What I heard on the ground floor from various system integrators, components manufacturers, and other companies, is memory supply has been tied up for all of 2026, and that shortages could last as long as until 2031.
Sure it’s scuttlebutt but wouldn’t surprise me as being true.
To spell this out clearly, the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn’t been produced yet has been bought with money that doesn’t exist to populate GPUs that also haven’t been produced to go in datacenters that haven’t been built powered by infrastructure that may never exist to meet a demand that doesn’t exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can’t exist while economists talk about this thing they call the “rational markets hypothesis”.
This meme is pretty new, like from the future, but it checks out.
Okay I’m old is this a actually newer meme or was it a joke to post the reply?
It does sound familiar (like close to a movie line) but also sounds accurate. If the bubble pops so much memory available cheaper.
Mean I’m only 1 year into my PC build but I tend to do them every 4 years or so…crap that’s only 5 years from now I thought it was longer, but still lot closer than I thought from first read. Least at this age time goes by quickly, for better or worse heh.
It’s not an original comment.
How dare you?!
I thought everyone had heard this meme by now.
I edited my post to add the source.
Sorry I didn’t mean anything by that. I don’t care if you post a source or not. I was just answering their question.
The solution is surprisingly simple:
“Sorry, I can’t use your online services. My electronics died. Oh well.” 🤷♂️
Or we hunt them down
The fashionable new sport
“No worries! We just launched Chat-Phone: a cellphone totally connected to ChatGPT. It has almost no capability by itself: poor CPU, min RAM, min/no storage, etc. But it is always connected to ChatGPT!
BTW: because of RAM shortage, we are the only smartphone maker in the world now!”
The phone is 50$, but you need the premium subscription for it to work…
Fortunately I’m currently I’m happy with what I have. I think I’ll oulast this.
I thought the same until one ram stick died this week, it’s apparently now $1200 for a replacement
Ouch. Never had memory fail on me before *fingers crossed.
JFC, what size? I paid about that for 64gb kit, and between my purchase and pickup 3 days later it went up like 150 - 200
48GB 6000MT/s sticks. Was $500 for a kit of two over a year ago
damn
Thank god I never sold my old desktops.
I have a i5-3470 with 16gb, i7-8700 with 16 gb, a steamdeck, and recently bought an m4 air.
I’m only gaming on the steamdeck, and those other computers are used for home server stuff.
My old computer is 16gb DDR-3, as I used it long time before jumping over to 32gb DDR-5 based systems. And thanks to consoles and rising handhelds (first gen Steam Deck <3), 16gb will be still the base floor for long time it seems.
I really hope tha devs target the steamdeck as a baseline for all future games.
I love it when they have a steamdeck graphics profile too.
The only problem is the current most used AAA game engine Unreal Engine 5. It is not very good for low end hardware, as the system and developers struggle to optimize it. Even the best devs struggle. But they can’t afford to require high end or just mid PCs. Handhelds become quite popular now. Devs want to make games run on Switch 2, which is beneficial as whole because it has to run under constraints of the system and environment.
Given that RAM prices may stay this expensive, my prediction is that developers absolutely have to make their games run on less powerful hardware (and on 16gb). I wonder how the Steam Machine (PC from Valve) will impact developers focus on Steam Deck.
It would be great if devs just target the steam deck and then let you improve graphics for better hardware.
Like, turn up ray tracing and other effects on the steam machine. Let my steamdeck be a potato.
Unfortunately the reality is, that developers don’t have all time of the world. They have deadlines to meet and focus on the thing that is in their mind the most important at the moment. For AAA it often means high quality textures and advanced tech like RayTracing, while they have less time to optimize it for weak hardware. On the other side some devs optimize for low hardware and then they don’t get the attention in the media they want to have, by having the greatest and biggest graphics. So they start optimizing later if the game is not too buggy and it is a success, so they get the greenlight to do more work on it.
Off course I simplify and it depends on the teams and publishers and so on. The point I am making is, that its not as easy a decision as we think or hope it would be. Especially because publishers force some decisions, regardless of what the developers or gamers want to have or need.
eli5 why doesn’t someone produce ram and refuse to sell to AI companies and make a bloody fortune?
Because the AI companies will just offer to buy at a higher price.
If you refuse to sell to AI companies you will make a small fortune yes. If you sell to the highest bidder you’ll make a larger fortune.
AI investment isn’t rational like consumer spending. Consumers will only spend what is reasonable for their needs.
The AI bubble allows companies to purchase inventory at higher prices than consumers will ever pay then leave it on a shelf unused. The suppliers are making record profits supplying them. Unless China increases supply beyond the current memory cartel all we can do is wait for the inevitable market collapse.
Honestly the funniest thing would be Chinese RAM being cheaper even with tariffs and then eating Micron’s lunch
Samsung
SK Hynix
Micron
That’s why.
Developing DRAM manufacturing capability is insanely difficult and hugely expensive. Almost all the worlds DRAM comes from one of these three names and they’re already making their fortune selling to AI companies. They don’t care about how many penny’s people like you or me can scrape together.
If there was really any demand more DRAM would be being produced.
The reality is most datacentre companies have warehouses full of DRAM and GPUs waiting for datacentres to be built. By the time they will be built, the GPUs they have stashed will be obsolete.
PC sales - and PCs use a lot more DRAM than phones - are falling off a cliff.
So there is no real future demand, that’s why no ones building chip fabs.
Game developers should focus on making good fun games without pushing the envelope on graphics, or maybe work more on optimizing things.
Microsoft should focus on not making windows a bloated piece of shit that consumes so much memory.
In a just world, OpenAI would be investigated for market denial…
When the bubble pops most of that gear will be useless for consumer use.
Penis! I picked a fine time to finally want to upgrade my Win 7 laptop from 2011.
I’m betting on a $700/$800 Steam Deck 2 when that launches and that being a solid deal. PS6 and it’s rumored 36GB of memory, don’t hold your breath for a release
Article doesnt mention China?
