this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Why has RAM suddenly got so expensive? We've been chasing this AI shit for the last 3/4 years and GPUs etc have been expensive the whole time, but somehow RAM has been ok until literally the last couple of weeks?
OpenAI abruptly bought 40% of global supply, and announced it.
Other companies found out about it when OpenAI announced and thought holy shit, if we hadn't heard of this massive deal, what else haven't we heard of?!, and so they started panic buying.
On top of that, because of US tariffs and trade restrictions, the Chinese "B-tier" memory companies, who usually buy old machines from the big 3 (SK-Hynix, Samsung, Micron) and sell this lower spec RAM at lower margins, didn't buy up these machines as much as they usually do. They weren't sure they'd be able to make a profit given their lower margins, should tariffs suddenly change again or other restrictions get put in place.
Micron actually just closed their consumer business to sell all their RAM to AI firms instead
https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business
Ah, so it's the 2020 toilet paper crisis all over again, but with RAM
Basically as I understand it sam altman made a deal to buy a majority of the semiconductor wafers needed to make ram from the two biggest manufacturers, and the third biggest saw that and went "oh ok time to make a killing selling tam to businesses" qnd pulled out of the consumer market so now there's just fucking none being made for consumers because of one giant fucking dickwad
Fucking slop factories.