Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
10 posts across 4 communities in the last 60 days; 60% from r/LocalLLaMA.
“Been tracking RAM prices closely ( pricesquirrel.com , ~20 EU retailers ). Given how volatile this stuff has been, I wanted to be extra careful with the numbers this time, every price-change figure below is averaged across at least 3 independent retailers in both time windows…”
“If (and this is a big if) China's ddr5 supply picks up, regular ram pricing could ease. Non bleeding edge nand and flash could potentially stop rising in price as well if non korean fabs taps into those. But no luck for hbms used in GPUs, China can't hack that. GPUs will stay…”
“it's a deep hole they've dug. they better hope there's something big ai can do home PCs can't bc we're rapidly approaching Claude grade coding on home PCs and the only thing holding people back from local builds is the shortage pricing.”
Manufacturers are significantly increasing memory prices, driven by high demand for AI hardware. This shortage impacts consumer markets, leading to inflated costs and limited availability of PC-related memory components.
SOURCES (17)
“...and it was caught, and executives went to jail, and eventually RAM prices were so low people were buying extra for the lolz. [re: The debt-fueled AI boom is cracking]”
“Their margins would be massive if they stopped chasing the next bigger model. What we’re seeing is war spending. [re: Here’s why RTX 5090 costs $5,000: AI firms are buying gaming GPUs by the pallet]”
“No, by increasing supply. You know the whole supply and demand thing that determines a products value? Do you think the increase price for memory has anything to do with the price of labor? BTW, this isn't the 1990s. There is far cheaper labor in other countries, such as India, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, ect. [re: Ahh, it all makes sense now for the 64Gb DGX Spark - [Samsung expects 780% quarterly operating profit jump on AI boom]]”
“If you follow the money though much of this future “demand” is on fulling orders from the AI labs and at the moment the AI labs don’t have the cash to pay that bill. A rather important detail in this whole mix.So either the labs need to start printing money, now, or there’s going to be a whole bunch of excess chips hitting the market in 2027-28.Someone in the middle is going to get left taking delivery of all these chips but unable to collect payment for them. And someone else is going to get le”
“> Currently a minority would want toBy themelves or in general? If it's the latter, it's because currently rpi offers relatively fair pricing. If they started charging 10x that amount, more would be interested in 3rd party upgrades..> at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problemsWho forces you to take the risk and buy from a 3rd party supplier at a cheaper price? You did not address my point about trust, brands and reputation handling these problems for”
“Been tracking RAM prices closely ( pricesquirrel.com , ~20 EU retailers ). Given how volatile this stuff has been, I wanted to be extra careful with the numbers this time, every price-change figure below is averaged across at least 3 independent retailers in both time windows, not a single store's price. That way one retailer's quirky pricing can't skew the whole picture. Changes over the last 30 days: G.Skill Trident Z5 2x32GB DDR5-6000 CL32 Black: -7.4% G.Skill DDR5 2x8GB 5600: -6.”
“Money , it will come down to money , at the moment the biggest AI winners are the shovel salesman, if the economy of AI doesn’t find a way where it’s a win win for everyone involved then it will break down , the tech is amazing and will stay with us for years to come, but the economy of scale at the current prices is not working , even the big tech companies can incinerate to a limit”
“Models will continue improve for open and closed labs, the demand for compute and memory will continue to increase. Expect to pay double or more for ddr 5 and 6 ram and +60% plus for new consumer gpus . Even a 512 gb mac studio will likely be over 22k . submitted by /u/power97992 [link] [comments]”
“The entire RAM production is sold for 2027 up 500%. All hardware pricing is fucked.”
“Maybe in a few years, the market will be flooded with cheap H100 servers stuffed with HBM ram. Unfortunately, that will never happen.”
“If (and this is a big if) China's ddr5 supply picks up, regular ram pricing could ease. Non bleeding edge nand and flash could potentially stop rising in price as well if non korean fabs taps into those. But no luck for hbms used in GPUs, China can't hack that. GPUs will stay price elevated until the current gen of gpus are depreciated out of data centers.”
“Based on what's been revealed recently, it seems they realize that, and are going the route of having that path made illegal, instead. So they really only need to keep it up until then.”
“it's a deep hole they've dug. they better hope there's something big ai can do home PCs can't bc we're rapidly approaching Claude grade coding on home PCs and the only thing holding people back from local builds is the shortage pricing.”
“> It is the gradual end of general purpose computing you own, and the start of everything just being cloud compute that someone else owns and you rent.A few thoughts...(a) There've never been more general purpose computers than there are right now. Spec progress may stall for consumer products due to the price increases, but the demand for workstations is not going to go down that much; they're critical items to get work done. Many are hoping this means a return to memory efficiency; the 8GB Mac”
“If this was a competitive market some suppliers would be ramping up pc memory and avoiding the AI buildout. But instead we see all of them diverting to GPU memory and cutting production of PC related parts universally. This sure looks like a coordinated move.I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a me”
“>and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it"Manufacturers taking advantage of it" wouldn't take it to 500% without AI, because it's way beyond the price elasticity points where they make up lost sales at higher prices.Those prices lose most consumer sales, and are only viable if there's constant high demand that's relatively insensitive to price (so, not regular folks, but e.g. AI companies).”