-RAM prices skyrocket another 5000%
-Gamers cannibalize their PCs to make small fortunes.
-The videogame industry collapses.
-2026 becomes known as the Year of the Boardgame as suddenly affluent gamers flock to tangible, tabletop games and retro consoles.Is this also happening to HDD 's as well?
There’s a few chips for cache on hard drives.
Yes, a bit. Looks like SSDs are up like 10-50% checking a few price trends on Amazon. That might be partially just end of the year supply chain stuff though.
I have two 32GB DDR5 kits I bought last year for $80 each. I checked and they are worth over $300. Now that’s a good investment I guess. I need to unload these somewhere.
Well, if you have a trenchcoat, maybe?
Hey mister, fancy some RAM? DDR5… The real stuff… no?
Sir? Looking for some RAM?
First, they came for our GPUs
HBM is like 10% of production but 30% of the revenue.
I’m guessing they want to get dram to the point where prices for dram are as high as possible, like all the past cases of collusion by those three companies.
AI investor expectations can’t shift soon enough.
Maybe this is what it takes to kill AI? If every company and organisation that actually does anything can’t afford to maintain its IT systems, they’ll lean on politicians to pop the bubble.
Surely they will increase their production? I can’t imagine being a DRAM manufacturer and not wanting to jump on the pricing boom. Even if they have to ramp down again in a year, the gains would be worth it.
As a side note, I do not know how long it takes to ramp up a DRAM factory. It may take a few years in which case we will have to ride out the storm as consumers.
If they also view this as a bubble, they have to weigh how long the bubble will last, and what happens to the investment in equipment required after the bubble pops. It may not be worth the investment if they think it’ll only last 1-2 yrs and it takes them 1-1.5 to spin that up.
Not to mention all the extra costs in raw materials/logistics of getting more materials into the factory and more chips out. You start shifting to “can the local infrastructure handle that?” Or is it near capacity and will either need improvements as well or if they’d be better off building a new facility elsewhere and everything associated with that.
It’s a complicated mess, and again, might just be a bubble.
Just like the energy bill. Those huge data centers use quite a lot of power…
