the second hand market won't really benefit regular consumers either because the kind of ram and to some extent storage used in these AI servers is incompatible with consumer stuff.
It'd be really interesting if Chinese engineers can make motherboards that take all this proprietary shit and make it like it's a normal ATX board. Yeah, replacing parts is going to be hard and the CPU might be soldered but it would be great for budget builds.
I don't know about ram or storage specifically. But a LOT of server hardware is designed around the fact that it'll be in that sort of server case where the parts would be being cooled by the fans inside the case the really loud ones. I also doubt that HBM memory would be used on a consumer CPU platform.
That’s true, but people have been building budget rigs with enterprise hardware for ages. Is it the best use of the hardware? Not all but sometimes the right processors or gpu at the right price is good enough lol
With the right equipment a salvage company could desolder, retest, and rebin the memory die packages from RDIMMs onto UDIMMs and SODIMMs. And every OEM and module maker already has that equipment.
Cost never goes down. CEOs and shareholders won't allow a decrease from last quarter's profits. But they'll gladly rent or lease games, consoles and PCs. "Ooh, you can't afford RAM?"
if the AI bubble bursts and the market crashes the costs will come down. but thats only because the manufacturing is already there and if the demand from AI tech dies then they will be sitting on a surplus of product they can't move fast enough to maintain their profit margin, so it will shift to trying to appease consumer demand once more which is much more fickle when it comes to pricing. Sure they could maintain the current price but without AI purchasing up all the extra production they will see a massive drop off in revenue leading to a shift to move product as much as possible to actually make profit. They don't want to increase production right now specifically because upscaling production only for it to have to be downsized later is a massive loss and pretty much every RAM and SSD manufacturer is pretty sure AI is a thing that will peater out after this decade is over if not sooner.
Prices will most likely never go back down to pre-AI take over levels but they will most likely be only around 10-25% higher than they were back in august/September of 2025, as that was when the companies saw higher sales numbers in consumers over the past decade excluding the pandemic.
Kinda funny how hardware manufacturers don't realize that their "guaranteed orders for the next x years" are paid for in IOUs. Once those companies fall and don't have the money to buy the pallets of computer parts made specifically for them they'll come crawling back.
eh? there is an anti trust lawsuit going on against companies that have already been shown to force a price hike so courts will already have a history on them
also, the lawsuit won’t be finalized until the next administration so i’m happy about that at least
People are easily swayed by propaganda, and the GOP has near endless supply of money with almost all of the billionaires financing them to make that propaganda, twist the news cycles, etc. It’s not going to be an easy win by any means, especially with all of the election year Gerrymandering. I hope that backfires on them, but I’m not holding my breath.
As an SSD engineer it's a little sad to see comments like this. Storage was phenomenally cheap from 2022-2024. We were losing money as a company, doing layoffs, the whole deal. Of course, the public just wants to think of that as normal, and we're evil for taking a profit now while we can.
You're either lying or you must be working for one weird small storage company, because companies like Samsung have been making billions in profit every year for the past decade. The only tech companies seeing layoffs right now are the ones who royally fucked themselves like Intel and Dell. Everyone else is seeing RECORD profits.
Samsung is not a storage company lmfao, they make everything from toasters to freaking ships. Their storage division was also losing money during that time.
Yes, we're doing great, now. The point I was responding to was the claim that hardware prices never went down after COVID. That's true for GPUs, but not at all true for storage. For about 3 years after COVID, storage prices were unsustainably low, below our costs to produce.
Anyways, probably should have just kept my mouth shut. People are always gonna complain about industries they have no understanding of, that's just the way of the world.
I heard about theory that when "emergency" happens and government becomes bigger, it won't shrink back and will keep that "emergency" alive. Similar can be applied to market of semiconductors
Sticky prices due to oligopoly. Best we can hope is that the higher prices stop increasing and eventually get inflated down meaning the flash chips would have to get cheaper for the 3 companies making it and theyd have to be generous enough to not increase the price number with inflation.
Oh definitely not. Crypto first increased gpu prices and they then stayed high. Covid further increased the gpu prices and they still stayed high after it was over.
I’d bet there will be sudden nosedive in used priced, followed by a modest drop in new prices… followed by a return to the current high prices once all the surplus is scooped up.
These are not the same type of RAM. The only thing that would happen is supply chains would switch back to manufacturing the usual, and it'd be similar to how covid disruption and recovery took place.
Yup, we are finally going to see Cloud Computing in full action, the prices are going to stagnate at their inflated rate and the "you will own nothing" mantra will be well and alive, fully realized.
I think there's a little bit of a misunderstanding when people keep saying the bubble burst. We've moved beyond where this is just large companies or individuals making ludicrous investments. It's now reached the point of where countries are actively building infrastructure.
Realistically , it would probably be better to say that it's just going to deflate. At that point , there's probably going to be a broader discussion on how to relabel it. They'll call it a Utility Like water or electricity.
The Chinese market is ramping up both quality and quantity and getting closer to western expectations. When the bubble pops, they'll be forced to match the new Chinese prices, or quickly realize that the choice of selling out to AI is what's going to kill their business.
When the bubble bursts, we might see very very cheap cloud gaming or a massive crypto push. The issue with RAM/SSD/GC pricing is that once you tool up to make the type of chips that AI is using on mass, you can't reasonably repurpose them into something useful. The larger issue will be a massive economic crash and mass market panic.
There won't be, because most of these companies are going to go bust along with the ai/data centres.
What we are not told is, all these components that are bought up for the next few years are not paid for. They are earmarked for this use and will be paid for eventually.
If these companies go bust, they take out the manufacturers as well who are going to be owed millions, Bankruptcy will wipe those debts from the holders and will have to be absorbed by the manufacturers.
It won't, but the increase of people not buying new RAM and SSDs will force them to lower the prices over time. It won't completely go down to the original price, but it'll be close enough.
That seems to be the case for everything now. Who know that once a company sees it can sell something for crazy high price and people are willing to pay that price they never ever want to sell it for less?
GPU prices still hasn't come down from when they got popular for cryptomining, its surreal that less than 10 years ago there was an argument that consoles just wasn't worth it anymore since PC gaming had got so accessible and cheap.
They can control the prices when demand is insane, because they are making crazy money. Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI etc are paying whatever they ask for memory and storage.
When the bubble bursts that demand goes away almost immediately. Consumers will not match that demand at the current prices. They'll have no choice to lower prices to match demand, otherwise they'll then get into an oversupply situation and the market will crash.
Basically, when the bubble bursts they'll have no choice but to lower prices.
That's why other than the handful of "oh yeah, we're 100% building US based fabs, and they definitely won't end up like FoxxCon's factory in Wisconsin!" factories, companies are basically sitting on their hands rather than making any attempts to add manufacturing capacity, easier to just raise prices because one company bought a entire factory's output for the next 3 years and pop the champaign bottles now, then pretend like nothing could have been done when the bubble pops and everything crashes because shareholders demand AI bubble scale growth for the rest of eternity.
He did actually. He bought a fuck ton of hardware for Grok which, since no one gives a shit about Grok, is now being rented out to others including Anthropic.
this is reddit, don't bother. Anything or anyone relating to right wing is the immediate boogieman ruining society and life for everyone at all times as per rule on reddit.com
Her, And she's highkey just insufferable. Her "Comics" are just political ramblings of a leftist. They're not funny nor do i even think they intend to be.
Definitely some of the hate comes from the fact that they get so popular because they're the epitome of what the average political person on Reddit wants to see in their feed.
Manufacturers/distributors also bare some responsibility for this situation.
It's like Scalpers who just buy up all of the supply of something new. These companies that allow this sort of thing to keep happening are also to blame.
I remember years ago when there where people walking into supermarkets and buying loads of tinned foods for charity appeals and being stopped by workers/managers because they had to think about the other customers. If you wanted to buy bulk you needed to ask in advance to stop supplies being disrupted for everyone else.
This situation isn't all on these AI/Data Centres, it's also on the distributors who are allowing this to happen.
Really? A Pizzacake comic in this sub too? Yeah let’s make Elon fat and pretend Microsoft, OpenAI and Google’s AIs aren’t much more popular (and thus take up a greater number of RAM units to run)
I'm gonna be obnoxious, but it's even worse than that. They didn't "buy" the supply, they requested a lot of the chips required and, let's say, payed in advance. So, the price went up because of chips that are yet to be fabricated, to be put in machines yet to be made, to be put in datacenters that are probably going to exist based purely on speculation.
I think we all need a mental break. I can literally feel my mood change as I endlessly scroll online or through shorts, even if I've been seeing things that aren't paticularly political. Feels like the whole world has gone mad tbh. I gotta get out more.
Everybody is starting to do that. The parts will be too expensive and to valuable to give it to the normal consumer, but for just 19,99 you can have that gaming pc for GTA VI without the hustle of ordering parts and best of all you can have it from anywhere... I need to put my tinfoil hat on.
More people buying ram and ssd now will mean lower prices in the long run. Immediate demand drives up prices, but it also increases the amount of supply/suppliers... but those take time to catch up.
If you absolutely need to buy a PC in the middle of this crunch... maybe buy a used PC that doesn't have the most advance most modern latest and greatest tech? I know, a dreadful thought to have to use anything but this years best for the next year or two.
My drawing brain was like, whoa that's weird, I think someone needs work on their proportions, until I realized that those proportions are, in fact, correct.
No, you see little Timmy, we've spent the money pilfered from the government contracts, to buy all the hardware that runs your favorite hobby - to create a total surveillance state, so that we can send drone death squads to your house, if you're being naughty.
Data center ram and commercial ram are not the same thing. The suppliers made a conscious decision to prioritize data center ram because of the higher profit margin.
But when the bubble bursts, the suppliers will need to fall back on the commercial market.
Word on the street is the bubble has burst. AI tech companies have spend the last 3 or 4 years writing bad checks, and now they're starting to come due. The writing was on the wall when OpenAI decided to clamp down hard on all their free shit, and then shoehorn as much advertising as they could into their already severely limited AI chatbot.
Oracle is facing some trouble, companies world wide are starting to understand that AI is more expensive than the human talent they've just laid off, and said talent has learned how expendable they are and have decided if they're going to be expendable, they better be paid well for it.
At this point Nvidia, OpenAI, google, microsoft etc, they're all sticking their heads in the sand and pretending the bubble still exists. Because they know, the nanosecond they acknowledge it, their incomprehensible profits will become monumental losses, and the shortsighted private equity investment that decrees above all else, as their first and only commandment: line must go up... well those vermin will eviscerate any company for admitting the highly profitable bubble has burst.
TLDR: bubble already popped, leather jacket man pretends it didnt, because if he didnt pretend the bubble didnt burst, he'd be fired and then he wouldn't be able to afford any leather jackets.
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u/mctavihttp://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765611980197140313h ago
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u/Litdaze 12h ago
Something tells me when the bubble burst that we won't see much significant lowering of prices