This has got to be some sort of psyop

I read an article yesterday that Samsung's memory division wasn't even willing to let Samsung's own cell phone division lock in any long-term memory buying agreement with them, which the cell phone division hsd been trying to do. Too much money in selling HBM memory for parallel compute to datacenters.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/ai-frenzy-is-driving-new-global-supply-chain-crisis-2025-12-03/

Some 6,000 miles away in California, Paul Coronado said monthly sales at his company, Caramon, which sells recycled low-end memory chips pulled from decommissioned data-center servers, have surged since September. Almost all its products are now bought by Hong Kong-based intermediaries who resell them to Chinese clients, he said.

"We were doing about $500,000 a month," he said. "Now it's $800,000 to $900,000."

I threw away a bunch of large-capacity DDR4 DIMMs last year, figured that they'd be useless in the future. Kind of wish I hadn't, now. Reusing old DIMMs is probably the only source of supply that can be ramped up in the near term.

In October, SK Hynix said all its chips are sold out for 2026, while Samsung said it had secured customers for its HBM chips to be produced next year. Both firms are expanding capacity to meet AI demand, but new factories for conventional chips won't come online until 2027 or 2028.

Two or three years until manufacturing capacity will be ramped up.

Oh man

I had to look it up. The RAM I bought 12 months ago for $99 is now $350. This is insane.

I'm not much of a conspirationist, but this memory "shortage" doesn't add up for me; it's like AI companies went from buying 10 memories as usual to 1000000, all of a sudden! It's too fast, and sus.

Shits wild the same ram I bought over a year ago is 400% more for half the amount of GB.

Cyberpunk wasn't supposed to be a prophecy. It was meant to be a warning.

Nnnnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

All I can do is pray that my current RAM survives long enough for this stupid AI bubble to burst, like with the Crypto-Bro GPUs.

But it is kind of horrifying how easily consumers have been priced out of the RAM market - at least for newer stuff anyways

Right after Windows 10 stopped being supported, rendering a lot of computers "obsolete".

/yes I know about Linux

My 5-year-old mainboard only supports DDR4. I'm just looking to increase my RAM and have two free slots available. But even the prices of DDR4 sticks have increased 100%-200% compared to a year ago.

They are more affordable than DDR5 sticks to be sure but still crazy.

I am really, really glad I replaced my PC's a year ago.

This is insane. I'm kinda sorta rooting for the crash now. These unregulated billionaires are ruining all the things.

Since nobody can afford memory, this means mainboards and cases will get cheaper, right?

I both fear and can't wait for the ai pop. Please come sooner rather than later.