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- Hacker News
- Not just server memory, desktop memory has gone up for the same reason... it's all going to AI. Forget building a new gaming pc, or buying a laptop, or even an arm SBC, because the supply is just gone.by nubinetwork
- Have we given up on edge AI this early?by lousken
- Does edge AI require less RAM?by recursive
- Manufacturers learned a valuable lesson a few years ago: overproduction leads to lower prices. Samsung was the first to address this issue by scaling back, and other manufacturers soon followed suit (collusion, cough cough). The past couple of years have been extremely profitable for the entire industry, and they’re not about to increase production and risk hurting their profits.
I suspect they would rather face shortages then satisfy market demand.
by sleepyguy - > I suspect they would rather face shortages then satisfy market demand.
Doubtful. A shortage is normally a scary prospect for a vendor. It means that buyers want to pay more, but something is getting in the way of the seller accepting that higher price. Satisfying market demand is the only way to maximize profitability.
Why do you think companies would prefer to make less profit here?
by 9rx - Yeah, it's easy to jump to the collusion theory, especially with this industry's, let's say, history. But honestly, I think it's less of an evil conspiracy and more just good old-fashioned fear mixed with inertia. These guys remember getting burned hard by oversupply cycles where they were left with mountains of useless chips. Nobody's gonna drop tens of billions on a new fab that could become a pumpkin in three years if the AI hype train just slows down a little
And on top of that fear, you have the pure technical reality: you can't just flip a switch and start pumping out wildly complex HBM instead of mass-market DDR5. That's like trying to retool a Toyota factory to build Bugattis overnight. So you get this perfect storm: a massive, near-vertical demand spike hits an industry that's both terrified of risk and physically incapable of moving fast. So yeah, they're absolutely milking the situation for all it's worth. But it's happening less because they're master villains and more because they're both scared and incredibly slow
by KurSix - lower prices are ok if they are selling more units, the question is whether the price point * units is Pareto optimal
overproduction means unsold units which is very bad, you pay a cost for every unsold unit
underproduction means internal processes are strained, customers are angry, but a higher price per a unit... can you increase the price by more than you are underproducing?
by tehjoker - Down stream this is driving up DDR4 demand as well :(by tempest_
- I picked a really bad time to start working on a DIY mini-NAS. A ram upgrade is more than what I paid for the whole Thinkcentre M720q.by jdc0589
- I was looking att filling my EPYC servers empty slots, what I paid $90/stick 2-3 years ago is now $430by guywhocodes
- These price hikes do fun things to the whole market.
In one of the last GPU booms I sold some ancient video card (recovered from a PC they were literally going to put in the trash) for $50.
And it wasn’t because it was special for running vintage games. The people that usually went for 1st rate gpus went to 2nd rate. Pushing the 2nd rate buyers to 3rd rate, creating a market for my 4th rate gpu.
by Scoundreller - This shortage is the best thing that could have happened for R&D in model efficiency. The "who has more parameters" race is about to hit the physical wall of hardware availability. Now the real race for efficiency begins: quantization, distillation, Mixture-of-Experts, new architectures
Hardware constraints are the single biggest driver of software innovation
by KurSix - This is a silly take. From day zero everyone and their mother was trying every idea under the sun on trying to get inference costs down.
There are a huge number of varients of attention schemes, like seemingly thousands. More posted on arxiv and blogs every single day. There are similarly a huge number of papers and talks on quantization, codebooks, number formats, everything. Like genuinely covering everything from analog compute to training lookup tables in FPGAs.
The AI model architects similarly are not sleeping on things. They genuinely take a bottom up approach to the design of their model and make sure that every mm of die area is being used.
And top down of course has extreme influence with people spinning up entire hardware companies like groq and cerebras to do AI as fast and efficiently as possible. Everyone wants to be the shovel seller.
The idea that anyone is sleeping on increasing inference efficiency when $$$$$$$$$ are being spent is ridiculous.
And genuinely they have actually made massive strides. Some models cost almost nothing like GPT OSS 120B which can be used to create slop at the speed of light.
by kingstnap - It feels like we're actually living in the Universal Paperclips universe.by cstuder
- I bet some are already buying the highest capacatiy DDR5 DIMMs in bulk to later put them on eBay in the upcoming major DRAM shortage.by tuhgdetzhh
- I’ve been selling unused ddr4 on eBay. It’s not as profitable as one would think tbh even with elevated demand. Only making a profit on the ones I initially acquired 2nd handby Havoc
- Desktop memory has also increased in price. I think it’s twice as expensive for DDR5 than it was 6 months ago.by vondur
- Even used memory has doubled in price. I was thinking of putting together a high-memory box for a side project, and reddit posts from a year ago all have memory at 1/2 to 1/3 of current ebay prices for the same part.by epistasis
- Yep, DDR5 prices have nearly doubled in less than 2 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5200....by zparky
- I've just built a gaming PC (after more than a decade without one), for curiosity's sake I just compared the prices I paid for DDR5 2 months ago to now, and at my location it already shows a 25-30% increase. Bonkers...by piva00
- It's very noticeable:
- I hope this AI craze will crash soon enough. Maybe then various things normalize in price again. And consumers get cheaper products with less limitations.by Ekaros
- Beware of what you wish for. Without the so called AI craze you wont get enough money to fund the current 2-3 years cadence of leading edge Fab development.by ksec
- Even if the hype around LLMs dies down, the demand for AI compute won't disappear. It will just shift from giant language models to more specialized areas: computer vision, scientific computing (like AlphaFold), drug discovery. All of that requires massive amounts of hardwareby KurSix
- Is that really the cause of this price increase? I still don't understand if this price surge is specifically for the US (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691) or if it's worldwide, I'm not sure I notice anything here in Southern Europe, so either that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true.
- Best we're getting is probably a stop to the price raises, but no price cuts. Kids will continue to grow up not knowing a $600 flagship GPU or a $1000 gaming PC.by 654wak654
- Hopefully this will put pressure on the market to produce much more efficient AI models. As opposed to bigger, then bigger, and then even BIGGER models (which is the current trend).
FYI: gpt-oss:120b is better at coding (in benchmarks and my own anecdotal testing) than gpt5-mini. More importantly, it's so much faster too. We need more of this kind of optimization. Note that gpt5-mini is estimated to be around ~150 billion parameters.
by riskable - Energy and GPU costs haven't pushed the needle any, so I don't see any reason to expect that RAM costs will.
- > We need more of this kind of optimization.
Who is the "we" in this sentence? The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?
The advantages of LLMs are tiny for software engineers (you might be more productive, you don't get paid more) and the downsides are bad to life-altering (you get to review AI slop all day, you lose your job).
by muldvarp - You're right. And it's not just about parameter count. Efficiency is a full-stack problem: from the architecture (like MoE instead of dense transformers), to the inference techniques (speculative decoding), to the data formats (quantization down to INT4/FP4). The shortage will force everyone to optimize every step of the process, not just "add more layers"by KurSix