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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

321 points by geox

by hansmayer

8 subcomments

I cannot stop thinking about the LLMs having this Midas touch quality, because everything they touch seems to ruin things or make people want to avoid them, for example:
- Ghibli studio style graphics,
- the infamous em-dashes and bullet points
- customer service (just try to use Klarnas "support" these days...)
- Oracle share price ;) - imagine being one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies, losing to your CEOs crazy commitment to the LLMs...
- The internet content - We now tripple check every Internet source we dont know to the core ...
- And now also the chips ?
Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?

by vee-kay

11 subcomments

For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs).
Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing.
New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment.
Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits).
It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else.
And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.

by torginus

14 subcomments

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

by SunlitCat

2 subcomments

I really wonder when the point will be reached at which the South Korean government steps in and starts to take a closer look at the growing long-term supply commitments that companies like OpenAI are indirectly driving with major memory manufacturers such as SK hynix and Samsung Electronics.
Allocating a very large share of advanced memory production, especially HBM and high-end DRAM, which are critical for almost all modern technology (and even many non-tech products like household appliances) to a small number of U.S. centric AI players risks distorting the global market and limiting availability for other industries.
Even within Samsung itself, the Mobile eXperience (MX) Business (smartphones) is not guaranteed preferential access to memory from Samsung’s Device Solutions (DS) Division, which includes the Memory Business. If internal customers are forced to source DRAM elsewhere due to pricing or capacity constraints, this could eventually become economically problematic for a country that relies very heavily on semiconductor and technology exports.

by rainsford

2 subcomments

One aspect of this I don't see mentioned all that often is that AI is competing for computing resources that are at least somewhat limited in the short to medium term while being pretty inefficient at utilizing those resources compared to alternatives.
A medium end gaming PC can display impressively realistic graphics at high resolutions and framerates while also being useful for a variety of other computationally intensive processing tasks like video encoding, compiling large code bases, etc. Or it can be used to host deeply mediocre local LLMs.
The actual frontier models from companies like Anthropic or OpenAI require vastly more expensive computing resources, resources that could otherwise be used for potentially more useful computation that isn't so inefficient. Think of all the computing power going into frontier models but applied to weather forecasting or cancer research or whatever.
Of course it's not either or, but as this article and similar ones point out, chips and other computing resources aren't infinite and AI for now at least has a seemingly insatiable appetite and enough dollars to starve other uses.

by zdc1

1 subcomments

Thankfully we're at a stage where a 4 year old second-hand iPhone is perfectly usable, as are any M-series Macs or most Linux laptops. Sucks for anyone needing something particularly beefy for work; but I feel that a lot of purchases can be delayed for at least a year or two while this plays out.

by goku12

2 subcomments

I understand the issue with all the devices. But what about the rest of the things that depend on these electronics, especially DRAMs? Automotive, Aircraft, Marine vessels, ATC, Shipping coordination, traffic signalling, rail signalling, industrial control systems, public utility (power, water, sewage, etc) control systems, transmission grid control systems, HVAC and environment control systems, weather monitoring networks, disaster altering and management systems, ticketing systems, e-commerce backbones, scheduling and rostering systems, network backbones, entertainment media distribution systems, defense systems, and I don't know what else. Don't they all require DRAMs? What will happen to all of them?

by jazzyjackson

4 subcomments

Question: are SoCs with on die memory be effected by this?
Looks like the frame.work desktop with Ryzen 128GB is shipping now at same price it was on release, Apple is offering 512GB Mac studios
Are snapdragon chips the same way?

by compounding_it

4 subcomments

Software has gotten bad over the last decade. Electron apps were the start but these days everything seems to be so bloated, right from the operating systems to browsers.
There was a time when apple was hesitant to add more ram to its iPhones and app developers would have to work hard to make apps efficient. Last few years have shown Apple going from 6gb to 12gb so easily for their 'AI' while I consistently see the quality of apps deteriorating on the App Store. iOS 26 and macOS 26 are so aggressive towards memory swapping that loading settings can take time on devices with 6gb ram (absurd). I wonder what else they have added that apps need purging so frequently. 6gb iphone and 8gb M1 felt incredibly fast for the couple of years. Now apparently they are slow like they are really old.
Windows 11 and Chrome are a completely different story. Windows 10 ran just fine on my 8th gen pc for years. Windows 11 is very slow and chrome is a bad experience. Firefox doesn't make it better.
I also find that gnome and cosmic de are not exactly great at memory. A bare minimum desktop still takes up 1.5-1.6gb ram on a 1080p display and with some tabs open, terminal and vscode (again electron) I easily hit 8gb. Sway is better in this regard. I find alacrity sway and Firefox together make it a good experience.
I wonder where we are heading on personal computer software. The processors have gotten really fast and storage and memory even more so, but the software still feels slow and glitchy. If this is the industry's idea of justifying new hardware each year we are probably investing in the wrong people.

by eb0la

1 subcomments

I believe we're in the middle of a "perfect storm" and AI is not the only one to blame:
- Right now A LOT of PCs are getting out of date because Windows 11 wants some new hardware that's missing in older PCs. - At the same time, smartphones were starting to use and need more memory. - Modern cars (mostly electric) have much more electronics inside than older ones... they're now distributed systems with several CPUs working together along a bus. - The cloud needs to upgrade and newer servers have much more memory than older ones with almost the same foorprint (wich means you need to lease less datacenter space). - And GPUs for AI are in demand and need RAM.
But only AI is to blame although we're living in a perfect storm for RAM demand.

by dizlexic

2 subcomments

Alarmist silliness. If it's a bubble prices will drop. If it isn't production will adapt.

by motbus3

2 subcomments

For me, there is concerning a flag about all of this.
I know this is not always true, but on this case, crucial folks say the margins for end user are too low and they have demand for AI.
I suppose they do not intend to bring a new AI focused unit because it is not worth it or they believe the hype might be gone before it they are done. But what intrigues me is why they would allow other competitors to step up in a segment they dominate? They could raise the prices for the consumers if they are not worried about competition...
There is a whole "not-exactly" ai industry labeled as AI that received a capital t of money. Is that what they are going for?

by Ekaros

4 subcomments

Outside say video and image editing and maybe lossless audio. Why is this much ram even needed in most use cases? And I mean actually thinking about using it. Computer code unless you are actually doing whole Linux kernel, is just text. So lot of projects probably would fit in cache. Maybe software companies should be billed for user's resources too...

by elthor89

4 subcomments

If all manufacturers jump into serving the ai market segment.
Can this not be a opportunity for new entrants to start serving the other market segments?
How hard is it to start and manufacture memory for embedded systems in cars, or pc?

by johnea

3 subcomments

"May rise"?
Prices are already through the roof...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates

by loudandskittish

1 subcomments

Love all the variations of "8GB of RAM should be enough for anybody" in here.

by memoriuaysj

2 subcomments

the first stages of the world being turned into computronium.
next stage is paving everything with solar panels.

by netbioserror

3 subcomments

Positive downstream effect: The way software is built will need to be rethought and improved to utilize efficiencies for stagnating hardware compute. Think of how staggering the step from the start of a console generation to the end used to be. Native-compiled languages have made bounding leaps that might be worth pursuing again.

by deadbabe

0 subcomment

Are we finally going to be forced to use something like CollapseOS, when the supply chains can no longer deliver chips to the masses?

by worik

0 subcomment

```
    AI companies are spending billions of dollars constructing data centers at warp speed around the world. It's the reason why Gogia says the demand for these chips isn't just a cyclical blip.
```
That makes no sense, except in the very short term.
The Datacentre building going on is clearly cyclic, the start of a cycle, but still a cycle. There are finite requirements, finite money and finite tolerance for loss.
RAM lead in times to ramp up production are long, but also finite.
This will correct, again. Hopefully in the meantime we learn to do more with less, always an innovation engine

by corimaith

0 subcomment

I always feel to place prices in context; Yes it does suck that 32gb DDR5 Ram is 300 dollars now, but comparatively a Magnus Pro XL table is $800 from the beginning. Furniture, Food, Clothes, etc are all at much higher marginal prices, its rather that PC building has been exceptionally cheap here. Are you really going to angrily shake your fist at society for that?

by shmerl

1 subcomments

> She said the next new factory expected to come online is being built by Micron in Idaho. The company says it will be operational in 2027
Isn't Micron stopping all consumer RAM production? So their factories won't help anyway.

by kotaKat

1 subcomments

Does this mean developers will have to make their software work on hardware with 8GB of RAM and stop blindly assuming every person in the world gets a packed developer workstation like they do?

by estimator7292

0 subcomment

At work we can't get DRAM chips. Micron stopped talking to us. We're looking to spend millions of dollars and nobody wants it.
It's insane.

by jennyholzer3

0 subcomment

The important question is: Who is planning to buy the datacenters and their hardware when these ludicrously overvalued AI companies are forced to shut doors?

by emsign

0 subcomment

Yeah, economic bubbles suck the life out of everything else. Imagine what tech doesn't get funding now because of this bet on LLMs.

by l9o

2 subcomments

It feels like a weird tension: we worry about AI alignment but also want everyone to have unrestricted local AI hardware. Local compute means no guardrails, fine-tune for whatever you want.
Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.

by racl101

1 subcomments

I should probably buy a spare Logitech keyboard and mouse pair. Mine current ones are seeing wear and tear.

by xbmcuser

1 subcomments

Might not be the best thing for US but rest of the world needs China to reach parity on node size with TSMC to crash the market.

by abhi555shek

1 subcomments

This is where government can jump in and take advantage of the less supply by opening large semi conductor factories quickly and helping people in avoiding this bottlneck.

by alecco

1 subcomments

For a while CPUs kept getting significantly faster every year. Then ram kept getting bigger. Then NVMe came along and brought 200-1000x IOPS.
So writing optimized software was niche and overshadowed by the huge gains of hardware. People and corporations didn't care. They preferred fast feature delivery. Even when optimizing techniques like multi-tenant servers, we ended up having heavy containers wasting RAM and resources. And most apps switched to web frameworks like Electron where each one has its own huge web browser. Most people didn't care.
I hope this shortage has a silver lining of untangling the mess and refactoring the sea of bloat. But I know it's more likely some trick will be found to just patch it up a bit and only reduce the pain up to the new equilibrium level. For example something idiotic like Electron sharing resources across multiple apps and taking huge security risks. Corporations love to play false dichotomies to save pennies.

by derelicta

0 subcomment

I'd like to see a State-owned memory manufacturer

by kankerlijer

1 subcomments

Well thank th FSM that the article opens right up with buy now! No thanks, I'm kind of burnt out on mindless consumerism, I'll go pot some plants or something.

0 subcomment

by HexPhantom

1 subcomments

What's a bit unsettling is that this isn't a short spike driven by hype; it's a structural shift in demand

by bfrog

0 subcomment

AI has had a net negative on my life and created negative value for me and my family. It's raising my power rate. It's stealing my ideas and creative output. All to enrich a select few assholes who didn't need any more enrichment.
AI embodies everything wrong with our modern gilded age era of capitalism.

by agilob

0 subcomment

It's going to be interesting for Google Chrome team when new laptops will be equipped with 8Gb RAM by default.

by arjie

3 subcomments

DRAM spot prices are something like what they were 4 years ago. Having RAM for cheap is nice. But it doesn't cost an extraordinary amount. I recently needed some RAM and was able to pick up 16x32 DDR4 for $1600. That's about twice as expensive as it used to be but $1600 is pretty cheap for 512 GiB of RAM.
A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.

by ChoGGi

0 subcomment

May rise? RAM has already gone through the roof, why wouldn't everything else?

0 subcomment

by ugh123

0 subcomment

You either like creating things or you like thinking about things.

by sega_sai

0 subcomment

So that makes it clearer how all these AI data centers will be payed for. They will be payed for by all of us paying more for the PCs, laptops and phones, while all the AI people arrange sweet deals guaranteeing low prices.

by krick

0 subcomment

Reminds me of my comment of 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581390

by 29athrowaway

1 subcomments

AI needs data and data that comes from consumer devices.

by cmxch

0 subcomment

At what point does antitrust become a thing?

by shevy-java

6 subcomments

I now consider this a mafia that aims to milk us for more money. This includes all AI companies but also manufacturers who happily benefit from this. It is a de-facto monopoly. Governments need to stop allowing this milking scheme to happen.

by vittore

2 subcomments

I've been ruminating on this past two years, with life before AI most of the compute staying cheap and pretty much 90% idle , we are finally getting to the point of using all of this compute. We probably will find more algorithms to improve efficiency of all the matrix computations, and with AI bubble same thing will happen that happened with telecom bubble and all the fiber optic stuff that turned out to be drastically over provisioned. Fascinating times!

by disqard

1 subcomments

The free market will surely fix this, amirite?
Maybe this is the free market working as intended -- did you know that RAM is actually a luxury item, like a Rolls Royce, and most plebes should just make do with 4gb machines, because that is the optimum solution!

by Culonavirus

0 subcomment

I mean yea, but this is THE wrong site to post stuff like this. Half the people here are the AI cock and the other half is riding it.

by cglan

4 subcomments

At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.
Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly
- high electricity prices - crazy computer part prices - phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs
and the benefits are mostly - slop and chatgpt
Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If most people's interactions with AI are the negative externalities they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost.

by CTDOCodebases

0 subcomment

"May"

by arnaudsm

1 subcomments

[deleted]

by devhouse

0 subcomment

[dead]

by jennyholzer2

0 subcomment

[dead]

by bschmidt97979

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by bschmidt97979

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by appreciatorBus

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by throwaway743

0 subcomment

This might be a little conspiracy thinking, but I think it's possible that the recent drive from NVIDIA to move toward defense contracting and shift to B2B is part of a larger strategy. When you combine that with the rapid increases in hardware pricing and the push toward renting cloud compute, it looks like a form of collusion between the private sector and the government in the name of "national security".
The goal seems to be to squash the proliferation of open source LLMs and prevent individuals from running private, uncensored models at home. It is an effective way to kill any possible underdog or startup competition by making the "barrier to entry" (the compute) a rented privilege rather than a private resource. The partnership with Palantir seems to point directly to this, especially considering the ideologies of Thiel and Karp.
They are building a world where intelligence is centralized and monitored, and local sovereignty over AI is treated as a liability to be phased out

by bilsbie

0 subcomment

Take this to the limit and humans end up as a primitive, agrarian society and AI does its own thing with industry.

by czhu12

0 subcomment

It seems… fine? Hasn’t DRAM always been a boom and bust industry with no real inflation — in fact massive deflation — over the past 30 years?
Presumably the boom times are the main reason why investment goes into it so that years later, consumers can buy for cheap.