There Is a RAM Shortage

(npr.org)

34 points | by paulpauper a day ago ago

15 comments

  • harpiaharpyja a day ago

    Do these companies that are buying up all the supply actually need all that RAM right now? Or are they buying it all up in anticipation of future need? If the latter, honestly this might be a case where some kind of regulation really ought to step in.

    • nostrademons a day ago

      To the extent that most of this is going into AI and people are having their ChatGPT and Gemini requests throttled because of lack of capacity, they need it now.

      AI is dramatically more compute- and memory-hungry than past computing models, so if that's what people are using, it's going to require a large build-out of computing capacity to support the requests that are being made right now.

    • rcxdude a day ago

      Some of the spike is speculation, and the overshoot seems to be correcting itself now. But the deal that sparked it was a contract promising to buy future capacity, not just doing a big block order for a bunch of stock 'in case' (which isn't unusual: if you're a big buyer, you will almost certainly buy most things this way).

      • Ekaros a day ago

        Sounds like market manipulation to me... But I suppose that is not punished...

        • halJordan a day ago

          That's because you're not paying attention to the wider world. Every inference provider has been maxed out for years now. Nvidia switched from mainly selling training servers to inference servers two years ago?

          People complain about the llm's hallucination, but humans making up conspiracies to shore up their own ignorance is a much worse problem

      • Fr0styMatt88 a day ago

        It seems like it wasn’t really a binding contract? At least the OpenAI one, some are saying it was more a letter of intent kind of thing?

    • Havoc a day ago

      They're not directly buying up RAM sticks per se, but rather placing orders for say a GPU resulting in wafer capacity getting redirected

      And since enterprise GPUs have enormous leads times right now yeah it is in anticipation of future needs

    • ZiiS a day ago

      Depends what you mean be 'need', but it is mostly going into powered on systems not being stockpiled.

    • xwowsersx a day ago

      [dead]

  • jcalvinowens a day ago

    It is truly unbelievable. A 2x32GB DDR5 kit I paid $150 for last July is listed for $885 today. Even DDR4 is getting hit, a 2x16GB kit I paid $105 for a year ago is $230 today.

  • a day ago
    [deleted]
  • Zee2 a day ago

    They’re a bit behind the curve. Prices are dropping.

  • ChrisArchitect a day ago

    February 21st OP?

    Some more recent impacts/discussions:

    RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161160

    Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296302

    First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card sales

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565075

  • mrlonglong 18 hours ago

    Yet another reason why it needs to be socially unacceptable to be a billionaire. Their power and greed needs reining in and inequality is on the rise.

    Billionaires should not exist.

    If they didn't, would we be in this situation with an illegal war raging in the Middle East, and many other things?