Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
I was told I was probably overdoing it putting 96GB in my PC a year or two ago. Be that true, but if this pricing doesn’t ease up by the time it becomes a server, my ZFS cache will love it!
This is crazy, not displaying the price of an item in a shelf or display is against consumer laws where I live. And if the price on display is not updated the store is required to sell by the price on display.
Bitch, are you surge pricing ram? Cuz it looks like you’re surge pricing ram…
That’s insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
yep. i took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc, knowing this ai shit along with the tariffs was going to make prices bonkers af, and i needed an upgrade anyway. 8% interest on a couple grand personal loan is better than paying 4x the price in cash
Love Keepa!
Isn’t this the new first party price chart Amazon is testing out?
Lived in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s, when the price of RAM exploded with the web, armed robberies of manufacturing plants and warehouses for RAM became a thing for a few years.
Insert <Aw shit, here we go again . meme>
Im still running off DDR3
Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, “I’m only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It’s DDR4, can’t be that expensive”.
Yeah… It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.
There should be laws capping how much of something you can sell to a single greedy person/purpose. It’s common fucking sense.
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I think that in the long run, the RAM shortage will turn into a glut of much faster and larger DDR5 RAM sticks. Provided if you can wait for the transition to AM6, an AM5 endgame system will have pretty good RAM.
They are going to pivot all that processing to the next snale oil scheme. Do you think its a coincidence that rhe AI hype came immediately after crypto crashed?
I view AI to be like the printing press: It is good for the everyman…if that everyman was willing to own and make use of it. By ceding AI to oligarchs, society would be allowing the 1% to have more tools to do stuff, while denying the public from making effective use of them.
The answer isn’t to reject AI, but to fund publicly developed and owned AI. Every minority who has 95% of Disney’s legal acumen in their pocket, will be able to more effectively resist Kavenaugh Stops in court. An AI can scour the web and spot discounted goods that a person actually wants, and create a shopping list that is cheap and convenient. People can have a competent teacher, if their rural household lacks a school. All these things lend a little extra agency to ordinary people.
My point, is that we shouldn’t refuse tools. Instead, we should adopt them on OUR terms, not the techbro’s.
This assumes machine learning models are able to get better than they currently are. Newer models have been plateauing in quality of outputs (improvements have been noticable in video and image generation, but even that is slowing down)
I don’t think we’re going to see machine learning models that perform well enough to create printing press level change to the world
LoL, LLM’s aren’t capable of being “competent” at anything. Not law, not teaching, not even coding. They are pure garbage at nearly everything they are applied to. Yes, some of these things have had some limited success at finding patterns in the noise. But those successes are grossly outweighed by the absolute failure of them to do anything else.
https://tech.co/news/list-ai-failures-mistakes-errors
AI is an technology, and like any technology, it improves. The AI we had two years ago was something akin to the Orville flier, the ones we have now are equivalent of a biplane. Those examples of technology weren’t very useful, but the planes that followed were far more capable and economical.
Your assertions that AI is useless, is merely burying your head in the sand and hoping things will go alright. The outright refusal of AI by people like you, only ensures the most evil people can use it. This is like only allowing Nazis to own guns, peasants not being allowed to own land, or newspapers to only be owned by the wealthiest.
It is power that you are giving up, and power doesn’t care about who has it.
Guess I should have bought the 128GB 3600 kit earlier.
Are DDR4 also affected?Ddr4 is apparently out of manufacturing at a lot of places now, so it’s even more affected (at least in my market, prices rose more then ddr5)
Yeah, just checked the 2 sites I use for computer components.
1 had no RAM listed.
The other had 32GB DDR4 at 2x the price and no 128GB kit (96 was the highest, 64 for DDR4)I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I’d grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can’t find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.
Speaking as someone with 128gb DDR4 3600 RAM and uses mid-size AI like GLM Air, it is too slow to have much fun with. I suspect that a lot of hobbyists will adopt and discard DDR4 in short order, so you can probably get a good deal if you buy used.
Sadly I am not in a location where people just discard useful parts.
If I were to try buying 2nd hand here, I would most probably end up with stuff that has some or the other kind of of damage.For instance, in one of the companies I worked at, their policy for getting rid of stuff was:
- If unneeded but working, then send to another department
- If malfunctioning but fixable, get it fixed
- If not worth fixing, then auction it off
- HDDs? repurpose or shred
And the auctions occurred years later after much red tape…
Mostly bought by other companies, who get to do more red-tape stuff to buy it.While on one hand, this is a good thing, reducing wastage, it also means that I have no way to get 2nd hand stuff for hobbyist usage.
In case we do get 2nd hand stuff, it is usually through a 2nd hand dealer, who then ends up with a higher asking price than what it’s worth.
Also, I am not expecting there to be any AI enthusiast nearby me.
As someone buying load of secondhand tech, you don’t need the latest and greatest
I can never get people to understand this. I’ve got servers running on i7 8th gens, with stock 16GB ram. I could upgrade, but no need. People thinking they need 128GB to plays games are delusional.
To run games, you might need at least 32Gb. 64 Gb is sufficient in most cases. Still expensive af
16GB is fine for most games, 32GB is handy if you run a lot of poorly optimized mods, but also memory compression helps with that significantly. 8gb of memory gets pretty cozy for gaming these days though, but again memory compression makes a big difference.
Both my and my wife’s computers have 32GB of RAM because it was cheap enough to not be worth worrying about, but if RAM is expensive you don’t need a ton of it to enjoy your games
Yeah, this is my point and experience too. 32 is better, I’d say 16 min. But people crying about needing 128 should rethink their priorities for gaming, were in a recession lol. Save your money.
Yeah but even second hand drives are stupid-priced today. No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
I can’t wait for this to pop, I mean if it does in a way that produces selloffs.
No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
well damn that’s a steal. I’d buy it.
First they came for the hard drives, and I did not speak out because I didn’t need a hard drive. Then they came for the GPUs and I did not speak out because I had a pretty dope GPU. Then they came for my 8gb of ram and there was nobody left to speak out for me.
I have 128gb of corsair ddr5 in my closet. IM RICH!
Just did a quick check, it’s worth double what I paid for it. I’ll just let it sit in my closet until it’s worthless.
I also have 128gb of ddr5 ram
And 64gb of ddr5 ram
And some laptop ddr5 ram
I’m going to wrap them all in Saran Wrap and stick them up my ass so my brain works faster
Ah, but you see, if you wrap it in Saran wrap, they won’t be able to make contact. You’d be better off using contact grease for that easy insertion
Of course. That must be why it didn’t work the last time. Thank you kindly for that wonderful advice.
Is it sitting on top of a pile of beanie babies?
If it’s new it genuinely might be worth 2k. Looked at the prices yesterday and corsair had 64gb for ~1k.
If this bubble doesn’t pop soon, I expect a memory card thefts to start making the headlines. Small and easier to carry off while being more expensive than some jewelry of the same size.
