What’s crazy is that they aren’t just doing this because they make more money with AI. 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. As long as the manufacturers get paid they don’t really give a shit, but this is so unsustainable it would be hilarious if it weren’t so catastrophic for the rest of us. And as long as the line goes up as they all circle jerk their money around they’ll all be happy and can pretend the economy is good.
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.
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.
I mean, you took the first sentence out and ignored the rest of what I said. My point was that yes that is a reason, but it’s not the only reason. My point was they don’t wanna sell to consumers because Elon Musk is just gonna pre-order their entire stock for the next two years.
Everything else that you said seems to fit the general thesis that they’re making a lot more money selling to AI companies.
If those reasons were still true but the memory companies stood to not make as much money on those deals, I guarantee the memory manufacturers wouldn’t have taken the deal. They only care about money, and the other reasons you list are just the mechanisms for making more money.
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.
GEEEEEE, what a coincidence, eh? Almost like these companies may be coordinating some sort of market shift for some reason.
What do you call that when a bunch of companies responsible for large swathes of market share of a particular good or service use the guise of unnatural market pressure to create conditions unnaturally beneficial to themselves and not consumers?
Capitalism
Cartel.
This sounds like they are joining the war on general-purpose computing, and not on our side. Fuck em.
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”
The reason I see the connection is that big dogs like Apple or Microsoft will be able to get RAM from those suppliers (or build it themselves like Samsung), and will be able to sell you walled-garden “computer appliances” which only run approved software. But you won’t be able to afford to build your own computer from parts yourself, and won’t be able to install whatever you want on it as a result.
Think about the power Microsoft has when they have every business document on earth and an AI that can summarize vast quantities of them on an ongoing basis.
They’re taking control of free markets, of political movements.
I am sure getting the gist of all the knowledge in the world will be very useful. They’ll have the general idea of the kind of things they may or may not need or not need to do to accomplish anything!
If we can’t store or compute anything, we will be reliant on those with that power. Cloud providers. They will suck up all our data, analyze it with their AI, and charge us for the privilege.
They are forcing us to rent from them their ability to watch us and predict us.
Welcome to the global panopticon.
SK Hynix (and Samsung) is worse than Micron.
Micron scrapped Crucial, the consumer brand they owned.
SK Hynix and Samsung never even directly sold to consumers to begin with.
SK Hynix and Samsung were the ones who signed deals with OpenAI on the same day for 40% of the entire fucking planet’s DRAM supply that kicked off the DRAM panic buying to begin with! This mess is their fault!
Micron are absolutely shifting to more profitable HBM production in order to make the most of the AI bubble, and they’re fucking us over in doing so, but IMO what they’re doing pales in comparison to the levels of fuckery that SK/Samsung have done with the shady backroom OpenAI deals. I repeat… 40% of Earth’s RAM production.
It really angers me that those two have so far escaped media wrath while Micron was exclusively taking the hit for an entire shady industry. Blame all of these fuckers. Blame OpenAI. Blame Nvidia.
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.
So I FOMO bought an SSD and SD card when all this started.
Not regretting it.
…But now I’m considering hoarding a spare GPU. Is that nuts? I don’t need it, I don’t want to hoard, but If my old Ampere card suddenly dies, is it gonna take $2000 to replace?
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 🤷♂️
Oh, I know. I bought my previous GPUs in the peak of cypto busts.
But I need 24GB… My plan was to eventually buy a used 4090 when they get cheaper, or 24GB Intel/AMD card. But it doesn’t feel like AMD/Intel are interested in big GPUs anymore, and the 4090 just keeps going up in price.
