But in performance work, the relative speed of RAM relative to computation has dropped such that it's a common wisdom to treat today's cache as RAM of old (and today's RAM as disk of old, etc).
In software performance work it's been all about hitting the cache for a long time. LLMs aren't too amenable to caching though.
I don't think that ever happened. Using relatively sparse amount of memory turns into better cache management which in turn usually improves performance drastically.
And in embedded stuff being good with memory management can make the difference between 'works' and 'fail'.
it's just a cartel cycle of gaining profits while soon eliminating all investments into competitors when flood of cheap ram "suddenly" appears
But it doesn't really need a nefarious plot for the price spikes. There is a serious lack of VRAM deployed out there. Filling that gap will take quite some time. Add to that the nefarious plot and the situation will most likely get even worse....
Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
1) Prices aren't returning to "normal".
The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it
2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome.
If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about competing on price, maybe they become price competitive before the launch of your new fab in order to kill it, but, it will have an effect and probably before it even opens
3) A western supply chain has benefits by itself.
There's a reason some industries are not allowed to die, most notably farming- because security and external pressure are concerning.
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Realistically there's no reason not to do this. It will be long, painful and expensive. The best time was a decade ago. The next best time is now.
I disagree.
Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. So we can't exactly increase global manufacturing capacity overnight.
The way I see, there's 2 ways this goes:
1. AI is a fad. RAM and storage demand falls. Prices drop back to normal.
2. AI is not a fad. Over time, more and more fabs come online to meet the supply needs of the AI industry. The price comes down as manufacturing supply increases.
Or some combination of the two.
The high prices right now are because there's a demand shock. There's way more demand for RAM than anyone expected, so the RAM that is produced sells at a premium. High prices aren't because RAM costs more to manufacture than it did a couple years ago. There's just not enough to go around. In 5-10 years, manufacturing capacity will match demand and prices will drop. Just give it time.
And that company is in Europe, isn't it? The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market: it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.
and waiting for 5-10 yrs for a lower price is a long wait for consumers.
If food prices were high, would you say to the starving person to wait for 5-10yrs for food?
If all consumer devices only shipped with 1gb of RAM maximum, we'd get over it remarkably quickly. Just about the only times large amounts of RAM is an actual requirement is AI, some data science / simulation, and editing video in 8k. And maybe 3d modelling. Lots of programs we run today are memory hogs for no good reason - like the rust compiler, cyberpunk 2077 and google chrome. But we could make those programs much more memory efficient if we really had to. Cyberpunk wouldn't look as pretty. But nobody would really care.
The economy won't die due to expensive RAM. Programmers will just adapt, like we've always done.
Really the only way it could work is if the government declares it it a national security issue and will promise to subsidize it. Because in just a free market, it's most likely to flop.
This does not really help EU and US businesses to be competitive though, neither does it stop consumers going for the cheapest option...
The biggest problem is that the industry wants HBM, whereas consumers want DRAM. Until the need for HBM has been sufficiently satisfied, fabs will prefer being tooled for HBM because businesses can be squeezed much harder than consumers.
Then again, as consumer you don't really need DDR5 or even DDR4 so long as you aren't using an iGPU. Its all about being around CL15 timings.
you're missing the picture that it's not companIES - the crisis primarily was caused by only one company OpenAI buying out wafers
but even more than that - that wafer buyout is *an excuse* used by cartel - there are several mechanisms that could have eased out most of the problem (e.g. Samsung selling old equipment) that was not done to ride the money wave
(also said "hyperscalers and AI companies" existed in spring 2025 too, yet the price was low)
the winners will not be the ones who build new fabs - but ones who'll have enough money and government subsidies/import taxes to protect such investments after cartel decides to oversupply again, flushing the price down
You can't reshore domestic manufacturing without creating legions of desperate workers with no other choice but to accept minimum wage factory jobs.
Which is a good idea for when we don't have a dementia patient in charge of our country.
EU should get on that though.
Which is exactly how you know it will always be nerfed. The last thing these guys want is to take their claws out of our data.
People forget quickly why we only have a handful of DRAM manufacturers today.
The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more locked-down design, such as soldered RAM or even SSD. My current ThinkPad already got soldered LPDDR5 RAM chips on it with no user-end RAM upgrade possible, so there's a reason to suspect they'll take more pagers from Apple's book if they can get away doing it, just like what they did when they pushed out those internally mounted unswappable batteries.
My personal guess is that the RAM price will fall down after this period of AI expansion is over and major players starts to consolidate. But it will not fall as much as we're hopping for, because the manufacturers could just reduce production to control the price.
Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exports?
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
Also, I don't think you've seen true consumer rage until the opposition in the EU would start pointing out the current parties are making the smartphones, laptops, TVs and whatnot consumers wanna buy much more expensive (or more crappy). Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to be wavering for young people especially, and tech / gadgets being cheap was one of the sole rays of light left.
Huh?
People appreciated cheap YMTC 232-layers when that happened where I live.
Or their consumers will enjoy cheap PC part prices. With possible gray zone re-export market.
Of course we could see retreat from global markets to mercantilism, but that has yet to fully happen.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/xi-putin-hail-tie...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-president-xi-meet...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-calls-closer-defen...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-steps-up-efforts-cut-...
[4] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
You don't see their products in stores too often as they're focused on B2B - particularly the automotive sector.
That being said I have a 128GB memory stick from this manufacturer and I hope they make the most out of this windfall.
SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron don't treat good people well enough to give them taxpayer money.
It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, chip factories do pollute... a lot.
Countries like South Korea or Taiwan have adapted all their legislations and tax, environmental regulations to allow such factories to operate easily. The EU and EU countries will never do that... better outsource pollution and claim they care about the planet...
The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.
We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!
So, we're looking at a decade-long project at least, even if everything goes as planned, and crazy fast, in the technical and administrative departments.
Excellent universities, overall. But results from primary and secondary schools are nose diving at a more than alarming rate in several EU countries. Literacy rates are falling, math grades are falling. There's IMO only so much time before universities begin to be affected as well.
Well, the EU has not manufactured a whole lot of chips in the last 30 years, where do you get the people with the professional experience to teach new engineers... Oh you mean you have to import the teachers from South Asia too? /s and it takes what, 5 years at the minimum to train an engineer? France and UK used to produce entire home computers... in the 80's...
This is not comparable to Taiwan or the Shenzen area, but it's definitely not nothing. Some local expertise exists, even though it may be not the most cutting-edge.
The same applies to your comment.
How?
Most foundries across Asia and the US are being given subsidizes that outstrip those that the EU is providing, with the only mega-foundry project in Europe was canceled by Intel last year [0].
Additionally, much of the backend work like OSAT and packaging is done in ASEAN (especially Malaysia), Taiwan, China, and India. As much of the work for memory chips is largely backend work (OSAT and packaging), this is a field the EU simply cannot compete in given that it has FTAs with the US, Japan, South Korea, India, and Vietnam so any EU attempt would be crushed well before imitating the process.
Furthermore, much of the IP in the memory space is owned by Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and American champions who are largely investing either domestically or in Asia, as was seen with MUFG's announcement earlier today to create a dedicated end-to-end semiconductor fund specifically to unify Japan, Taiwan, and India into a single fab-to-fabless ecosystem [1]. SoftBank announced something similar to unify the US, Japan, Malaysia, and India into a similar end-to-end ecosystem as well a couple weeks ago [2]. Meanwhile, South Korea is trying to further shore up their domestic capacity [3] via subsidies and industrial policy.
When Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese technology and capital partners are uninterested in investing in building European capacity, American technology and capital partners have pulled out of similar initiatives in Europe, and the EU working to ban Chinese players [4] what can the EU even do?
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Edit: can't reply
> Why are you overlooking European semiconductor champions
Because they don't have the IP for the flash memory supply chain. And whatever capacity and IP they have in chip design, front-end fab, or back-end fab is domiciled in the US, ASEAN, and India.
> STMicroelectronics
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for IoT and embedded applications.
> Infineon
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for automotive applications.
> NXP
Power electronics and legacy nodes (28nm and above) for embedded applications.
> All of them are skilled enough to build and operate a DRAM fab in Europe. A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.
They don't have the IP. Much of the IP for the memory space is owned by Japanese, American, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese companies.
Additionally, most Asian funds own both the IP and capital (often with government backing), making European attempts futile.
Essentially, the EU would have to start from scratch and decades behind countries with whom the EU already has FTAs with that have expanded capacity well before the EU and thus would be able to crush any incipient European competitor.
[0] - https://www.it-daily.net/shortnews-en/intel-officially-cance...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260224VL219/taiwan-talent-...
[2] - https://asia.nikkei.com/economy/trade-war/trump-tariffs/soft...
[3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251230PD220/semiconductor-...
[4] - https://www.ft.com/content/eb677cb3-f86c-42de-b819-277bcb042...
Today's RTX 5060 has 8 GB for basically the same price that the 1070 did.
For $650 you can go up to 12 GB in the 5070, if you want 16 GB it's $1000 for the 5070 Ti, or hundreds more than that for the 5080.
I know there's inflation and $380 in 2016 was more money than it is today, but if you'd asked me 10 years ago I would've bet on VRAM capacity doing better than "the same money is worth less but still gets you exactly same amount of memory 10 years from now."
With prices going up, I half expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 6070 and tell everyone "It has 4 GB of memory and we think you're going to love it. $900." Or they'll just stop bothering with consumer GPUs entirely.
Resource usage has been on a hedonic treadmill at least since I came online in the 90s. Good things have come from that, of course, but there's also plenty of abstraction/waste that's permitted because "new computers can handle it."
With so many gaming devices based on the AMD Z1 Extreme platform (and its custom Valve corollaries) over the past few years, it'll be great to see that be the target/baseline for a while. Brings access to more players and staves of e-waste for longer.
I work in gamedev, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive, and I understand that general purpose engines aren't as light on resources as the handcrafted ones that nobody can afford to make anymore... but we're not anywhere close to the layers of waste and abstraction that presents itself when using webtech for desktop apps by default.
So, the causal link is more: why would software makers need to optimize when it benefits them to pretend the user _needs_ more hardware. Especially in the games realm. Surely going from 60hz to 240hx refresh rate was a practical loss in benefits per hz halfway through. But it ate up hardware resources along the way.
Arguably the connotation has changed slightly, but AI slop caught on because it fit so well.
It's uncommon, and associated with old timey prisons and orphanages.
The word itself has existed for hundreds of years.
It reminds me of the heady days of Thai floods when hard drives were inaccessible.
Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once.
If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot.
I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.
Apple could lead here. They sell feels not specs so they could down OS and Browser RAM requirements and sell lower RAM entry models.
Of course seems like local AI is more or less a flop in the consumer market at least?
But still IMHO even for general use macos with 8GB is almost unusable unless you use it like an Ipad.
On the flip side if you're buying a new computer in 2026 - it's going to be even harder to justify not getting a MacBook, the chips are already 2 years ahead of PC, the price of base models was super competitive, now that the ram is super expensive even the upgraded versions are competitive with the PC market. Oh and Windows is turning to an even larger pile of shit on a daily basis.
Probably not quite, but I was pricing a Lenovo laptop last week and this is the first time the lenovo price for RAM upgrades was lower than 3rd party RAM.
Guess what's inside these chips and what equipment they're made on.
Behold, the RAM cost is being optimized with AI.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/880812/ramageddon-ram-shortage...
They discussed it on the decoder podcast as well.
Additonally, depending on which country you live in, telecom vendors reduce the upfront cost of the phone purchase and make up the difference via contracts.
People is missing the point. Mega-corporations distort the market. This is not capitalism this is old aristocratic ruling by power. If all these monopolies were divided in smaller chunks and regulated to not allow them to abuse that power we will not be here.
This situation is not normal, big tech is currently above the law and above the market economy and if they fail their plan is to make us pay *AGAIN* for their bad decisions. All businesses and individuals are already paying higher prices for big tech folly, we will be left with the bill when the AI boom fails, too.
They also marketed the first webcam, and made emulators mainstream. Their PlayStation emulator is the basis for the case law that says emulators are fair use, decided as a result of a suit from Sony.
So why you’re saying is that it could be worse, but not by much?
Idk if the owner changed or what, but the website used to be more comical.
Unless there is a true breakthrough, beyond AGI into super intelligence on existing, or near term, hardware— I just don’t see how “trust me bro,” can keep its spending party going. Competition is incredibly stiff, and it’s pretty likely we’re at the point of diminishing returns without an absolute breakthrough.
The end result is going to be RAM prices tanking in 18-24 months. The only upside will be for consumers who will likely gain the ability to run much larger open source models locally.
It denied this saying that the figures quoted were estimates only, that such massive RAM contracts would be easily obtainable public knowledge and that primarily the recent price increases were mostly cyclical in nature.
Any truth to this?
Edit to add: I am actually curious; I was under the impression that this 40% story going around was true and confirmed, rather than just hyperbole or speculation.