“AI” thanks for coming to my ted talk
Seems like AI might be going to cause hyperinflation soon…
"The US tariffs imposed on China on 1 August 2025, played a substantial role in the increase in DRAM prices. " DJT say he gonna lower prices on day one. NOPE.
Well, he didn’t necessarily lie, August 1st wasn’t day 1 of his presidency. He didn’t say anything about rising costs afterwards!
I’m pretty sure we could all have quite reasonably expected rising costs, destruction of science, frittering of international standing, increased morbidity and mortality, etc.
If nobody can afford anything with more than 8 gigs of ram for their office workers, they’ll all just pay for more AI tokens because otherwise the 900ms keystroke latency in MS Word would make it impossible to work, right?
I would be shocked if that wasn’t on some AI company’s brainstorm board as a positive side effect (for them) of all of this.
But theres a happily ever after, right? Right?!?
Considering Crucial is killing consumer chip production, and is only one of three companies making consumer chips, no.
In the span of 5 to 10 years, do you think there will not be a return to consumer production?
I’d love to see someone explain to me how the current rate of AI capex will continue to grow in that time span, and how it will be financed. I don’t think it’s feasible.
Manufacturing capacity though doesn’t seem very limited in that kind of time scale, it just needs investment and time to expand. Once it’s there… if it’s not used it’s lost profits. AI hardware deliveries are at an all time high but sentiment has been on shaky ground on the investor side starting this year.
The three memory producers have always exploited market disruption for profits, generally cooperatively. They’re really good at profiting during all disruptions which just happen with newer technology. It doesn’t last.
In the span of 5 to 10 years, do you think there will not be a return to consumer production?
Manufacturing will expand and the higher consumer prices will ensure some manufacturers still service that market. Price will be higher, but it’s not going to get to the point where you can’t buy a personal PC.
The thing is that the consumers of DRAM aren’t just home users, it’s businesses. Businesses all over the world literally can’t absorb hundreds of dollars of extra cost. I’ve set standards for global computing at a business with offices in all continents except antarctica, Dell can handle giving you a global price but you can’t just ship a $1000 laptop to a business in sao paolo and expect the business there to be able to afford it, the margins are not like the US or Europe.
Prices will come down much faster than people think imo. We’ll see a flood of slower DDR5 from substandard processes first, but I would be amazed if in 2027 AI spend is even half of what it was this year.
Micron is stopping Crucial, but they will still sell to companies like Corsair.
Yeah, but at what price?
Killing DIMM production.
That’s of the three major companies that make RAM chips.
There are other companies that make DIMMs. They just buy chips from the RAM chip manufacturers to do it. PNY or Kingston, say.
Micron was just doing a vertically-integrated thing where they did both the chips and DIMMs.
EDIT: Looking back at the article, it does say that.
