs) per month at price X in October 2025, leading to supply shortages and tripling of price, they have the option of later un-holding the warehoused memory wafers for a profit.
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain..
What's the economic value per warehoused and insured cubic inch of 900,000 memory wafers? Grok response:
> As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs.
→ Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.
> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies.
So it's the Bitcoin craze all over again. Sigh. The bubble will eventually collapse, it has to - but the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent... or, to use a more appropriate comparison, have a working computer.
I for myself? I hope once this bubble collapses, we see actual punishments again. Too-large-to-fail companies broken up, people getting prosecuted for the wash trading masquerading itself as "legitimate investments" in the entire bubble (that more looks like the genetic family table of the infamously incestuous Habsburg family), greedy executives jailed or, at least where national security is impacted due to chip shortages, permanently gotten rid of. I'm sick and tired of large companies being able to just get away with gobbling up everything, killing off the economy at large, they are not just parasites - they are a cancer, killing its host society.
Pricing compute out of the average persons budget to prop up investment in data centers, stocks, ultimately control agency
If an RTX 5000 series price topped out at historical prices no one would need hosted AI
Then it came to be that models were on a path to run well enough loaded into RAM... uh oh
This is in line with ISPs long ago banning running personal services and the long held desire to sell dumb thin clients that must work with a central service
Web developers fell for confidence games of old elders hook line and sinker. Nothing but the insane ego and vanity of some tech oligarchs driving this. They cannot appear weak. Vain aura farming, projection of strength.
Every shortage is followed by a glut. Wait and see for RAM prices to go way down. This will happen because RAM makers are racing to produce units to reap profits from the higher price. That overproduction will cause prices to crash.
I am very excited for a few years when the bubble bursts and all this hardware is on the market for cheap like back in the early to mid 2000's after that bubble burst and you had tons of old servers available for homelabs. I can't wait to fill a room with 50kW of bulk GPUs on a pallet and run some cool shit.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadYou can go 16GB if you go native and throw some assembly in the mix. Use old school scripting languages. Debloat browsers.
It has been long delayed.
[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.
More rot economy. Customers are such a drag. Lets just sell to other companies for billion dollar deals at once. These AI companies have bottomless wallets. No one has thought of this before we will totally get rich.
edit: this is a joke
I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore.
Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.
This https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2... will happen to every class of thing (once it hits energy, everything is downstream of energy).
Wonder what would happen if it really takes a dive. The impact on the SF tech scene will be brutal. Maybe I'll go escape on a sailboat for 3 years or something.
Anyway, tangential, but something I think about occasionally.
I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for most people.
Micron has already decided to just eliminate the Crucial brand (as mentioned in the post). It feels like if this continues, once our nice home PCs start to break, we won't be able to repair them.
The extreme version of this is that even dumb terminals (which still require some ram) will be as expensive as laptops today. In this world, our entire computing experience is connecting a dumb terminal to a ChatGPT interface where the only way we can interact with anything is through "agents" and prompts.
In this world, OpenAI is not overvalued, and there is no bubble because the large LLM companies become computing.
But again, I think this is mostly a dystopian sci-fi fiction... but it does sit a bit too close to the realm of possible for my tastes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142100#46143535
What's the economic value per warehoused and insured cubic inch of 900,000 memory wafers? Grok response:> As of late 2025, 900,000 finished 300 mm 3D NAND memory wafers (typical high-volume inventory for a major memory maker) are worth roughly $9 billion and occupy about 104–105 million cubic inches when properly warehoused in FOUPs. → Economic value ≈ $85–90 per warehoused cubic inch.
So it's the Bitcoin craze all over again. Sigh. The bubble will eventually collapse, it has to - but the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent... or, to use a more appropriate comparison, have a working computer.
I for myself? I hope once this bubble collapses, we see actual punishments again. Too-large-to-fail companies broken up, people getting prosecuted for the wash trading masquerading itself as "legitimate investments" in the entire bubble (that more looks like the genetic family table of the infamously incestuous Habsburg family), greedy executives jailed or, at least where national security is impacted due to chip shortages, permanently gotten rid of. I'm sick and tired of large companies being able to just get away with gobbling up everything, killing off the economy at large, they are not just parasites - they are a cancer, killing its host society.
If an RTX 5000 series price topped out at historical prices no one would need hosted AI
Then it came to be that models were on a path to run well enough loaded into RAM... uh oh
This is in line with ISPs long ago banning running personal services and the long held desire to sell dumb thin clients that must work with a central service
Web developers fell for confidence games of old elders hook line and sinker. Nothing but the insane ego and vanity of some tech oligarchs driving this. They cannot appear weak. Vain aura farming, projection of strength.
You don't need a new PC. Just use the old one.
Always good advice.