If capitalism works, we’ll start to see competitors enter the market and prices would go down.
If capitalism worked.
At this p;oint if I go to a site and they have an “AI Chat Assistant!” pop up I send them a “support” message telling them that I will not be purchasing from people who contributes to the bubble that is driving up costs for components.
I just did that for an MP3 player, why the everloving frak they need an AI assistant to give me a “compare” feature that’s been on commercial sites for decades…
A bit off topic, but what sort of mp3 player? It crossed my mind a few times that I should get one again.
Why would you want the mp3 player they are talking about? If they cant even shell out for decent web dev, why would the hardware be any less cheap…
At what point do we start making the factories ourselves? No really if ddr3 is significantly going up would it make sence for all these smaller companies to pool thier resources and start fabbing thier own chips?
Nice profile pic. I’ve been wanting to find a maker/tinkerer community on lemmy but I haven’t come across one yet. Am I just not looking hard enough? I love seeing and discussing people’s DIY electronics / 3D printed projects.
Theres some. Honestly more people are on mastodon than lemmy. It hasnt taken off like the mastodon crowd. If you do #maker on mastodon.social for example, its much better.
I wish the threadiverse supported hashtags and more mastodon stuff but it is what it is.
Thanks!
Your client shows profile pics?
Piefed works on firefox moble well, so thats what i use 😁.
I used to use sync, but it’s been abandoned and I heard from other former sync users that summit had a comparable feature set, so I switched to that. Summit shows profile pics next to each user.
unfortunately chip foundries take years to set up (just filtering the air alone takes months), so it’s not really a solution - although china is attempting to do exactly this.
"It’s hard work and it takes too long. China is trying to do it "
2 years later and after China has done it, “why are the chinese taking the lead on all of this? we should be doing things more like China.”
Sorry, I was perhaps unclear - China is and has been setting up chip foundaries regardless of the global memory prices, simply to have domestic production of those components. Production of memory modules during this period of AI ratfucking is just a happy bonus.
Yes because they have an autonomy incentive, but “our” (as in Western capitalism) incentives is solely on profit and profit is being done, therefore we will never solve this because in fact there’s no problem. We are being mocked by all these PC parts suppliers.
I don’t think you’re wrong, I’m just not sure how it relates to what I said.
But they really wanted to shit on capitalism regardless of context.
What’s weird is that capitalism should be driving others to set up fans because it is so profitable.
I mean fair enough I suppose. It’s almost like capitalism doesn’t quite work like how it says it does in the advertising… sigh.
Haven’t they been drooling over Taiwan’s tech and foundries for years now?
More or less, though they recently bought their way in to a domestic EUV foundry so their coveting of TSMC will likely reduce in the near future as that comes online.
I can just see makers starting to do small scale projects such as https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/russian-enthusiasts-are-building-their-own-ddr5-ram-amidst-the-worldwide-shortage-as-easy-as-sourcing-your-own-memory-modules-and-soldering-them-on-empty-pcbs
And then naturally expanding. I mean we talk about all these hypotheticals but at a certain price range, impractical turns practical. If you cannot convince any big chip makers to make your thing and people will pay 2x for your thing, then getting together with smaller manufacturing starts to make sense.
I dunno im just a small maker person. Made my own laptop from parts and all that. I see this as a potential opportunity.
You still need the chipmaker to make you the memory module, assembly is not the problem
There is a guy on YouTube doing it and making videos about the process. He turned his shed into a clean room lol.
Sure. A hobbyist with the right equipment can make technically functional memory as a scientific curiosity. But making any memory module that is as powerful as anything that’s come out in the last twenty years is going to require millions of dollars in investment and years of effort combining the work of thousands.
Oh nice ill take a look! We have a 10k pick and place machine over at a local makerspace and ive thought about prefab chips before. Just for fun, but its still a bit of money.
Why filter the air at all? Why not just turn the clean room into a vacuum? No air contaminants since there’s no air. All the stuff in there looks to be automated anyway.
I have no idea how silicon fabs work so this probably isn’t realistic.
Many reasons! The enormous building imploding is probably the big one, but risks from cold welding, use of atmospheric cooling, relying on exposure to atmosphere for many steps in the process, etc. are all additional factors. It’s a good question though.
Just put them in space, that way they’ll be right next to all the datacenters that Musk will be building there. It’s much more convenient!
Interestingly they’re also doing that, too. At least, if you uncritically accept the popsci reporting about it like musk probably did
Nobody (aside from China, for purely geopolitical reasons) really wants to invest billions of dollars in a multiple years long process that could be instantly undermined by the popping of the AI bubble.
This level of demand is not sustainable, and the big tech companies know it.
I thought ireland and a couple of other countries are stepping up quite a bit recently? I know they have been at the forfront of the EUs efforts to start building chips and have been doing so last 10 years to start scaling.
Just did a search, looks like its going to happen: https://wallstreettimes.com/intel-foundry-5-billion-ireland-chip-manufacturing-2026/
This level of demand is not sustainable Totally agree!
This isn’t really accurate, there’s been literally hundreds of billions invested over the past several years. The only reason prices are predicted to normalize after 2028 is because that’s when the new fabs come online that those investments are paying for.
Who do you think is going to be buying DRAM at the current prices in 2027?
Before the bubble, there used to be oversupply of DRAM leading to price fixing scandals, that’s what will eventually happen again.
It takes 4-5 years to build a new memory fab from scratch for companies in the industry.
They’re talking about no price reductions for 1.5 years.
(And the reason they’re saying that is because the first significant new production capacity isn’t expected to be up until mid-2027 and isn’t expected to be scaled up to full production until 2028.)
And they already moved that forward by something like six months, probably by spending more on stuff like construction, so I doubt that there’s more slack to eliminate. Can’t just speed it up a little more.
It upfront investment cost is simply too much to just start manufacturing your own chips. Just the fab alone would take around 20-30 billion and 4-6 years to build. Then add another couple of billions and 3-4 years to design a DDR5 chip that would give comparable performance to what the big 3 manufacture.
At scale sure. But for like a small controller or power supply?
It’s decades away. Making dumb chips is possible, but we lack the supply chains, infrastructure, and learned knowledge of making advanced tech.
If you doubt this look at how intel and nvidia are having a hard time in making usable chips on US soil.
If Valve said the crisis is going away soon people would then wait for the prices to come down. This is very basic manipulation to convince people to buy now.
I’d believe this if these devices weren’t sold out and this information contradicted everything else we know about the situation on the market.
Jesus Christ, who hurt you?
I mean that question rhetorically; I know who it was, it was everybody. So, I don’t blame you. But I do think you’re off base a bit on this one, specifically.
Especially considering the congruence with all of the evidence pointing to them telling the truth.
To buy what? They are out of stock
Yeah, Valve is really having trouble moving those units. Never mind that they sold out in a couple days and have waitlists till next year
Earlier this month, research showed that memory prices are predicted to rise sharply between now and 2027, with no reductions expected until 2028. Now, Valve has shared its own view of the hardware market, and it’s equally glum.
That’s not really a position new to this month.
TBF, from how they’ve described the situation it sounds like Valve has as much sway and insider knowledge as me or you. So I don’t think I’d trust their opinion here
I saw in an interview of their engineers that memory suppliers basically just say take it or leave it, at the risk of paying more later or having none at all.
On the scale of all tech companies, Valve is very low down. Even Big Players like Amazon have trouble getting the best deals; if you’re not Apple or nVidia, you get to just go fuck yourself.
Lmao what makes you think even Apple has any special treatment?
Industry experience.
Apple has been overall getting the sweetest deals from chip vendors for quite a while now.
I mean, historically, absolutely, everyone knows that. But do you know for a fact that, now, in 2026 they’re still getting first pick at normal “sweetest deals”? I would assume maybe better than some, or at least still getting supplied at all. But I thought I recently (in the last 2-3 months’ish) heard something about them also getting fucked: by the big AI datacenter players; Apple, to my knowledge, is not, at least not on that scale.
If you have insider/industry experience, though, that’s that… I no longer am close friends with people at Apple, and to dispute confident, current inside knowledge becomes a different discussion for a different place with different people.
My information is probably less out-of-date than yours, but yeah, they’re probably getting hit as well, just not as hard.
I’m curious what their next iPhone is going to cost
They did have to bump up the prices.
Yeah, the specific RAM shortage is affecting everyone.
Also it’s Apple. Even if they got the chips at the same price before they would never NOT raise the price if given the opportunity.
last i heard even nvidia having problem making gaming gpu that they’d slashed 50’s card production down. now im not sure how credible this source is but its pretty telling how bad the situation is rn. even if its a lie to slash unprofitable product line.
Samsung is one of the Big Three memory manufacturers. Samsung’s phone division had some news articles talkimg about how they couldn’t get Samsung’s memory division to give them privileged access, even.
(Though for context, about two years earlier, when there was a glut of memory and Samsung’s memory division was losing money, they apparently went to the Samsung phone division and tried to get them to buy a bunch of the excess, which I suppose would have meant putting more memory in their phones than would have been optimal. The phone division told them no way.)
And now it’s the phone division losing money and the memory division making a ton of money.
https://www.megamobilecontent.com/news/2026/07/17/samsung-phone-division-first-loss-memory-prices/
Samsung’s mobile division may have posted its first-ever quarterly loss in Q2 2026, despite strong Galaxy S26 sales and record-breaking profits for Samsung Electronics overall.
The culprit is memory. DRAM prices have reportedly surged roughly 850% year-over-year, driven by insatiable demand from AI server infrastructure. Samsung’s semiconductor division is reaping the benefits, but its mobile division is paying the bill.
That’s not too surprising. Samsung is one of those mega companies that its own divisions fight for contracts all the time. I remember hearing about, for example, the Samsung division that produces touch screens isn’t guaranteed a spot in the latest Galaxy smartphone but has to bid on contracts for that spot just like everyone else.
Well, I don’t think Nvidia is “having trouble” making 50 series cards. I think they have fab allocations that they are choosing to prioritize to AI products and its current ROI with blank check hyperscalers, compared to retail consumer products.
Why do people think Valve has some godlike influence over everything? Sony has sold over 90 million PS5-s, Sony reduced its Playstation 5 manufacturing in part because they struggled to buy RAM. Valve has sold less than 5 million Steam Decks. If a hardware powerhouse like Sony can’t get all the RAM they want what makes you think Valve, who barely has presence in the global hardware market, has any sway in the global ram production?
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They certainly have a lot of motive to place blame for their own price increases, justified or not.
