The thing is, this is happening precisely because manufacturers are giving a flying fuck. They're seeing that the AI bubble is about to burst, and that this increased demand won't last for long. So why spend tons of money on expanding production capacity when said capacity wouldn't even be used?

Not to mention that the current pricing bump is entirely on the OEMs, not the ODMs (ODM here being the DRAM manufacturers, OEMs being the RAM module manufacturers). OEMs have already bought and paid for the DRAM they're selling right now, as it takes generally 2-3 months from manufacturing for the product to hit the shelves, and DRAM modules are usually bought at least 6 months, but usually 12-18 months ahead. Meaning these fuckers bought the DRAM cheap, saw the possibility of there being scarcity in the future, took a guess on how much they will need to inflate prices to reduce demand... And immediately jumped to those prices because if morons will pay £1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of £200, even though the production cost is still at £50... Well that's just "good business" to maximise profits, innit?

Isnt some AI bro hoarding a fuckton of CPUs because there arent enough servers to put them into?

Yeah more or less. The Verge did a whole podcast episode on RAM over the holidays. It was a good explainer.

Basically, RAM that goes into AI data centers isn’t necessarily the same as RAM in your computer. There are only 3 companies making RAM. They are altering their fabrication lines to accommodate for the commercial/AI ram so they can make more money. That means they can’t produce consumer RAM.

It’s hard and expensive to build RAM and chip factories because there is one company that makes the machine that does it. So anyone who wants to stay a RAM factory is at their mercy.

The Verge reporter said he expects ram prices might go up significantly more in the next 6months to a year.

They’re doing this because these AI companies have basically pre-ordered a fuck ton of components that have not been manufactured yet to be put into computers that haven’t even been made yet for datacenters that are not even built yet all on an electrical grid that hasn’t caught up.

throwing us AI slop summaries in our faces to create a demand that doesn’t yet exist, to generate a profit that will never exist.

What you just described has so many possible points of failure that I can only state that I hope any of it breaks and the circus comes falling down.

It will be horrendous to see the aftermath.

I hope we will see RAM at volume discount. I want to see these companies hurting to attempt to liquidate a fraction of the inventory.

This is just a meme, I hope it all comes down and the bubble bursts and I can build a PC but te thought that a supply chain operates one piece at a time is ridiculous.

It is purely about the line going up, but they are thinking ten steps ahead which is why tech wants fascists who grab mineral resources.

What's crazy is that they aren't just doing this because they make more money with AI.

No, they really are making more money by selling whole wafers rather than packaging and soldering onto DIMMs. The AI companies are throwing so much money at this that it's just much more profitable for the memory companies to sell directly to them.

Capitalism

Cartel.

that doesn't seem to be the same thing, I skimmed most of the article, but that speech is about restricting what hardware can do , not making hardware unavailable to general people so that we become dependent on "cloud computing"

Both companies sold directly to consumers. They just sell cheap jdec garbage ram, so people normally don't buy them. Both companies do make a lot of storage devices and do sell directly to consumers.

Micron had sold their profitable product rights to lexar , and then split lexar back into its own company. If micron didn't launch micron pro by crucial right before departing the business, it would have made sense for them to stop the consumer market since they were selling commodity jdec ram and cannot tell more profitable gaming targeted overclocked ram due to their deal is splitting off lexar. They killed crucial right when they could start selling the good stuff again.

I mean, look what happened with the crypto boom and that wasn't overly mainstream companies. So not nuts imo. But maybe get a less expensive GPU to hedge your bets 🤷‍♂️