The big news story this cycle is that OpenAI secured two large contracts with two separate DRAM companies at the same time, carefully timing the deals so that neither DRAM company knew about the deal with other. Had either company known about the true demand from OpenAI they would have charged a lot more, but each only saw about half.

In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were both caught off guard and left a lot of money on the table.

The current price increase is the result of the huge demand spike. Production takes years to ramp up, but demand has spiked rapidly. Supply and demand.

Between inflation generally, and DDR4 being obsolete and unsupported by current desktop or server CPUs, it would be unsurprising for DDR4-3200 DIMMs to be at an all-time high even without the current DRAM price shock. You can never count on old memory types dropping to bargain prices, because the major manufacturers are always eager to migrate the bulk of their production capacity to current-generation memory.

Dang, I'm going to have to put my old RAM on ebay. I thought it was worthless, but I was clearly wrong.

Now happy I bought that 256GB of DDR4 with the MB/processor combo of ebay last summer.

anyone want to buy a 2x16 GB DDR4-3200 kit that only fails memtest86 some of the time?

Starting to make Apple's RAM upsell prices look competitive...

July: 172,38 € for a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit

Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €

Simple web pages can be made small with modern tooling, e.g. AstroJS.

The problem is that most web pages these days fundamentally are not simple.

Rather than trying to make web pages small, the real effort would be in designing web pages to be simple.

The large majority of software devs, PMs and the like don't really know how to do anything else than a Node + React webapp.

And if someone could make a chat program not use 1 GB of RAM that would be great.

Obligatory mentions:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Most people have phones that can handle webpages with 1-5MB JS bundles. Why artificially limit what you can do on the web? Why limit ourselves to 1GB RAM when more resources means tech becomes more useful?

Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case for most people.

Most people want their cars to be safe and convenient, and their webpages useful and rich, more so than they want to return to some idealized simplicity.

A simple webpage or blog with minimal styling that runs as an ARM binary on a TV remote is cool and fun but it’s not economically useful. It’s the equivalent of a manual scooter. We can build better apps (in the same way that car manufacturers can build less crappy infotainment systems) but optimizing for scarcity isn’t the answer in a world where abundance tends to grow.

(Edit: your downvotes mean nothing to me, I’ve seen what gets upvoted!)

The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.

> Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different

Wouldn't this be ... collusion?

Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something.

OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.

Only 50-60% of the recent price appreciation is after October 1st, so this is not likely the biggest direct cause, more likely it's everyone buying the finished stock on the market in a frenzy because they anticipate things like this will impact availability in the future, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sounds like OpenAI might be trying their hand at TPUs, like what Google has. They are one of Google's biggest advantages in AI right now. It would also give them insurance against Nvidia being everybody's hardware supplier.

Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?

The current prices are a response to future stock, not current. It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap because they know there will be limited stock in the near future. Asian retailers may be more honest and keep their margins the same, but will catch up in a month or two.

Yeah, that's the spot market price, small sellers are more nimble, big platform sellers however probably feel the need to price in supply risks.

Shouldn't be recycled chips too, as those were always older gens. I bought one ddr3 dirt cheap and no issues.

Aus stock was cheap a couple of weeks ago, it's caught up though. I'd snatch it up if you need it.

The market is inefficient. Also, if you are in a small country, the demand is not there. So the seller will sell with regular prices. The stock will also be very low to export it back to where it came from.

Is it possible they are fakes?

When Gaben's 11 organize a heist to steal the RAM wafers from the high-security vault in Sam Altman's basement, the price of the steam machine will drop below $1000 USD.

They would already have contracts in place.

Not only that - I think OpenAI and all those other AI blobs must pay compensation damage to The People for inflating the prices here and skyrocketing costs.

That's from June 2025. It's not relevant to current situation — prices have been rising since October 2025 due to agreements that became public in the same month.

Scroll down. The same trend is happening for DDR5 prices. It's AI demand.

Is he saying the supply of ddr4 went down because they’re switching to ddr5?

On this graph, the most expensive RAM is $12.5 / GB ($400 for DDR5-6000 2x16GB). Apple charges

- $25 / GB ($200 for 8 GB for the M5 MacBook Pro and the M4 MacBook Air)

- $16 / GB ($400 for 24 GB for the cheapest M4 Pro MacBook Pro)

- $12.5 / GB ($200 for 16 GB and then $800 for 64 GB more for the most expensive M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros)

and Apple's RAM is faster than PC RAM.

Came here looking for this comment.

I wonder how much price increase it takes for Apple to raise theirs.

Guess that’s the flip side of selling sometimes three to four years old hardware with zero price cut (I know they’ve been doing better in the M-series era)—the price also stays there when it’s skyrocketing elsewhere.

Exactly. Gotten from ‘price gouging’ to ‘not unreasonable’ in a couple months.

it's a commodity, it'll come down eventually, but soonish? depends completely on if/when AI bubble deflates and datacenter projects get cancelled.

> What specifically happened in June to set this off?

Tariffs implemented by this administration:

  "Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff 
  pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic 
  strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While 
  services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration 
  in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of 
  greater price pressures to come. The Fed will want to hold 
  steady as it awaits more data."[0]

OpenAI bought up a big chunk of global DRAM production:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

"Waves hands at AI/LLMs"

The problem is that training these models and using these models has required exponentially increasing amounts of memory.

ChatGPT has existed for years and in those years it's userbase and model size has increased tremendously. Not to mention the fact that a lot of competitors have sprung up in the wake of GPT. Including the likes of cloud based open model hosting services.

Perhaps some tariff shenanigans?

DDR5 is digital silver

I picked up a pretty cheap second-hand GPU after the mining boom ended!

They should get back into the Optane business first. Take the existing Optane memory to a modern PCIe 5 bus, and it will be competitive with lots of uses for DRAM. PCIe 5 gives you basically DDR4-like transfer bandwidth, and the Optane media has better latency and far better DWPD endurance than existing NAND SSD's. It's a total no-brainer.

"Downloading RAM" is more feasible than people think.

The seek time of a consumer-grade hard disk is said to be on the order of 10 ms. That's roughly the latency of a very high quality FTTH connection. Meaning that if you run a HDD rather than an SSD, a swap file in the cloud could potentially be faster than a local one (especially when you consider multiple reads/writes that could be done in parallel).

It's not exactly downloading more RAM but decently close to call it that for the joke.

Make? The market of course.

Benefit? The manufacturers of course.

Waiting for all my out of use 4, 8, and 16GB DDR3 DIMMs that I have somewhere in a drawer to become the new gold standard first.

Memory chips are divertied to registered server RAM and those will not fit most workstations

Yeah though expecting that to A) take years still and B) the gear will be old AF

Bit like you could get NVIDIA Server cards before things went crazy but they’re on ancient cuda etc so not exactly as glorious as one would imagine

Unless it drags on for years so that the parts are old by the time everything gets liquidated.

A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads.

Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be shifted to other military markets and family car production would take some time to resume.

All in a pretty bad state of wear, I imagine.

I would snag up every possible H100 and H200 if the AI bubble burst and their prices went into steep decline.

No, they'll be shipped off to developing nations to be dissolved for rare earths for the next boom cycle.

Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.

The silver lining could be that game developers spend more time on actual gameplay, and less time on chasing graphical fidelity.

Silksong is playable on an 8 year old Nintendo Switch.

I mean its pretty rare to buy more RAM after completing your PC build + that single PC is going to last you 5+ years. Also mobos usually only have 4 slots in total so its not like its even going to take a lot. I'm rocking 2x48gb sticks and that's plenty for gaming.

The prices are wild tho.

I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL

There is more than a lifetime of incredibly great PC games that run on your existing hardware, and if this is your life's hobby, then paying an extra $100 or so every year or few is a drop in the bucket of your gaming expenses

Increased demand for computer components for purposes other than gaming constitutes "AI bros murdering your lifelong hobby"?

PC gaming is not "murdered", it's doing better than ever.

In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.

The inflation-adjusted price per gigabyte of RAM has dropped from $3/GB to $2/GB over the last 10 years, even including the recent price hikes.

So spare me the hysterics, your hobby is fine.

And you know what? The increased demand for compute always spurs innovation, so you'll probably get a better computer in the end as a result. You're welcome.

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today.

So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year.

That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%.

Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.

Sure how does it compare to similar low, middle, high end cpu prices? NVME drives?

They seem to fail to capture a whole lot of things. Supposedly $1 in 2000 is worth $1.88 in 2025. So 88% inflation over the 25 years. Meanwhile the median home price has increased by 150%. Family insurance by 350%. Median college tuition by 225%. Childcare costs have risen by 200%. But sure. We can buy super cheap 65" tvs now. Hurray for us! Literal kings who lived hundreds of years ago couldn't possibly imagine a world with cheap large screen tvs. So the poorest among us should rejoice at the wonders they are able to enjoy while they skip meals and ration their insulin.

They don’t capture anything going up because that would shame dear leader