Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
First they came for the hard drives, and I did not speak out because I didn’t need a hard drive. Then they came for the GPUs and I did not speak out because I had a pretty dope GPU. Then they came for my 8gb of ram and there was nobody left to speak out for me.
I have 128gb of corsair ddr5 in my closet. IM RICH!
Just did a quick check, it’s worth double what I paid for it. I’ll just let it sit in my closet until it’s worthless.
I also have 128gb of ddr5 ram
And 64gb of ddr5 ram
And some laptop ddr5 ram
I’m going to wrap them all in Saran Wrap and stick them up my ass so my brain works faster
Ah, but you see, if you wrap it in Saran wrap, they won’t be able to make contact. You’d be better off using contact grease for that easy insertion
Of course. That must be why it didn’t work the last time. Thank you kindly for that wonderful advice.
brAIn power.
Is it sitting on top of a pile of beanie babies?
If it’s new it genuinely might be worth 2k. Looked at the prices yesterday and corsair had 64gb for ~1k.
exactly when i needed some ram.
thank you based ai bubble, for making shit unaffordable because of spambots.
For real. I’ve been building a completely brand new computer for my husband for a couple months now. Buying a new piece each paycheck, then I get paid this week and I discover I can’t buy the RAM… It’s fucking half way finished and the only 2 parts left to buy is GPU and RAM.
Unfortunately those are the most expensive parts right now because they both require memory chips. Perhaps consider buying used, might be tough to find DDR5 DIMMs but used GPUs are plentiful.
I’m definitely looking for used parts, especially in my local classifieds. I’m going to jump on the first affordable set of ddr5 ram I can find lol
It’s sweet how much effort you’re putting into it. When I was a kid I built my first computer one piece at a time with money I saved from mowing lawns, there’s something so satisfying about earning a computer through dozens of shrewd bargains and months of dedicated labor. It’s all worth it in the end, you’ve got this!
You may have to settle on DDR4 for now
LOL I wish. It’s not compatible though, ty
Ffs I keep delaying a rebuild of my PC because of crap like this every year thinking the bubble will burst, but something new comes up. I don’t use it for gaming nowadays, just regular browsing since I have a console but even Sony is bringing their stuff to PC so I was looking to upgrade. Now it’s been pushed even more.
Hang in there my 8 GB ram PC with GTX 960…
so i switched myself and my parents to arch linux over the past 3-4 months and I can say definitively that those specs are fine for CachyOS (an Arch Linux distro). My mom is using my hand-me-down 970 with its lovely “we charged you for 4gb of vram but actually only 3.5 of it is fast haha sucker” and it runs great paired to an old i7 6700k.
If you have 8gb ddr4 you can probably get a decent deal on a used 8gig stick. Even that would be quite aboost.
I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.
I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.
And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.
I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.
If you got good internet you could look into GeForce Now as a stopgap / headstart.
This bubble cannot burst soon enough
It can’t pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.
The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn’t pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they’re doing.
We’re increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government’s leadership believes they need to maintain the illusion of control over the public.
That’s crap. They’ve loaded their stock on a certain price and they want to surf the high wave while they can.
They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I’ve worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I’ve never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it’s going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I’m selling you now.
I don’t have any insider insight into other companies’ operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.
Almost all retailers inventory on consignment. So, no.
No they don’t. They purchase at a fixed rate.
I think what we’re seeing is the result of their stock depleting actually. AI has been buying up supply for a while, and I don’t think the consumer markets are able to compete.
That’s Free Markets, baby!
Lived in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s, when the price of RAM exploded with the web, armed robberies of manufacturing plants and warehouses for RAM became a thing for a few years.
Insert <Aw shit, here we go again . meme>
I think the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).
Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.
That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
OpenAI just bought the raw wafers? WTF.
But now the surveillance capabilities of both the state and large corporations have been ramped up to infinity and beyond. I’m expecting a partnership announcement between Micron and Raytheon any day now, where Raytheon gets free DDR5 and Micron gets armed and autonomous security drones.
Kind of \s, kind of not
This is crazy, not displaying the price of an item in a shelf or display is against consumer laws where I live. And if the price on display is not updated the store is required to sell by the price on display.
It’s blatant price-gouging. Any stock in the store has already been sold to them at an agreed price. They can set a number and make their set margin.
Updating prices after each delivery might make sense (if their procurement department is absolute dogshit at negotiating contracts), but updating prices throughout the day is just someone trying to see how hard they can push their margins to drain every cent out of their customers.
That’s probably one of those toothless laws that can be easily bypassed on a technicality. Like, just say the shelf is for “storage” and not “display”.
Some places try to argue something like that, but if you push back a little they cave. The law estipulates a fine ranging from 74 to 1 000 000 USD for visible products in shelves or display without a visible price tag. And since its a fine, the government is eager to get his piece of the pie.
(Edit for misspelling)
What’s stopping them from throwing a blanket over the shelf and just posting the same notice on the blanket? That’s what I mean by toothless law.
So with things like fish that can change day to day are they required to just update it every day? that sounds nice.
@kieron115
Yes, otherwise how would buyers know the price?
@kurodrielAt restaurants here you would ask the host/waiter the market price before deciding to order.
That’s a little different.
But it’s what the article is comparing to when they say “market prices”. This particular store is based out of California.
Even in 2025, emerging industries are like “what’s an environment?”
Can’t blame this on not knowing. It’s all just negligence and evil now.
As someone buying load of secondhand tech, you don’t need the latest and greatest
I can never get people to understand this. I’ve got servers running on i7 8th gens, with stock 16GB ram. I could upgrade, but no need. People thinking they need 128GB to plays games are delusional.
To run games, you might need at least 32Gb. 64 Gb is sufficient in most cases. Still expensive af
16GB is fine for most games, 32GB is handy if you run a lot of poorly optimized mods, but also memory compression helps with that significantly. 8gb of memory gets pretty cozy for gaming these days though, but again memory compression makes a big difference.
Both my and my wife’s computers have 32GB of RAM because it was cheap enough to not be worth worrying about, but if RAM is expensive you don’t need a ton of it to enjoy your games
Yeah, this is my point and experience too. 32 is better, I’d say 16 min. But people crying about needing 128 should rethink their priorities for gaming, were in a recession lol. Save your money.
Are people throwing 128GB in for shits and giggles these days? I’m kinda out of the loop and still used to people arguing about if 32GB is excessive or not. Used to be only needed for media production and honestly it’s still debatable for pure gaming systems if more than 16GB is overkill
It’s not that it’s excessive, that’s a lot of money to spend right now with the way things are.
My husband and I have been using computers we built 15 years ago and we decided this year we’ll finally build new computers… Lmao sucks to be us :( already built mine, his is almost done but missing a key component… RAM lmaooooo
Just get the least necessary and hope that prices will drop :(
Yeah but even second hand drives are stupid-priced today. No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
I can’t wait for this to pop, I mean if it does in a way that produces selloffs.
A friend of mine lives in Egypt and that would be a steal
Is it difficult to buy stuff trom Europe in Egypt?
Checking leboncoin (french place where people sell & buy stuff) there are lots of em for 20€ +p&p
But there are also these kinds, for 10€, I almost want to make a RAID6 with a bunch just to see
He said that receiving is the issue. So even if you buy it cheaply here, he might have to pay a huge sum in taxes
Ah yeah gotcha. Like stuff from england, 7€ tax + 16€ “tax handling fee”…
No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
well damn that’s a steal. I’d buy it.
That’s insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
yep. i took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc, knowing this ai shit along with the tariffs was going to make prices bonkers af, and i needed an upgrade anyway. 8% interest on a couple grand personal loan is better than paying 4x the price in cash
took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc
Are you okay?
Edit: Mean comment. Don’t let assholes like me stop you from enjoying your life. I’ve definitely spent sums of money on my hobbies and enjoyed every minute of it
Are you legitimately insane?
sometimes i think that. but i can just look at the news on any given day and feel like i’m further to the right on the sanity bell curve
edit: lemmy helps too
don’t look at that before, during, or after eating thanksgiving
Yikes you’re literally financing your hobby! Better financial move is to get a used system to start with (usually a used gaming PC can be had for like $500ish, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people online you can ask for help speccing something out), squirrel away money for a couple of years (I like to keep a dedicated savings account just for big purchases like tech upgrades. $40 biweekly dissearing into another account you don’t touch is $2k every 2 years, so a 4 year complete refresh cycle for 2 people) and buy when you feel like it. Good news is it’s a small enough amount of cash to easily right the financial ship but still yikes!
yea, i do a lot of dumb shit with money. gonna blame my parents for passing financial dumbness onto me
Hey it’s never too late to get things better under control! My parents only just started that journey and they’re old enough to be grandparents
That’s almost a quarter of minimum wage
Love Keepa!
Isn’t this the new first party price chart Amazon is testing out?
Well if you know of a better way to generate pictures of comically obese bearded men gayly dancing, I’d love to hear it.
DMing you my patron
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
You don’t hate AI slop enough…
Im still running off DDR3
and feelin fine
