Comment by shevy-java
4 hours ago
About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over 3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
> Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.
Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.
No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.
Several of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel.
Is there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product.
Especially not for consumer goods.
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No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.
I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.
I don’t really know much about how this stuff works, but I have a feeling we wouldn’t even have to do anything punitive. We might just need to find and close whatever weird loophole allows the folks who are participating in this gold rush to feel confident enough that they’ve externalized their risks to be willing to engage in speculative data center buildout projects on such a grand scale in the first place.
Apple used to do the same thing with TSMC’s newer process nodes, and nobody really complained because people were getting superior products. I happen to like US antitrust enforcement that considers consumer benefit primarily.
Your attempts to insult what they are doing doesn't show they did anything wrong, but it does impeach the validity of your own argument.
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How much memory does it take for the consumer market not to be totally screwed?
Can that share of production be allocated to consumers, and the AI fights over the rest?
What abuse? Responding to supply and demand fluctuations isn't abuse, it's the proper operation of the market.
Would if one industry gobbles up an important resource to the point that other consumers lose practical access to it, shouldn't there be limits?
No. The other industries can bid for access to the resource, and under most circumstances, whether they are willing to bid higher tracks importance. Sometimes there are cases where something has significant positive externalities and so people are not willing to bid high enough, and then we can talk about some kind of government intervention (typically a subsidy that attempts to track the value of the externalities) but I don't see that applying here.
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If others are willing to pay more, that a signal that more value is created if the resource goes to them rather than to the more price sensitive customers.
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Where is the additional supply resulting from the sustained increase in demand?
Some are building new fabs, example:
https://news.skhynix.com/en/fab-facility-investment-2026/
It's not an overnight thing obviously.
Check the article we're commenting under
3x? I bought 128GB DDR5 SODIMMs for 300 eur. Now it's 4000 eur.
Damn you were lucky. I bought 96GB DDR5 last year for £600 UKP. They're now retailing for three times that.
Bastards.
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