Comment by kristopolous
5 hours ago
Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.
Memory companies have price fixed multiple times. They've paid hundreds of millions in fines. wikipedia even has a page on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing.
Look at the financials of these companies, they're all making obscene margins and do they plan to increase production? No. Micron is doing a stock buy back to pump the price of their share.
The Micron CEO just recently said this is the exact plan https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/01/ram-supply-se...
There's sanctions, tarrifs, and a DOJ who doesn't give a shit. Until we can fix that the insanity will continue. Phones will be unaffordable. Laptops will be obscene. Gaming consoles will be thousands of dollars. Desktops will be dead.
If you're waiting for some David Ricardo equation to happen, tough cookies, it's not coming.
The market is legally locked down and we're in hostage pricing mode.
And what's the story? You can't afford electronics because we're using it to build robots to take your job? I mean ...
Nobody is coming to save us. That's our job.
> do they plan to increase production? No.
Micron has 3 brand new fabs currently under construction, 2 Boise, 1 in New York as the first of 4 planned for a campus.
Plus expanding other existing facilities.
These things take ~3-5 years from breaking ground to full production. You'd have had to anticipate the current demand years before it happened in order to be bringing production on-line before 2030 or so.
Samsung and HK Hynix also have fabs under construction and planned.
CXMT started 11 years ago and only now is reaching any real volume. If they decided a year ago to react to the current demand cycle they'd be 6-7 years out.
Not much you can really do to wish for more fabrication to exist on any timeline not measured in fractional decades.
Could they do more and react quicker? Probably, but everything I've read on the subject seems to point to 3 years is absolute bare minimum if you happen to have a shovel ready project with the land bought, local permitting completed, infrastructure extended to the site, and a skilled workforce already in place. They could suspend buy-backs/dividends today and dump it all into building production and there would be no material impact until around 2030.
> The Micron CEO just recently said this is the exact plan
CEO simply stated the demand pressure will not go away through 2027, and supply will not increase until around 2028 when currently under construction fabs start shipping volume. The article does not support your statement.
Stanford tracks RAM prices in this nice little site: https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html
Costs did go nuts, but there are signs of easing in the market of late. CXMT is starting to have an impact and priced will probably fall in 2027.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ is better. pcpartpicker has the data.
> CXMT started 11 years ago and only now is reaching any real volume. If they decided a year ago to react to the current demand cycle they'd be 6-7 years out.
It's taken them this long to catch up to the DDR5 standard. They've only recently been through qualifications to be a DDR5 supplier for the big boys.
> Every Major Motherboard Maker Now Validates CXMT DDR5
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/321572/20260725/every-maj...
After their recent IPO, they have more than enough cash to ramp up in a major way.
It's just a matter of time.
The second Micron boise fab hasn't even broken ground yet, they are still working on the first one. So don't expect these things to be completed in parallel.
Some of my family is pretty happy, though, with the job security as they are pretty convinced these projects are all going to take much longer than what's being stated publicly. Micron is saying the first chip from the new fab will be in 2027... though they also predicted it'd be 2026. The date seems pretty slippy.
Anyone who has been around the semiconductor industry since the last century will remember various huge fabs e.g. in Arizona that were partially built but never finished due to oversupply by the time the walls and roof were done.
Yeah, but why would they make consumer memory when HBM for GPUs is much more profitable?
Capitalism eats itself this way. Second and third order effects will collapse the demand.
You need to keep the market healthy, not some insane Bitcoin style HODL pump - that's how you get wrecked.
I mean I'm not a neoclassicalist but I've read all of them. I'm in consensus with them here. There's a bunch of theories on what a healthy market is but what we're currently seeing matches none of them.
It's short term profitable but long term disastrous, especially in a world where new mathematics and techniques could literally collapse the demand overnight.
Imagine if some paper hits arxiv and the 256 GB requirement for some model now becomes 64. Woops!
Some clever trick about how attention heads and context Windows work could potentially slash a bunch of requirements by giant margins and all they're doing is firing the starting gun at that global race with every obscenely priced unit they sell.
But if prices were reasonable, this wouldn't be an apocalypse. It'd be fine. Consumers wouldn't rush to 64GB, they'd say " Cool I can multitask now at 256" or " great I can do horizontal scalability' or something else.
But no they created the market conditions so now what would happen is the consumer will immediately flip the 192GB they don't need on eBay, hoping to snatch a profit before the prices tank and the second hand market will be flooded the rug will be pulled out from the luxury pricing and everyone will get screwed.
This has happened in electronics markets before. Many times.
When Engels talked about the grave diggers of capitalism they were looking at it through a 19th century labor/manufacturing lens but arguably this same dynamic is at play here.
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>Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.
How many people, outside of tech geeks and megacorps care about RAM prices? And how gullible would you be to BELIEVE the politician they could actually make it happen, and even if they did, that it would extend to the average person, and not JUST megacorps/megadonors?
Phone companies have been differentiating their models based on RAM for a decade. As have laptop and desktop sellers. The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.
I think a lot of people care about the downstream effects of memory prices, but I agree with you that they may not realize that they happen because of memory prices.
>The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.
That might be true at micro level, but at the macro level more memory just means developers get more lazy with their optimizations, causing apps to get more bloated, eating up any gains in extra memory. There's no reason why slack needs 1+GB to run, yet people are perfectly happy to put up with it.
RAM manufacturers are bidding against NVIDIA and everyone else for the same constrained supply of EUV machines. And it takes years to build more fabs. Micron has multiple fabs coming online in 2027 and 2028.
Don't believe Nvidia has any fabs of its own.
> "i'll bring down ram prices"
wonder what voting would be like?
gamer vote ++
datacenter hater vote --
datacenter lobby ++
micron lobby --
Yep, that's all the voting blocs.
Wouldn’t cheaper memory make it easier to bring compute out of data centers and onto consumer hardware?
Datacenter haters will read this as "that's still evil AI", and everyone else hopefully can count and understands it'll be worse for environment.
If we take some time to understand how HBM memory is manufactured (with particular focus on yield risk for final packaging steps), we will hopefully learn that the current capacity crisis is not bullshit.
I guarantee Micron & friends are not intentionally orchestrating their business such that they would suffer a massively reduced chance of yielding on a per-die basis. Unless someone is actually buying HBM devices, they are not going to be making them. These are not a commodity that can be speculatively manufactured in any economically rational way.
> they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur
I know it's just a figure of speech, but damn. I laughed out aloud in public just reading this.
Kristi Noem would fit the bill, except for the bit about lowering memory prices.
How many people would you allow them to kill?
Neither political party cares at all about memory pieces get real lol
I don't really understand why. Memory is a critical component of every computational device.
That's tautological, but I think you would need to explain how it extends their and their backers' influence to get party attention.
wait until holiday shopping...it affects the price of almost everything with a battery or power cord.
What do you think they'll do? Neither repubs nor dems will touch ai companies in a meaningful way. Anything China does wrt memory fabs week be more significant
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I don't think RAM vendors have formed a cartel and I think this is knee-jerk anger without any thought. RAM is a commodity product with massive upfront capex costs, and those always have boom-and-bust cycles. At various points in the 2010s and 2020s RAM vendors were getting eaten alive by a supply glut, this would not have happened if they were a cartel.
Is it really so hard to believe that RAM prices are up because demand is simply exceeding supply, especially in a market where additional supply takes years and billions of dollars to come online? There's no need to posit cartel behavior and a fair amount of evidence that there is none.
The RAM vendors have formed cartels previously and been convicted, so although demand is exceeding supply it is not that crazy to at least consider.
The AI boom started in 2022. Prices rose THREE years later after 2025 sanction and tariff style legislation to protect the market during a price hike.
I got a 4090 in 2023 for 1600, a 5090 in 2025 for 2000 with 256 DDR5 for about $1,000 ... and then, after some protectionist legislation passed, these prices quickly shot to the moon.
Connect the dots.
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