It’s artificial - this is what happens when the capitalist leader goes full corrupt in late stage capitalism, cartels and oligarchies follow suit since they know they are not going to be punished. The factories that make RAM have literally stopped making it, at least for the general public. This is a closed market that has a few key players based in the US/Taiwan/South Korea and China, and they are all trying to keep their closed markets while the world suffers.
Consumers don’t matter when they can appeal to an even more gullible group that buys on masse, and, soft of like what is happening with the housing market, the late stage capitalism end result of it all will be a shift from owning your own PC to owning the barest minimum you need as a terminal so they can milk you with services.
This is more of a wild tangent, so I’ll leave this hanging as a reply instead.
We have the gullible joining forces with the billionaires/future trillionaires on this. AI itself is supposed to become a means for this, a direct scaffold between all the resources needed and all the rich people who will benefit from it - fear AGI, it will topple societies.
Just wait until the consumer market AGIcorps that are no longer needed because the need for the common human horse has been eradicated is turned against the luxury / power market AGIcorps. There will be no shortage of rich assholes willing to let go off the reins purely out of spite, it will be the necroevolution of the AGIcorp consumer market against the remaining AGIcorps, who centralized as they may be are still going to have to duke it out. Hint: humans will be the weakest link in that chain of decision, and evolution will dictate they be eliminated.
The funny thing is that hyperintelligent life isn’t a threat to humanity. Mutations with several times the brain and processing power haven’t just taken over, animals don’t just go for bigger brains. The threat to humanity is that this life will follow in its tradition of “I don’t care as long as I get mine” that has fueled the rise of billionaires. Life finds many ways, it’s all about how the individual cells and parts can cooperate to form part of something bigger, and when they can’t. The cancer, the cancer does what it always does, it hogs all the resources and leads to the decline of the entire system until it’s in a state where only the parasites survive. Oh, hi US.
I generally agree with your thinking at a high level.
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic though. Not saying everything will magically work out OK, it will probably get worse before it gets better. In the long term, oligarchs too subject to human weaknesses. hubris, factual ignorance, ignoring the notion humans aren’t like parasite and can be very unpredictable.
That being said, this is all in the long term. We might really be fucked for the next 30 years.
Oh you kids today. We used to lock computer cases in research labs because of RAM theft in the early 2000s. It’s still relatively cheap.
Ok
I remember one time in the early 90s we fried my friends dad’s ram in a proprietary IBM by mixing with another computer. Nowadays I understand it was likely a voltage mismatch. It cost him thousands. He was Scottish and I have never seen a man turn so red in my life.
-RAM prices skyrocket another 5000%
-Gamers cannibalize their PCs to make small fortunes.
-The videogame industry collapses.
-2026 becomes known as the Year of the Boardgame as suddenly affluent gamers flock to tangible, tabletop games and retro consoles.I mean the US is absolutely plowing toward a recession cliff into the sea. Maybe even a depression
Maybe, although I’ve been hearing that for the last 15 years and it just keeps chugging along
I have two 32GB DDR5 kits I bought last year for $80 each. I checked and they are worth over $300. Now that’s a good investment I guess. I need to unload these somewhere.
Well, if you have a trenchcoat, maybe?
Hey mister, fancy some RAM? DDR5… The real stuff… no?
Sir? Looking for some RAM?
First, they came for our GPUs
HBM is like 10% of production but 30% of the revenue.
I’m guessing they want to get dram to the point where prices for dram are as high as possible, like all the past cases of collusion by those three companies.
AI investor expectations can’t shift soon enough.
Surely they will increase their production? I can’t imagine being a DRAM manufacturer and not wanting to jump on the pricing boom. Even if they have to ramp down again in a year, the gains would be worth it.
As a side note, I do not know how long it takes to ramp up a DRAM factory. It may take a few years in which case we will have to ride out the storm as consumers.
They will. Supplies will come back up eventually. And prices will stay up as well. Just like the GPU market. But, the bigger concern here is that almost freaking everything uses memory chips. So basically all electronics will go up in price.
If they also view this as a bubble, they have to weigh how long the bubble will last, and what happens to the investment in equipment required after the bubble pops. It may not be worth the investment if they think it’ll only last 1-2 yrs and it takes them 1-1.5 to spin that up.
Not to mention all the extra costs in raw materials/logistics of getting more materials into the factory and more chips out. You start shifting to “can the local infrastructure handle that?” Or is it near capacity and will either need improvements as well or if they’d be better off building a new facility elsewhere and everything associated with that.
It’s a complicated mess, and again, might just be a bubble.
Just like the energy bill. Those huge data centers use quite a lot of power…
Maybe this is what it takes to kill AI? If every company and organisation that actually does anything can’t afford to maintain its IT systems, they’ll lean on politicians to pop the bubble.
Is this also happening to HDD 's as well?
There’s a few chips for cache on hard drives.
Yes, a bit. Looks like SSDs are up like 10-50% checking a few price trends on Amazon. That might be partially just end of the year supply chain stuff though.
