Technology

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.

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.

Quite frankly, we abuse ram anyways. So much software uses way more ram than is actually necessary. I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals. Doing far more with far less.

It's the only thing we are empowered to do, buy less ram and use software that runs smoothly with less ram.

Expect an import ban on Chinese made ram to be coming soon.

I have a work issued Lenovo Thinkpad P14S Gen6 AMD with a Ryzen 9 AI, 2TB nvme, and 64GB of GDDR5 RAM. It cost $2600 last October.

Went to buy more of them for other devs last week as their Dells are just hot garbage and are being refunded, who wants to guess what the price of the exact same machine though Lenovo directly again is now?

$6800.

Absolutely insane.

The article ignores several points.

First, this is one of the conditions where capitalism actually works. Many players in the field dropped out because of the razor thin margins of the past. Fabs take years to ramp up, and are insanely expensive to set up, so getting in to take advantage of a temporary shortage was an unacceptable risk. Now there is a decade(s) long projected shortage, making the investment attractive again. Plenty of players have experience in Fabs, even though they are not up to date.

Also, the market is going to accept that slightly slower ram is quite fine in many applications, and they are easier to make. DDR5/6 is really not that important. I have an AM4 Ryzen 9 with 64Gb DDR4 that flies, I mean the thing cooks! This environment is going to make Chinese Fabs competitive in the mid-term, and give them the opportunity to catch up, especially since the Chinese government subsidizes whole sectors to catch up, and often surpass the west (see EVs, solar, airliners, etc.) maybe they'll take years to get there, and maybe they won't match the very top end, but they'll take over.

We are going to have a shortage and obscene prices, but not as long or hard as doomsayers scream.

Another factor is that the AI bubble is going to pop. LLMs are a dead end, and are already at an extreme diminishing returns point. There is no way the major players are going to recoup investment, and the market will eventually wake up. Open source models are at single digit distance of the most powerful commercial models, so much of the resources are going to shift to in-house.

JEPA is one of the next steps in AI, and is way less hardware intensive. There are several new approaches to AI that are way less hardware intensive. LLMs are plain brute force approaches, and evolution makes efficiency a major goal.

Oh course not. Why lower them when they can keep the prices high and pocket the profits? When you live in hell you can't expect the devil to not profit on the vices.

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.

It's obviously to Lenovo's benefit to have people believe that RAM prices will not drop, so that they will not wait out the current price surge.

The price will drop if supply exceeds demand, and if competition increases.

Yeah, I'll be there waiting for them to rotate their inventory at a loss when it does go down. Meanwhile, fuck Lenovo.

Oh, I better then go ahead and buy them at high prices before it turns out in 2-3 years that he was wrong.

Oh when the bubble pops ram is gonna be insanely cheap

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.

Lenovo is not a manufacturer of ANYTHING below motherboards (pc or laptop) .

Their opinions need to be looked at through that lens and no other.

This could be a fomo tactic….

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.

As an old person, I recall a time period when there were lots of so-called RAM optimization software packages out there. It would be interesting to see if that sort of thing makes a comeback.

Yes, the operating system is far better at managing resources than back then, but I'd bet that lots of fun new malware will sprout up masked as such.

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?

LOL. The biggest area of tech investing right now is alternative video cards and RAM for the home consumer market. The Wang dropped the ball on what made the company chasing a Ponzi scheme. This is so ripe for perturbation.

See Bolt Graphics...dual PCI connect options, upgradable VRAM, non proprietary hardware...

https://youtu.be/-fZM9wOvbh0

Lenovo apparently ignoring China then

Ah yes, history has shown that prices never fluctuate.

I'll stick to chess and keep my humble elderly gaming laptop for another 40 years with Linux

This is relevant for all prices. If Amazon sees you will pay 3x for toilet paper or whatever, what’s the incentive to charge you less?