Comment by jiggawatts
15 days ago
Now I understand why NVMe flash drive prices have rocketed up to triple the normal in the last few months! The AI hyperscalers aren't just sucking up the wafer runs for memory, they're also monopolising the wafers for SSDs.
Sam Altman bought 40% of the world's supply of DRAM in an underhanded, secret deal with two large manufacturers. It will take years for supply to recover.
The best part is the wafers are being bought with no plans to use them; just to keep them in storage so that competition cannot easily access RAM. Supervillain shit, should have been the last straw for PG to publicly denounce Sam and for OpenAI to be sued by the US government for anticompetitive practices. All this does is harm the consumer. Of course that ks never going to happen.
He didn't actually buy it, nor does he have the money to. He just "committed" to buying it at a later date to disrupt the supply chain for his competitors. It's scams all the way down.
And he doesn't even have to follow through if he doesn't need it, he can probably sell it into the super tight market and profit that way.
I guess the memory companies loved the deal because they knew prices would skyrocket. I wonder if there are rules against cornering the market that apply here.
All in all, it stinks.
1 reply →
Yeah, good clarification. But the deal is made nonetheless, for the time being we have to expect it to be carried out and act accordingly.
china also buys raw materials (metals, ...) with no intention of using them immediately
but they do because they prefer holding commodities to us dollars