They’re basically saying the AI companies are going to keep demand elevated to the point that supply will never catch up. It’s possible but with variables like public backlash, unrealistic power requirements, eventual financial and AI regulation, I would bet on a painful collapse.
There’s always a collapse on the horizon, I believe many of these stories are worst-case scenarios or a way to help billionaires believe their own hype and swallow the turds to keep capitalism on life support.
Nah they’re saying the like 3 places that manufacture RAM won’t drop their prices after
The Chinese fabs should be producing lots of RAM by 2030.
Old/current ram or new ram? Probably be moving on to DDR6 then
We could always just not, and use whatever RAM we can get. I’d rather have a thriving market with slightly worse RAM than motherboards that require a RAM no one can afford.
DDR2 Prices are up 60% as AI datacenters are slapping together whatever hardware they can get.
There is NO affordable RAM, and this is by design.
DDR5 will probably stick around for a long time if DDR6 is not affordable.
China will be running out of people soon. Their birth rate has been in collapse.
But they’ll still have plenty of people by 2030.
And if they’re not as xenophobic as some other countries I could mention, they could easily solve the population issue through immigration.
China will not collapse. It produces too many goods and its economy is too strong. Birth rates aren’t a problem to the point that they undermine manufacturing.
If someone tries to tell you the story that China will collapse and they seem credible, just reach out to me. I have a bridge for sale that will help you short the Chinese collapse.
The problem is they modify goods, not produce them.
Intellectual property shouldn’t exist. If China wants to “steal” ram designs and sell them for cheaper, then LeT tHe fReE mArKeT wOrK
That’s simply not how the current economy works.
Yeah, but if they started right now I bet they could pump out some new adults inside of 20 years.
They literally can’t.
I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is “winner takes all”, which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We’re already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.
Lenovo are right that prices won’t go back to “normal” - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.
We don’t even know if it’s currently being produced at greater numbers (as far as I’m aware). The only public info I’ve seen is that the data centers that haven’t been built will need all of the produced RAM based on handshake deals (not contracts). The RAM makers themselves are doubling down on the bubble by investing into the AI generators as well as increasing costs to insane levels in the process which surely reduces the amount of items sold.
Sounds like Lenovo is one of many companies pumping stocks.
I wouldn’t say “never,” but it’s very likely that RAM prices will not return to pre-AI (read: bullshit) levels. Many markets do this; hike up to crazy levels during a boom, come back down 80%, rinse and repeat.
The only thing that might put a stop to it is competition or the unicorn business that focuses upon everyday consumers and not purely profit (lol). I’m hopeful China is able to be a spoiler to this current tech hegemony, given general US hegemony is basically over, but the home computing market is probably fucked in the meantime.
maybe i’m naive, but if it’s so profitable to make RAM in the long-term, why wouldn’t competition emerge? I get not investing in the startup costs just for a bubble, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Capital/time intensive start up costs make it a barrier to entry. This is why the prices are so high. Supply is inelastic because the producers know this is a bubble. If they do the capital intensive thing and the bubble pops before realizing the additional capacity, they are left holding the bag.
Yes, that’s literally what I said about bubbles. The assertion in OP is that RAM pricing won’t go back to pre-bubble prices. If that is true, RAM manufacturing will be incredibly profitable post-AI-bubble and competition should emerge eventually.
I’m hopeful China is able to be a spoiler to this current tech hegemony
As awful as that sounds, I bet that’s what will happen.
That’s what I’m guessing. The consumer market is a multi-billion dollar industry. If Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynex are too big for it now, that’s them leaving money on the table for others. Smaller companies will kick up, like those in China, and they’ll gladly take the money left for them. It’ll just take a while for them to get there.
That assumes Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron won’t have competition in the next few years, but that’s already not true with the Chinese CXMT and YMTC. And the more they drive the prices up, the highest the reward for a new competitor to get established. They have a few good years (for them) charging these prices, but it won’t last.
Sure the prices will go down a bit, but never to pre-bubble levels. This is the new “market rate” now.
Invisible hand creates best prices when there is infinite supply, many suppliers, elastic demand. None of that exists and neoclassic economics is bullshit.
Help us Xi Van Jingping - you are our only hope.
This could be a fomo tactic….
The prices will never go back to normal because that’s not how pricing works. Once its proven that consumers will pay the price, they will modulate supply to keep the price where it is. Why do more for less when they can do less for more.
We’re fucked. It’s not going to get better. Act accordingly.
Yeah guys, this is true for sure and we should all panic buy now. Because prices for computer hardware never come down over time.
We’ve seen with other industries that the prices never come back down once they’ve gone up.
That said, expensive RAM kits (and a lot of tech in general) are not exactly a mandatory purchase for many people like food is. Those that can stop buying expensive electronics certainly will once the price is too high.
Grocery companies price gouge and shrinkflate because their customers don’t really have a choice other than to starve. What are tech companies going to do when customers go an increasing amount of years between purchases?
What are tech companies going to do when customers go an increasing amount of years between purchases?
Ignore them and continue selling almost exclusively to businesses and manufacturers?
For consumers, sure, RAM modules aren’t something people buy in general. But every device needs memory, RAM and flash. Cars, smartphones, business machies, fucking tv’s need them today.
I work for a medical startup and we had to pay scalper prices for the NAND flash chips for the first batch of our devices because of a shortage, because the specific model we need is only made by Micron and their fabs are too busy making stuff for datacenters.
I’ll stick to chess and keep my humble elderly gaming laptop for another 40 years with Linux
Don’t doom too much about this headline. HBM contracts represent artificial AI demand. When the bubble pops (and it will pop), the HBM demand evaporates and it’s back to competing for consumers. That said, there will be a very slow ratchet to get back to consumer-competitive prices, because as component costs go down, additional companies will be “priced in” to speculative AI business models, even if hyperscalers and other AI-drunk multinationals are backing off.
Regardless of whether there is a bubble, though, AI spending is ludicriously, unsustainably inflated even from existing memory customers. They are purchasing one-time AI infrastructure that needs to last a decade to even have a remote chance of paying off the hardware investments. There are only a few companies that can afford current AI pricing, those companies have already played their hands and paid for allocations, and they will not keep purchasing at this pace even in their own best case scenarios.
Regulation could keep consumer prices down, but of course we’re in the bad Trump timeline and that won’t happen until at least 2028. Assuming the bubble pops before then, the key to resetting this “new normal” is to NOT purchase anything you do not need to until we’re back to $80-130 / 64GB or cheaper, like it was in 2025. Hold out, make them desperate to lower prices.
Because it doesn’t want it to go back to normal
You can bluff all you want the hallucinating multi trillion dollar scam that by design cant always guarantee 100% accuracy is a scam from the start. Scam Altman
Was Lenovo one of the companies who signed 4 year profit gravy train contracts with one of the big 3, return of the RAM cartel? This kind of statement might suggest they did.
