> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
The margins on memory for Apple were so absurd that they should have more ability to eat up the costs, if they wanted to. I'm assuming they would, to the extent that they're a device company more so than a service company yet.
I don't think Apple ever adjusts the price of existing products, for better (eating the cost of part shortages) or worse (over-charging for old parts). The real test will be what they do with upcoming products.
A year ago, Framework-branded memory for DIY laptops cost, IIRC, 2x Amazon for equivalent specs (not the same modules—the ADATA ones that Framework puts their stickers on are theoretically available retail but in practice complete unobtanium in most countries). Not Apple pricing, but they definitely have some margin to eat into.
I feel like I got the last chopper out of 'nam buying my G.Skill 256GB 6000MT/s kit when I did. I paid $780 in July and now it's listed at.. $2700, over 300% higher. That and buying a bunch of sticks for some Tyan boards I got on a whim last year with some engineering samples I got working on them.
Literally bought 96GB (4x24GB) of DDR5 5600Mhz (edit: RDIMM ECC) just 5 days ago, fearing the prices would go up even more moving forward. Paid 1500 EUR for it in total :/ Southern Europe FWIW.
Altman should be jailed for this. Single-handedly crashing consumer spending in an entire sector of the economy. At the very least for the reason that that was supposed to happen _after_ they had the AI in hand to supplant majority white collar labor, not before.
Yes? Reports are that OpenAI is buying unfinished memory kits which they have no capacity to complete. It appears that OpenAI is just buying them to remove them from the market and damage their competitors. In United States, that used to be considered against the law if we were actually enforcing such things.
Since COVID, this has been the norm for any industry that requires chips.
Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.
I doubt this is to create artificial scarcity. Especially when OpenAI is the biggest player thought to be able to build AGI first and that it is now backed by the US & the Saudis.
The US Government, Saudis, consumer/private investors apparently or at least the one that can build the most economically useful AI. I myself believe Google is most likely.
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
But OpenAI legitimately needs HBM. Amazon in this instance doesn't need food and is doing purely to create artificial scarcity. If OpenAI were to actually not use the HBM then it could mean something.
Simple: they create value for the right people. Namely, politicians who get their donations, and a generation that, despite not having enough children to grow the economy organically, doesn't want to work any... er... wants to retire.
Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.
So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.
Yes, and I actually think it's a symptom of advanced societal decay that you think this is somehow an unreasonable proposition.
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
This is a dystopia no one really thought about. A handful of people anointed to spend borrowed money on a (so far unprofitable) quest to destabilize the world's economy, alienate the working class and make everything we've enjoyed the past 15-20 years a luxury.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
Eh my (anemic) work laptop from 2019 probably won't get replaced for an extra year because my employer won't authorize the big laptop order at inflated prices.
I'm aware that the US is changing, but in the past, we had an idea that you don't go to jail unless there was a specific crime that you could be charged with.
This "crime" would be written down somewhere in what we called a "law", that would state penalties, with "maximum" sentences.
And, to forestall your comments, one of our other traditions was that you applied these rules even to lying sons of bitches (which Altman is).
I'm pretty sure this clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, no? Altman is intentionally sabotaging the global electronics supply chain using their existing market dominance to prevent competitors from being able to operate.
And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.
Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?
Since it clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, it will be easy for you to find case law that demonstrates that, alongside credible sources stating that OpenAIs actions are prosecutable that make that case.
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
I believe it depends on which parties are responsible for the criminal antitrust violations. Is it the manufacturers abusing monopoly power, or is it OpenAI abusing monopsony power?
I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
You should look up the monopsony provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, as well as the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 which prohibits predatory price discrimination schemes. Scam Alt-Man should be paying the same price for RAM as us plebes, if the DOJ wasn’t derelict in its duty to enforce antitrust law.
It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.
mo·nop·so·ny /məˈnäpsənē/ a market situation in which there is only one buyer.
It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.
Like monopolies, monopsony power exists on a spectrum. For example, Walmart exercises extreme monopsony power over suppliers, despite not being the only retailer in town.
Yikes, I hadn’t realized this was that big of a problem. The same exact G.skill z5 64Gb ram I bought 4 years ago is well on its way to being double the price. Does this have more to do with Crucial ending consumer product lines or tariffs?
And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.
What do you mean by this? From everything I can find points towards other companies winding down DDR4 production because of China's cheaper DDR4 production lines.
The toilet paper thing didn't really happen though because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
Did we live through the same pandemic? At least where I live, there was shortages for weeks, and scarce for months.
There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.
In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.
Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.
Perhaps a quantity below "a single company causes enough of a spike in global demand that it'll have demonstrable impact in nearly every single industry"
And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.
I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
> The toilet paper thing didn't really happen [...]
Yes, it did.
> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)
I literally had a friend mail us a crate of TP in our time of need. Thankfully they had access to industrial suppliers.
Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.
The end of Crucial is a symptom, not a cause. Crucial is merely Micron's factory brand. Nothing is stopping OEMs like G.Skill or Kingston from buying DRAM chips from Micron and putting them on consumer RAM sticks.
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.
They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.
They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.
And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.
There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.
It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.
I think maybe long-term the effect of Korean companies no longer daring to reuse old machines to produce DDR4 because of US retribution is the bigger cause of that.
Repeating this weird claim won't make it true. DDR4 isn't going to come back into fashion, even during a DRAM shortage. Demand for DDR4 can't increase meaningfully when no current-generation processors can use it, and older-generation processors aren't seeing any increase in production or sales. DDR4 is not a substitute good for the RAM that's in short supply.
He's confused about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because they're afraid China would be the eventual buyer (via proxies) and they'd be inadvertently in violation of US sanctions , so instead of selling they just locked down the old machinery to gather dust instead.
And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been slowly but steadily increasing long before this crisis, after the crisis DDR4 prices have also tripled just like DDR5 prices, even in the used market. So regardless of whether it's a real demand or panic response, the effect is still real on people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems. These people who probably just wants to update RAM in their systems in the hope that it'd help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years while bracing the impact. Had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.
What is this estimation based on? I'd think once the bubble pops pricing would start to return to normal levels and the general consensus seems to think the bubble won't last that long.
In my opinion we are witnessing the market influences of a new type of public-private "Phoebus cartel" except at a total global scale where anti-terrorism laws require pricing businesses and individuals out of owning their own compute forcing them to rent compute from multinational hyperscaler cloud businesses who are integrated with military intelligence operations. Computing technology after all is a weapon of mass destruction and the peaceful are being punished for the non peaceful. It is too dangerous for governments around the world to allow individuals to posses the immense power of computing technology. Call me chicken little but we are witnessing the end of publicly available private general computing. Market changes influencing cost effectiveness analysis to favor public cloud is a deliberate goal to secure national critical infrastructure. I also think this coincides with the limits of MOSFET scaling and RISC-V permissive licensing. My only credentials for this is 15+ years working in fintech I&O for a US Fortune 500 company.
It certainly feels like we are being squeezed from all sides. I think the push to require ID verification for websites is also part of the plot - it all feels too coordinated, like governments all over the world have the same exact agenda to destroy our privacy. At some point you will have to verify your ID to use any computer system, and it will act just as a terminal to the cloud.
I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.
What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.
I thought Apple would get around and improve their memory prices with time, I guess it's the opposite: all manufacturers are now becoming Apple given these raises.
They are not becoming Apple. They are updating the prices of their components to the underlying market costs. Framework lets you replace the memory modules.
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
I bought a couple of terabytes of RAM and now I feel like one of those crypto-whales haha. It's just sitting there in the corner. One was a lucky one, too, because I tried to negotiate a guy to sell me a system with less RAM but he wouldn't discount it much. Now it pays for most of the cost of the damn thing.
These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
You don't NEED to fill the 12 ram slots. My personal 1U has an Epyc 9124 and only 4 of the 12 ram slots filled. I figured, ram will only get cheaper with time so I can fill the remaining 8 slots in the future. Turns out I was wrong, but regardless, the server runs fine on 4 sticks.
Placed an order from Lenovo on November 21st - 96gb of RAM in that machine, it still hasn't shipped yet - am wondering if/when they will try to "renegotiate" the deal... (supposed arrival date on that system is 01/02/2026)
From what I've read, he's tied up RAM manufacturers through 2029. That's a lot of quartely earnings reports for many firms in the economy where they watch consumer spend come to a screeching halt.
They bought unfinished components and have no ability to finish them. They're now waste just sitting on shelves and by the time we could do this and get them into production lines, they'll be obsoletd by DDR6.
As with all Ponzi schemes OpenAI will eventually go bankrupt, yet it continues to receive money from the unwary. I wonder how the research division at Disney feels about what their bosses have done...
But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.
Now I'm curious: does this situation classify as force-majeure for a major firms? "Hey, you know, actually our entire consumer base just disappeared overnight. Crazy, huh?". And will various governments have to intervene to save them when/if that happens.
Not taking into account that they all be busy handing money to openAI, at least someone somewhere has to notice that something is very wrong.
There's an errant thing at the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if this ram shortage could revive the ram dimm as a concept as so many manufacturers were adopting the soldered-ram approach. I'm sure though this won't come to pass
The price difference in terms of manufacturing cost is immaterial. But if people can't afford a machine with 32GB anymore then they're going to suffer one with 8GB knowing from the outset that it's not enough and then have a strong preference for the ability to upgrade it later when prices come back down or they get more money.
What's wild is OpenAI doubling down on hyperscaling when it's obvious that the gains from pre-training are coming to an end. They seem determined to just go out in flames...
This is a "the horse might sing" situation for the whole market that focused on breakthrough-level results (AGI, ASI, or even just "not going off the rails after the third response").
The thing is, it seems like they are planning to force everyone else out of the market. Acquire all the RAM they can possibly get, leave none for the competition, pray to survive the entire mess.
It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.
And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
Perhaps we can call this type of maneuver, "The Sam Altman": Your expensive business's mid-term outlook not looking so good? Why not use all that cash/credit to corner the market in some commodity in order to cripple your perceived competition?
He's not the first one though. The crypto miners used to do the same (I distinctly 'member first GPUs, then HDDs, then ordinary RAM being squoze by yet another new shitcoin in less than a year), and Uber plus the food delivery apps are a masterclass in how to destroy competition with seemingly infinite cash.
> In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
You can't, it doesn't have any video output port per the product brief [1].
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
This is a huge Hail Mary... IMO they'd be better served slowing down the training pipeline, becoming profitable now, hiring a bunch of scientists and figuring out the next AI technology.
Oh, both Uber and AirBnB did get dinged by the courts - but it took them years and the damage was already done, on top of that the fines were laughable.
We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.
Thank you for sharing this. Their point about the 128GB desktop mainboard being a bargain while their prices remain low rings true. I bought one a couple weeks ago because I've been wanting to build a beefy, efficient home server and I think this might be the last window of affordability for quite a while.
> all the memory chips and energy. And GPUs of course.
Yes and no and yes.
AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.
The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.
I upgraded my laptop from 32gb to 64gb (should have gotten 96gb) over the summer and I'm considering the same for the leftover 32gb - fear of not having spares in case of defects holds me back though.
I started thinking about it last spring, been slowly finding the ideal setup over time. Finally bit the bullet just like 5 days ago, fearing it's about to become worse rather than better, but it hurt as much anyway :/
It seems the only thing that could break this is the off chance that the SCOTUS rules that the tariffs are illegal and/or Congress strips the Presidency of the power they gave it in utters incompetence many decades ago.
I’m thinking with sufficient pressure by all tech interested people it could become an issue in the midterms and even force Trump to sign agreements not to tariff RAM by Korean producers who could ramp up production.
Frankly, I wouldn’t even be surprised if we start seeing RAM smuggling. In not sure of drug prices, but would smuggling RAM not be at least just as profitable, especially without the high profile and risk?
Here's what they actually said: "We are going to need to increase our memory pricing soon, but we won’t use this as an excuse to gouge customers like @Dell apparently has and that @Apple does as their norm."
No hypocrisy there.
They were replying to a screenshot showing a huge price per GB on Dell's site, but it looks like that screenshot was wrong? So a mistake on framework's part for not checking sources, but they've had a consistent and reasonable position on pricing.
This is the fault of manufacturers fixing supply, especially in the case of micron, one of only 3 memory chip manufacturers, deciding to flip the bird to the non-AI consumer market.
When rational economic actors have enough power, and use that power to decrease the competitiveness of the market, they gain increasing amounts of "fault".
Late-stage capitalism in action. We have companies that are so insanely rich (despite losing equally insane amounts of money) that they can single-handedly corner worldwide markets for critical components in a brazen attempt to hurt the competition, and nobody will do a single thing about it.
Yes, we're just hitting the limits of current manufacturing not some fundamental limit like the availability of raw materials. Either demand will wane and the prices will go down, or manufacturing will scale up and prices will go down, eventually. That "eventually" does some work, but it's not remotely a case of "a point of no return".
In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, because we'll make more of it and get better at producing it than we would have without the demand spike. I.e. Wright's Law in action - which is usually pretty good at producing the long term direction of prices of products like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
They'll come down some day, but between the massive ai co purchases, and how long Micron says it will take to bring up new production capacity... most estimates I've seen are that it stays high (or grows higher still) until at least 2028.
The situation is really sticky, since allegedly fabs are anxious to ramp up production, fearing the AI bubble will burst and they will be left with useless stock. So the usual supply chasing demand doesn't apply here and we might wait for a really long time...
> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.
https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.
Who still thinks this?
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
Small thing, but this is not simple or realistic at all. How does someone in an apartment grow enough food for their family?
What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?
Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.
So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
This "crime" would be written down somewhere in what we called a "law", that would state penalties, with "maximum" sentences.
And, to forestall your comments, one of our other traditions was that you applied these rules even to lying sons of bitches (which Altman is).
Sorry to be old fashioned here.
And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.
Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.
It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.
There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.
In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.
Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.
And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.
I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
Yes, it did.
> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)
Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.
It absolutely happened. I was there, I saw it happen. Maybe it didn't happen in your area, but others weren't so lucky.
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
Prices are not expected to recover until 2028.
AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.
They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.
They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.
And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.
There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.
It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.
FOMO and Number goes up is the primary issue both with AI and most compute today.
There's so many made up numbers these days that does zero productive work, like FPS, refresh rates, 4k, 8k, 16k.
Bloat is everywhere.
He's confused about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because they're afraid China would be the eventual buyer (via proxies) and they'd be inadvertently in violation of US sanctions , so instead of selling they just locked down the old machinery to gather dust instead.
And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been slowly but steadily increasing long before this crisis, after the crisis DDR4 prices have also tripled just like DDR5 prices, even in the used market. So regardless of whether it's a real demand or panic response, the effect is still real on people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems. These people who probably just wants to update RAM in their systems in the hope that it'd help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years while bracing the impact. Had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.
The RAM I bought last year has more than tripled. 2x32 DDR5 kits, $240/kit, now $820.
I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.
What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.
I wonder what Apple's next move will be :-)
EDIT: Spelling
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
They might pull it off , but hell off a way to bet the economy dominos all on black.
These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
Haha, if I did sell I'd probably sell on /r/homelabsales which is a much more pleasant place to interact.
https://frame.work/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-naviga...
Maybe this won't last that long given the RAM shortage is apparently a corner attempt by Sam Altman.
But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.
Not taking into account that they all be busy handing money to openAI, at least someone somewhere has to notice that something is very wrong.
Is anyone's salary here projected to go up 53% in 2026?
This is a "the horse might sing" situation for the whole market that focused on breakthrough-level results (AGI, ASI, or even just "not going off the rails after the third response").
It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.
And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
There's a few historical examples here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market
Of course I'm joking, there are LLMs to check these things now.
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...
[2] https://www.heise.de/news/Nvidias-H100-kommt-im-deutschen-Re...
We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.
And we need all of that fast.
Except its caused by good old bubble capitalism.
Yes and no and yes.
AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.
The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.
This memory situation has me pondering putting it all up on ebay
Or just cash out, that's always great.
I’m thinking with sufficient pressure by all tech interested people it could become an issue in the midterms and even force Trump to sign agreements not to tariff RAM by Korean producers who could ramp up production.
Frankly, I wouldn’t even be surprised if we start seeing RAM smuggling. In not sure of drug prices, but would smuggling RAM not be at least just as profitable, especially without the high profile and risk?
Hey! … hey, you! You want to have some fun?
No hypocrisy there.
They were replying to a screenshot showing a huge price per GB on Dell's site, but it looks like that screenshot was wrong? So a mistake on framework's part for not checking sources, but they've had a consistent and reasonable position on pricing.
In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, because we'll make more of it and get better at producing it than we would have without the demand spike. I.e. Wright's Law in action - which is usually pretty good at producing the long term direction of prices of products like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/ram-prices-are-exploding...