Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement.

(You can have inflation while your currency go up relatively to all the others on the FX market, like what happened to USD in 2022-S1, or you can have massive inflation difference between countries sharing the same currency, like it happened in the Euro Area between 2022 and today).

This ram price spike is literally part of the currency debasing

And even with increased priced you often still get paltry amount of RAM. All for market segmentation due to AI use cases. Which is bad as requirements have crept up.

If you stay off of the upgrade treadmill, you can game with a pretty dated card at this point. Sure, you cannot turn on all of the shines, but thanks to consoles, a playable build is quite attainable.

In some ways though, the increase in visual fidelity has been _marginally_ improved on a per-year basis since the PS4/Xbone era. My GPUs have had much, much longer useful lives than the 90s/early-2000s.

If you're willing to accept the performance level of a console, then you can buy a second-hand 3060 for cheap.

I think there's always been a rent-seeking middleman service. In the 80s it was retail: you'd go to a physical computer store to buy a game for $50 (note: that's $150 inflation-adjusted, more expensive than most games today), and the retail store, the distributor, and the publisher would all take a cut. In the 2000s it was the developer's ISP, web developer, and credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe.

The shareware/unlock-code economy of the 90s was probably the closest you'd get to cutting out the middlemen, where you could download from some BBS or FTP server without the dev getting involved at all and then send them money to have them email you an unlock code, but it was a lot of manual work on the developer's part, and a lot of trust.

U.S. tariffs inadvertently kept prices low, due to stockpiling of memory when prices were cheap, before tariffs took effect. As that inventory is depleted, new supply chain purchases are much more expensive and subject to tariffs.

I did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691), the RAM I bought in March 2024 currently costs about the same as when I bought it, seems the price stagnated rather than increased for that specific example.

Do you have some concrete examples of where I can look?

They are US-specific, yes. Thanks for asking that - I'll look into updating those graphs to show for the appropriate region/country depending on what country you've selected (on the top right of the page).

536 € seems expensive for March 2024, but either way, the price dropped a lot over the last one and a half years, only to surge in the last two months.

In the UK I was looking at DDR4-3200 SODIMM last week for some mini-pcs... and decided to pass after looking at the price graphs. It's spiked in the last few weeks.

While thats a sweet upgrade for people with an older desktop that can support a motherboard swap, its worthwhile to point out the ram is probably insufficient.

RAM usage for a lot of workloads scales with core/thread count, and my general rule of thumb is that 1G/thread is not enough, and 2G/thread will mostly work, and 4G/thread is probably too much, but your disk cache will be happy. Also, the same applies to VMs, so if your hosting a VM and give it 16 threads, you probably want at least 16G for the VM. The 4G/thread then starts to look pretty reasonable.

Just building a lot of opensource projects with `make -j32` your going to be swapping if you only have 1G/thread. This rule then becomes super noticeable when your on a machine with 512G of ram, and 300+ threads, because your builds will OOM.

I think that's nearly exactly what I paid for 2x32GB at a retail store last week. I hadn't bought RAM in over a decade so I didn't think anything of it. Wish my emergency PC replacement had occurred a year earlier!

Feast and famine industry, it’s very traditional

It's not the 1980s anymore. If you make too much profit nowadays you pull a John Deere and start crying to government that your customers aren't profitable enough (because you siphoned off all of their profit) and need a bailout so that they can pay even more for your product in the future.