Memory prices have surged to 2007 levels after decades of steady decline

[jdrch]

> software developers will have to find ways to build AI systems that require less memory

LOL AI has blinded people so badly they can't think of anything else. That sentence absolutely does not need AI in it. Everything needs to be more RAM efficient.

 

[Endymio]

Well this is what happens when you go from capitalism to collusion.

Why do you perpetually spread disinformation? The AI explosion has caused demand for memory to surge some 800% nearly overnight. Do you honestly not understand what effect that has on prices?

The big 3 just locked in minimum pricing going into 2030 with manufacturers and that's not something you would do if you were confident the line keeps going up.

Was that a joke? You can't sign a sales contract that commits someone to buy from you at "whatever price we decide is fair three years from now" -- pricing has to be specified to be meaningful. And in any case, memory makers are quite obviously expecting prices to begin declining before 2030 -- the Big Three alone are already spending three quarter of a trillion dollars in expanding capacity, all of which will hit the market by then.

The cracks are rapidly starting to show

Yeah, you've spent the last two years predicting the imminent collapse of AI ... and you'll continue to do the same for the next 20 years.

 

[yRaz]

Why do you perpetually spread disinformation? The AI explosion has caused demand for memory to surge some 800% nearly overnight. Do you honestly not understand what effect that has on prices?


Was that a joke? You can't sign a sales contract that commits someone to buy from you at "whatever price we decide is fair three years from now" -- pricing has to be specified to be meaningful. And in any case, memory makers are quite obviously expecting prices to begin declining before 2030 -- the Big Three alone are already spending three quarter of a trillion dollars in expanding capacity, all of which will hit the market by then.


Yeah, you've spent the last two years predicting the imminent collapse of AI ... and you'll continue to do the same for the next 20 years.

My god, it's incredible! You've finally shoved your head so far up your own *** that it came out of your shoulders and begun to talk!

 

[Loadedaxe]

“Memory prices have erased 20 years of progress in a single year.”
Come on, TechSpot.

Memory PRICES have gone insane. Twenty years of technological progress did not suddenly get sucked into an AI data center somewhere in Virginia.

My DDR5 didn’t wake up this morning, forget everything it learned, and turn back into a 1GB stick of DDR2.

What has been erased is 20 years of declining cost per GB. That’s a legitimate story all by itself, and frankly, it’s a pretty damn important one. AI data centers are consuming ridiculous amounts of memory, manufacturers are chasing the much fatter margins in HBM and enterprise products, and the regular PC market is getting stuck with the bill.

But that isn’t the same thing as “20 years of progress” disappearing.
We still have dramatically higher densities, bandwidth, efficiency and capacity than we did 20 years ago. The technology didn’t go backwards. The economics went completely sideways.

And that’s the story worth talking about: after decades of consumers getting more memory for less money, AI infrastructure has disrupted the market badly enough that cost per GB has been thrown back toward levels we haven’t seen in years.

That’s crazy enough without dressing it up like somebody accidentally restored the RAM industry from a 2007 backup.

Good story. Real problem. Ridiculous headline.


@Endymio
@yRaz

At this point I don't even care what RAM costs anymore.

I just click these articles to watch Endymio and yRaz continue their 47 part PBS documentary...

“Two Men, One Forum: The Never Ending Search for Someone to Admit They Were Wrong.”

Endymio arrives with charts, contracts, supply and demand curves and a 14 page rebuttal.

yRaz reads it, cracks his knuckles and responds with basically:
“Yeah, but have you considered pulling your head out of your ***?”

And somehow we're now 38 comments deep and I still don't know whether I should buy RAM or canned food.

Please, neither of you ever leave TechSpot. This place wouldn't be the same.

 

[yRaz]

“Memory prices have erased 20 years of progress in a single year.”
Come on, TechSpot.

Memory PRICES have gone insane. Twenty years of technological progress did not suddenly get sucked into an AI data center somewhere in Virginia.

My DDR5 didn’t wake up this morning, forget everything it learned, and turn back into a 1GB stick of DDR2.

What has been erased is 20 years of declining cost per GB. That’s a legitimate story all by itself, and frankly, it’s a pretty damn important one. AI data centers are consuming ridiculous amounts of memory, manufacturers are chasing the much fatter margins in HBM and enterprise products, and the regular PC market is getting stuck with the bill.

But that isn’t the same thing as “20 years of progress” disappearing.
We still have dramatically higher densities, bandwidth, efficiency and capacity than we did 20 years ago. The technology didn’t go backwards. The economics went completely sideways.

And that’s the story worth talking about: after decades of consumers getting more memory for less money, AI infrastructure has disrupted the market badly enough that cost per GB has been thrown back toward levels we haven’t seen in years.

That’s crazy enough without dressing it up like somebody accidentally restored the RAM industry from a 2007 backup.

Good story. Real problem. Ridiculous headline.


@Endymio
@yRaz

At this point I don't even care what RAM costs anymore.

I just click these articles to watch Endymio and yRaz continue their 47 part PBS documentary...

“Two Men, One Forum: The Never Ending Search for Someone to Admit They Were Wrong.”

Endymio arrives with charts, contracts, supply and demand curves and a 14 page rebuttal.

yRaz reads it, cracks his knuckles and responds with basically:
“Yeah, but have you considered pulling your head out of your ***?”

And somehow we're now 38 comments deep and I still don't know whether I should buy RAM or canned food.

Please, neither of you ever leave TechSpot. This place wouldn't be the same.

Canned RAM

 

[Tech420]

Well this is what happens when you go from capitalism to collusion. The big 3 just locked in minimum pricing going into 2030 with manufacturers and that's not something you would do if you were confident the line keeps going up. The cracks are rapidly starting to show

It's actually really not that big of a deal. You buy ram once every 10 years. Who cares if it's 30 dollars or 300 dollars. Most people spend more than that on coffee every month

 

[JamesBlond]

The sad part is, insider information the shortage is all fake they building stock for Data Centers and making the users pay, there is no shortage, only a desire to 7uck you the user over

 

[yRaz]

It's actually really not that big of a deal. You buy ram once every 10 years. Who cares if it's 30 dollars or 300 dollars. Most people spend more than that on coffee every month

Memory is in every car, every TV, most appliances made after 2010 use some sort of SoC that has memory so you're fridge has it. Not to mention, your phone. And while I have no idea how many times I've bought ram in my life, by your metric with would have been 4 times and it's much more than that. Not to forget, individual components like SSDs have use RAM. That's not to mention that NAND is heavily impacted by this.

At best, you purchase something with memory in it at least once a year and the price difference is not small.

 

[Win7user]

I actually need 32g of Ram, however I'm not buying it because of these BS prices! I'll just do without...

 

[Squid Surprise]

It's actually really not that big of a deal. You buy ram once every 10 years. Who cares if it's 30 dollars or 300 dollars. Most people spend more than that on coffee every month

If you aren’t made of money, it IS a big deal! As has already been posted, PCs aren’t the only things that have RAM… and… some of us need more than 16/32gb… I’m glad I got my 256gb of ram before this - but it would be costing THOUSANDS more if I were to buy it today.

 

[Win7user]

It's actually really not that big of a deal. You buy ram once every 10 years. Who cares if it's 30 dollars or 300 dollars. Most people spend more than that on coffee every month

It does matter.

 

[Puiu]

It's hard to come up with a more ridiculous title.

.. erased 20 years of progress ... Holy Cow!

It's true that the increasing price per unit of capacity is a historical anomaly, but the real anomaly here (in a good sense) is AI. Rising component prices are merely a temporary consequence of the colossal economic boom we're having.
That colossal economic boom has non-temporary consequences as well - chip factories of all sorts are popping everywhere, same for all sorts of infrastructure, startups, you name it ...

Framing all that as 'erased progress' is beyond preposterous.

It is 100% erased progress if the average joe now has to buy old PCs, slow PCs or no PC at all compared to how it was before. It's a hella huge loss of progress. Not everything is about the speed of the components.

"colossal economic boom we're having" - there's no "boom" anywhere, in fact for most the economy is in the dumpster. only the rich are benefiting from AI. this has been crux of the issue.

"preposterous" is your claim of an economic boom...

 

[hydrated]

Well this is what happens when you go from capitalism to collusion. The big 3 just locked in minimum pricing going into 2030 with manufacturers and that's not something you would do if you were confident the line keeps going up. The cracks are rapidly starting to show

This is what happens when you have Central banks, which are a Communist staple.

 

[yRaz]

This is what happens when you have Central banks, which are a Communist staple.

And yet the largest Communist country in the world just banned paper gold. Do you know why the US abandoned the gold standard?

 

[Squid Surprise]

This is what happens when you have Central banks, which are a Communist staple.

Central banks are in virtually every capitalist country… like the
United States, Canada, the UK, Japan, Australia just to name a few… and they pre-date communism by a fair bit…the Bank of England, for example, was founded in 1694…

Maybe do some research before spouting nonsense?

 

[pnntmp]

It is 100% erased progress if the average joe now has to buy old PCs, slow PCs or no PC at all compared to how it was before. It's a hella huge loss of progress. Not everything is about the speed of the components.

"colossal economic boom we're having" - there's no "boom" anywhere, in fact for most the economy is in the dumpster. only the rich are benefiting from AI. this has been crux of the issue.

"preposterous" is your claim of an economic boom...

Well the average Joe now has a tool he can ask about everything and task with different problems, something unthinkable two years ago. Most people simply couldn't afford having an advisor in every area, and now they have it for free or for $20. That's the real progress.
Increased component prices are merely a temporary side effect of the fact components are put to a better use in datacenters.

There's boom pretty much everywhere, we're finally building things again (not everyone, some just whine about others building things). There's also this thing commonly referred to as 'data' , you may briefly skim through it before making another embarassing statement about the economy.

Finally, "only the rich are benefiting from AI" is completely false. Absolutely everyone around me uses AI and definitely benefits from it. OpenAI alone just hit a billion users (with a B), and most of them are not rich, just getting richer.

 

[Puiu]

Well the average Joe now has a tool he can ask about everything and task with different problems, something unthinkable two years ago. Most people simply couldn't afford having an advisor in every area, and now they have it for free or for $20. That's the real progress.
Increased component prices are merely a temporary side effect of the fact components are put to a better use in datacenters.

There's boom pretty much everywhere, we're finally building things again (not everyone, some just whine about others building things). There's also this thing commonly referred to as 'data' , you may briefly skim through it before making another embarassing statement about the economy.

Finally, "only the rich are benefiting from AI" is completely false. Absolutely everyone around me uses AI and definitely benefits from it. OpenAI alone just hit a billion users (with a B), and most of them are not rich, just getting richer.

What does this have to do with the regression topic? This is just you admitting that you were wrong and adding a big "BUT AI" at the end.

"Increased component prices are merely a temporary side effect of the fact components are put to a better use in datacenters." - we just had industry specialists come and tell us that the 'temporary" just got extended and that we should expected prices to never go back down to pre AI levels. Without an economy busting bubble drop, your dream of cheap PCs will never happen in the next decade. In fact we've been told to expect prices to rise even further in the next several years. (check the attached research paper)

DRAM and SSD prices are on track for a staggering 130% surge by the end of 2026.

"There's boom pretty much everywhere" - prove it. Show us how the economy is doing well. We know for a fact that Europe isn't doing well at all and the recent jobs report in the US paints a very negative view on the US too (besides the 1 million other facts that say it's doing bad, but hey... I don't expect people to read those pesky statistics)

And recently you just had the US secretly using Euro to buy Yen to stop the Japanese government from selling US bonds. And it failed spectacularly, the Yen is going back down fast because of the lack of trust on this transaction. (do you want me to go into details as to why this is really bad for the US, EU and Japan?)

"OpenAI alone just hit a billion users (with a B), and most of them are not rich, just getting richer." - prove it. Show us how normal people are getting rich, instead of major corporations like Nvidia, because of AI. Show us the numbers.

Since when does "I'm using AI thus I'm getting rich" ever been a thing? It's the first time anyone besides a CEO of these AI companies has said this. Even companies have discovered that paying somebody is cheaper than buying tokens for AI... what are we even talking about dude?

Wealth has been steadily been transferring from traditional labor and concentrating it into the hands of capital owners and tech giants -- this is something very well documented and known for years.

Words mean nothing in the face of facts.