• melfie@lemy.lol
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    146
    ·
    10 hours ago

    The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn’t really exist to be put into GPUs that haven’t been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven’t been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn’t actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible.

    😎

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      7 hours ago

      The price crash is going to be great. Such a massive yo-yo. Most of the AI companies will just completely eat shit out of it.

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        4 hours ago

        Yes and no. The hardware companies have already said that they’re not interested in expanding production. They know it’s a bubble, and don’t want expanded production now to cause a glut in the future when the inevitable pop happens. So prices may not actually drop, (even after the pop), because the companies still won’t be producing more hardware than they currently are.

        My best guess is that we’ll have some dark data centers sitting around collecting dust, but the hardware they bought won’t actually flood the market and crash prices. If anything, since the US dollar’s value is essentially tied to Nvidia and OpenAI’s market share, a pop will only make the dollar less powerful and will counteract any potential drops in prices that may have otherwise happened. The companies will get a trillion dollar bailout when the pop happens, (because they’re too big to fail) then nothing will change about the current hardware prices.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          4 hours ago

          All the ram being bought up is going to end up in the 2nd hand market as the hardware is all liquidated out. The prices will crash, and despite manufacturers not increasing their productions lines to build more ram, will still have to compete against themselves from the used market, meaning they won’t be able to keep trying to charge crazy high prices.

          • foggenbooty@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 hours ago

            The problem is it’s manufacturing capacity that is being bought. They’re going to use that capacity to build HBM modules and data centre GPUs that cannot run outside of specialized servers. There will be a lot of high end gear gathering dust, but nothing you or I can use.

            Maybe if you’re a large business/enterprise you could get some hardware on the cheap during the crash, but it’s not ot like those things are full of DDR5 DIMMs and RTX GPUs.