by stuxnet79
9 subcomments
- Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years.
It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all the dry powder out of the private markets. Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue. It is increasingly looking like they might not commit to the purchase order they made which kick-started this whole panic over RAM.
Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?
- I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of Google's TurboQuant[0] introduced 26 days prior.
Given that TurboQuant results in a 6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches and up to 8x boost in speed, this optimization is already showing up in llama.cpp, enabling significantly bigger contexts without having to run a smaller model to fit it all in memory.
Some people thought it might significantly improve the RAM situation, though I remain a bit skeptical - the demand is probably still larger than the reduction turboquant brings.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513475
- I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of China's new memory companies.
[0] https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...
by tim-projects
1 subcomments
- The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.
- It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?
- If only we have not allowed oligopolies to exist. Meanwhile, EU is not in the race at all and US has very few fabs.
- I fear the author and most commenters are not aware of the law of demand and supply. If there is demand for consumer RAM, there will be supply for consumer RAM. It just takes time and risk-assessment to scale up operations.
We have RAM shortage now, we will have very cheap RAM tomorrow. It’s not like production is bottlenecked by raw materials. Chip companies just need to assess if the demand by AI companies will last so it’s better to scale up, or perhaps they should wait it out instead of oversupplying and cutting into their profits.
by tomaytotomato
1 subcomments
- I just checked my gaming PC I built a few years ago with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, its actually gone up in value, that is unheard of generally.
Think I will scrap my PC and sell its parts.
I wonder if there are any niche companies building decent rigs with DDR3 and 5/6th generation Intel CPUs out there, it is cheap and might be a business opportunity?
- I'm personally hoping that one of the AI or data center companies is suddenly unable to pay for their bills and deflate the entire industry. Probably the only hope of things getting better before the 2030s.
- Thank god they shut down 3D XPoint.
by WesolyKubeczek
1 subcomments
- I fear that the real reason we do have a shortage, I mean, the real reason for the demand, is AI companies scooping what they can so that their competitors, whether existing or incumbent, can’t get to it.
by ochre-ogre
2 subcomments
- can't read the article due to a paywall.
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