> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.

https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...

> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.

> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring. - https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Every one seems so focused on that one company supposedly had "fake demand" just to ruin it for competitors, while the supply also seemingly is being suppressed, and no one seems to be talking about that. To me that seems like a much bigger deal, because then the market can't even restore the supply...

There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.

In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.

Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.

And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.

I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.

No. I’m genuinely curious, because I agree with you about how critical these components are. I ask because it doesn’t seem to me like the answers are immediately straightforward and wanted to hear serious replies to those questions.

Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply.

Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.

Yes, it did.

> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.

No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)

It absolutely happened. I was there, I saw it happen. Maybe it didn't happen in your area, but others weren't so lucky.

Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.

Prices are not expected to recover until 2028.

AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.

They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.

They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.

And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.

There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.

It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.

FOMO and Number goes up is the primary issue both with AI and most compute today.

There's so many made up numbers these days that does zero productive work, like FPS, refresh rates, 4k, 8k, 16k.

Bloat is everywhere.

He's slightly wrong about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because they're afraid China would be the eventual buyer (via proxies) and they'd be in violation of US sanctions , so instead of selling they just locked down the old machinery to gather dust instead.

And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been slowly but steadily increasing long before this crisis, after the crisis DDR4 prices have also tripled just like DDR5 prices, even in the used market. So regardless of whether it's a real demand or panic response, the effect is still real on people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems. These people who probably just wants to update RAM in their systems in the hope that it'd help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years while bracing the impact. Had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.

... You don't seriously believe no one is using DDR4 today, right? Sure, they may no be developing new chipsets or whatever, but large swaths of the PC population will still be on DDR4 for the foreseeable future, especially now with these prices.

If you would have asked me 5 years ago this wouldn't even become a bubble. I'm still amazed it did. It really taught me how much of the modern economy is just grift.

The RAM I bought last year has more than tripled. 2x32 DDR5 kits, $240/kit, now $820.

Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.

Except its caused by good old bubble capitalism.

Yes and no and yes.

AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.

The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.

It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.

And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.

There's a few historical examples here....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market

Of course I'm joking, there are LLMs to check these things now.

I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.

For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.

Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.

Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...

[2] https://www.heise.de/news/Nvidias-H100-kommt-im-deutschen-Re...

We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.

And we need all of that fast.

This is a "the horse might sing" situation for the whole market that focused on breakthrough-level results (AGI, ASI, or even just "not going off the rails after the third response").

No hypocrisy there.

They were replying to a screenshot showing a huge price per GB on Dell's site, but it looks like that screenshot was wrong? So a mistake on framework's part for not checking sources, but they've had a consistent and reasonable position on pricing.

Maybe this won't last that long given the RAM shortage is apparently a corner attempt by Sam Altman.

But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.

Not taking into account that they all be busy handing money to openAI, at least someone somewhere has to notice that something is very wrong.

This memory situation has me pondering putting it all up on ebay

Or just cash out, that's always great.

I wonder what Apple's next move will be :-)

EDIT: Spelling

Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.

BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.

Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.

There's also this:

> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.

Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.

Who still thinks this?

For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.

Small thing, but this is not simple or realistic at all. How does someone in an apartment grow enough food for their family?

That's certainly not a universal Legal Standard. If I'm harmed, but you didn't "intend" to harm me, does that nullify my Claim?

Hardly.

What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?

Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.

So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.

  > they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return

you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.

And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.

This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.

What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.

Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.

Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?

(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)

In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.

1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market. 2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence. 3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.

If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.

This "crime" would be written down somewhere in what we called a "law", that would state penalties, with "maximum" sentences.

And, to forestall your comments, one of our other traditions was that you applied these rules even to lying sons of bitches (which Altman is).

Sorry to be old fashioned here.

And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.

Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?

I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”

This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.

It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.

It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.

Maybe OpenAI's RAM monopoly is what kills Electron.

2. Browser destroys apps

3. Browser creates apps

4. AI destroys browser apps

...

5. AI eats all memory

6. Forth inherits the Earth

Sam is betting that vibe coders are the future.

Whoever wins, we lose.

Water tomorrow

This is the natural consequence of letting individual psychos control more money than most world economies.

If the problem is that these companies are creating an externality by straining the local water supply, then maybe we should simply tax water more where appropriate? I don't think any sort of shame will be effective.

For the past decade water has been mismanaged in inefficient farming practices, like bad irrigation practices or production of alfalfa to feed foreign livestock. We also waste a ton of water on our big dumb lawns. "cooling datacenters" doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

desalination isn’t just expensive, it’s existentially costly in terms of energy consumption, and I don’t see any dyson spheres in production.

It costs approx 3kwh of energy to desalinate one cubic meter of water.

It’s like a whole fucking genre.

What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys

Companies that are essentially monopolies have greater income than most countries GDP, with government bailouts, with the Federal reserve printing money like crazy, the interest on government debt is greater than military spending.

This is monarchy wearing the skin of capitalism.

The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.

The ram price appreciation began 3 months before October 1st and his contract was about future capacity that has nothing to do with the current equilibrium price in consumer DRAM.

A lot of people on HN dislike Tim Cook for various reasons and many would literally “sacrifice” him just to get Apple to stop being so anti-consumer.

I’m thinking with sufficient pressure by all tech interested people it could become an issue in the midterms and even force Trump to sign agreements not to tariff RAM by Korean producers who could ramp up production.

Frankly, I wouldn’t even be surprised if we start seeing RAM smuggling. In not sure of drug prices, but would smuggling RAM not be at least just as profitable, especially without the high profile and risk?

Hey! … hey, you! You want to have some fun?

DDR4 fab capacity should have stayed constant as DDR5 was brought online.

The mechanism that powers that is usually the top tier brands selling their used fab equipment to China who then keep mass producing the legacy DRAM while fabs in Korea are converted to manufacture the new standard.

Instead all of those machines have been warehoused because Korean firms fear US sanctions/punitive tarifs if they were to offload that equipment to China.

So what has happened is DDR4 capacity has actually shrunk massively when it shouldn't have, DDR5 capacity was only barely meeting demand and then huge deals were cut that cornered the market.

Tarifs wouldn't help DDR5 a huge amount but without them DDR4 would be dirt cheap right now.

These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.

I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.

Haha, if I did sell I'd probably sell on /r/homelabsales which is a much more pleasant place to interact.

They might pull it off , but hell off a way to bet the economy dominos all on black.

In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, because we'll make more of it and get better at producing it than we would have without the demand spike. I.e. Wright's Law in action - which is usually pretty good at producing the long term direction of prices of products like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect

An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless.

GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/ram-prices-are-exploding...

https://frame.work/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-naviga...

Currently they are selling for 8000 NOK (~800 USD).

I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.

What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.

The rest of us 'normal' memory plebes are fucked.

Is anyone's salary here projected to go up 53% in 2026?