Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.

It would also be dumb to cut production when prices are high because you increase the incentive for one of the outside players to suddenly ramp up production and jump in the market.

Not saying they aren't coordinating in other ways (following each other's leads on price hikes and availability). But again the context here is literally the opposite as last time.

CXMT's DDR5 and LPDDR5 is also slowly gaining market shares, although not at the pace of YMTC due to yield and cost issues.

Both company are close or already at escape velocity. And then there will be a moment like electric car where DRAM and NAND will oversupply. Which is another reason why DRAM manufactures are eager to move to LPDDR6.

I'll bet you'll see a lot more output, esp. with low margins -- to make the market uninteresting for new players.

But it's just not selling. I guess most people don't even check ebay, and go straight to hardware online retailers.

Busy getting my new build together so today I bought a 8 Tb WD Black 2280 SSD, a 2 Tb WD Black 2230 SSD and 2 x 64 Gb Crucial SODIMMs for (in comparison) a whopping 1850 USD...

Yes, that's pretty much a complete PC. Or at least it used to be.

Hopefully prices for Radeons remain a bit stable for the coming weeks, I'm still figuring out which one to buy to replace my aging Geforce 1080 and drive my 3840x2160 widescreen...

Yes, sellers fill the most expensive bids first.

>OpenAI's new "Stargate" project reportedly signed deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month to feed its AI clusters, which is an amount close to 40% of total global DRAM output if it's ever met.

Right, so demand has pretty much doubled.

>In this cycle, manufacturers had cut back production and investment during the last downturn (2022), and they've been slow to ramp back up.

And manufacturers have been burnt by over production before and are cautious

>Another factor limiting supply of standard RAM is that memory firms are diverting their limited manufacturing capacity to the most lucrative products. Specifically, there's a gold rush for HBM, which is a special kind of memory used by AI accelerator GPUs, because HBM commands far higher prices and profit margins than commodity DRAM.

See above about filling the more lucrative bids first.

>I'm not saying that all of these reasons given aren't the cause for the recent price boom, but what I am saying is that it wouldn't be the first time that price-fixing occurred in the memory industry.

Ok so what should be done about it?

>While that second lawsuit didn't hold up in court (and failed in appeal), that ongoing suspicion exists for a reason.

K so there have been 2 claims, one spurious.

>Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove.

See: Have been burnt by over production before. And Unspoken coordination is hardly an issue. Reacting to private information is bad, reacting to public information is normal and expected.

>It's hard not to see this supposedly coincidental aligned strategy of restraint and wonder if there's something more at play. All of these actions support pricing stability (for those companies) and suggests that no one is "breaking ranks" to grab a larger share by undercutting prices.

You are telling me that you are suspicious of an industry that has expanded, caused a glut that hurt their own businesses and killed their competitors, and are shying away from repeating that event that you outline as a clear mistake.

If theres so much money on the table, you will need another vendor. New RAM vendors have to weigh risk, including all the risk you have outlined, against what is likely a very massive capital outlay.

It might either be artificial to keep GPU prices where they are, or someone already started building their RAM-based AI datacenter.

> memory suppliers have both the motive and precedent to coordinate behavior, even tacitly, in order to keep prices high. When only a handful of firms control the taps, it doesn't take a formal cartel for them to collectively benefit from constrained supply. Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove. The backdrop of past cartels makes it hard not to be cynical when hearing that "AI demand" is solely to blame for increased prices. Whether or not any collusion is happening now, it's clear that memory companies are profiting immensely from the current crisis. After bleeding financially during the last oversupply downturn, the major DRAM makers are now seeing record-high earnings in the third quarter of 2025 thanks to the price surge, and to put it bluntly, the shortage is great for business.

If AI companies continue to scale up and buy massive amounts of memory as prices spike, how much will that intensify the spike? Could feedback of this nature cause a price shock sufficient to pop the AI bubble earlier than it might have otherwise? How soon might that happen?

Is it actually standard modules that are high on demand, or are the chips directly soldered to custom mainboards?

I've maxed out the RAM on every (consumer mobo) build I've ever done, and have always ended up appreciating it. I did a Ryzen build with 192GB back in January, so despite the questionable signal integrity of DDR5 especially on AM5 (more than one DIMM on each channel means lower speed) this time turned out to be no exception. I also stocked up on 130TB of HDD and 30TB of SSD, as it was clear we were headed towards some kind of economic disaster. (look, I'm avoiding politics!)

But the best RAM purchase I ever did was during the dot com crash glut a few decades ago. I maxed out my Athlon XP with 3x 512MB sticks for $27 each. A gig and a half of RAM. Those were the days.

This was my last respite for intellectual argumentation.

Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it and anyone who does is a grifter and or amateur and or embarrassing and any data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999…so therefore, $X! (In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging)

As my MD friend noted wisely a couple weeks ago: it’s noteworthy how this became a culture after LLMs became ubiquitous and user friendly. It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.

And you can't just manufacture or not the gold supply into scarcity