Finally secure a research grant and had budgeted money for a new compute workstation and the RAM prices are killing my budget, because I'd love to get at least 256 GB of RAM and that's 4-5 grand now. Ridiculous, especially since I'd like to have a GPU in it with at least 32Gb of VRAM for medical image model training, so that is also like 4-5 grand too.
Do I wait two years and hope, or pay, isthe question I keep asking myself.
You're building a common infrastructure to address privacy concerns about the use of shared infrastructure??
Basically make your own hpc provider for academic purposes, and rent out extra capacity to smaller commercial interests to utilise that spare capacity and also prop up the local economy with usable research compute.
how many successful careers include 8 months in prison
The allegations haven't been proven to be true. Thats what the courts will decide on when the class action continues.
- Cutting DRAM production in 2022 as a result of low prices/demand made sense if they didn't expect the market to recover as quickly as it did. A lot of the recovery is also likely caused by the start of the AI boom.
- The deals OpenAI made with SK Hynix and Samsung was a smart move by OpenAI where they drove up prices for everybody else while securing "cheap" supply themselves. I dont think its clear whether SK Hynix and Samsung came out ahead in that deal as the demand likely would have risen either way and it wouldn't have needed to go up by as much as it has now.
- Moving production to HBM also makes perfect sense when that is what the market demands and is willing to pay a premium for.
It made less sense back when billionaires needed to get on trains and spend hours to collude. Now they just make podcast appearances.
See the prisoner's dilemma.
That's a matter of course. This goes way beyond our wallets. They are actively pricing us out of computing. They are deliberately pushing computers back to the big iron mainframe era.
Computers are subversive: they democratized cryptography, copyright infringement, all sorts of things. Now that humanity has developed AI, they will not cannot tolerate mere citizens having access to powerful computers any longer.
If we don't fight this somehow, it's over for us. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for will be destroyed. We need some kind of second amendment but for computers.
(Speaking of which—I've seen people suggest a seti@home-like approach to creating a frontier-level, fully open LLM. C'mon, guys, let's vibe code this thing!)
> The judge found that long-term HBM lock-ups, refusals of long-term conventional DRAM contracts, Micron's Crucial closure, fab delays, the failure to expand despite record prices, near-identical customer vetting and the companies' prior cartel history supported a plausible inference of conspiracy.
They didn't even announce plans to expand production until after the news of this class action lawsuit broke, despite massive DRAM price increases.
“To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[3]“
What hasn't happened is that they have been found guilty in the latest class action lawsuit. Which is what this discussion is about.
So far the court has only decided that the lawsuit can proceed, which indicates there is some substance to it.
In my opinion, the fact that this has happened before, and that the companies involved eventually plead guilty, is an important piece of information for people following this story. Especially in light of the statements from the companies involved today.
It is the complete opposite of the current situation.
Work for however long, shut down. I do this with linode and their GPU VMs. If you shutdown nightly and on weekends, the costs drop dramatically on a monthly spend.
I only need it a few hours per day, so very cheap for custom compute.
The custom volume keeps your persistent install, configs, work in progress, etc.
You can programmatically kick off a linode, attach the volume, then boot, as well as delete, all via curl or python.
So not variable rates, but no rates when the beast is deleted.
The project ran out of budget roughly three months in. From what I heard, status meetings consist of everyone getting together once a month, asking "have we gotten any more budget yet? no?", and then wait until the project runs out.
Cloud providers need to make a profit too, and they've gotten very good at ensuring that their clients forget this point. The whole advantage of cloud compute is that you don't pay for the time you're not using it, but once you reach a certain point you're the one covering the overhead for everybody else.
The glut of AI chips will lower prices meaning consumer GPUs start looking high margin. And if they pile into it again, prices will come down.
Kevin O'Leary's 20 GW data centre is never getting built. Maybe he'll do a "phase 1" at a few hundred MW, but he's not going to build the largest power station in the world.
What you probably want instead is a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra. The 256GB model is ~$11k. The problem? Demand is so high that the lead time last I checked was March. But this will give you 256GB of shared memory, well above the 32GB you'll get on a 5090.
If you can live with 96GB (or less) on a Mac Studio it's quite a lot cheaper and the lead times are far quicker.
Well not really, there is the AMD Radeon AI PRO 9700, which is a RX 9070 (or possibly the XT, dunno) with 32GB VRAM. It does use slower GDDR6, but it has "held its price better" (for some definition of better) and is still available for like 2.3k€ (this includes taxes). Though I remember when I was thinking of buying one when it was 1.4k not too long ago and didn't :( now I just don't bother looking anymore.
The RX 7900 XTX has slightly higher bandwidth at almost 1kGBps compared to AI PROs almost 650GBps but has only 24GB instead of 32GB, though I can't find the card on sale anywhere rn.
In the end I see it mostly as a "is the massive jump in price worth it, or do you risk it and maybe get multiple AI 9700s instead and deal with ROCm instead". I can't tell how good ROCm has gotten in regards to training and such, but for inference Vulkan on my 9070 XT is pretty solid.
those upgrades ARE ACTUAL UPGRADES, and if exiting ddr4 helps on producing more ddr5, why not?
(and the cheap chinese makers can produce plenty of those ddr4 chips, so it's NOT that "monopoly destroying the market" scenario)
you can just sell the production line and re-purpose human workers for ddr5?
There's a story where a fab company tried to open a fab in America but the chips kept coming out broken, and they tried everything and the only thing that worked was disassembling the whole factory and rebuilding it in the exact floor layout of their Taiwanese one.
Sometimes they do salvage one or more machines as both processes use the same one. But that had better be worth shutting down the old process, financially.
On RAM side it's purely "the factories that turn wafers into RAM", and big part of the problem is that HBM just yields less bits per wafer (the number I've heard is between extra size and lower yield, about half) so more of the capacity moved to making HBM also lowers total bit count made
Something China literally never did though? They seem to love flooding the world with what they produce.
"more akin to hawks flying in formation – an activity that hawks ordinarily do not do"
Just strange nowhere in article DDR5 is mentioned...
They could literally reopen manufacturing. But why? They know its free profit through inaction as long as none of them fix consumer DRAM market.
This act of playing dumb and ignorant has never been easier. Getting really old
They "literally" couldn't, there's no idle fab. They could redirect manufacturing to make more consumer RAM instead of HBM but why eat into your profits by doing that? The shareholders won't be happy.
I'm not a fan of this situation but unless there's some WhatsApp texts the investigators will find to point to collusion this is dead in the water. The filing itself is based on a lot of circumstantial evidence.
If you really are thinking from a game theory perspective, in order for it to be the prisoner dilemma, they each need to benefit from lowering prices individually (to cheat). But given that demand outstrips supply so much, they each just lose if they lower price, regardless of what the other players do.
Failure to enforce this kind of thing gives us shortages of eggs and insulin too; It is a real source of social harm.
These things are complicated, and people act like the mere existence of increased prices is evidence of malpractice. This is a naiive and juvenile attitude.
Note, it's not just one thing, it's a combination of practices that make the collusion more likely explanation than otherwise
If they had started building new fabs earlier, they might have been able to sell even more inventory _and_ gotten back into the consumer market that they now neglect. Instead they've been way too slow to respond to demand or, in this case, purposefully didn't respond to demand.
OAI would be doing the same.
The sense of scarcity factors into the ability to negotiate these contracts. Cooking the reports has a direct impact on contracts and does increase real demand.
Nearly everything could have a non-colluding explanation depending on the tech and market. (for example I would be skeptical to build up extremly expensive production if i follow the widespread belief that Ai is a huge bubble)
However, collusion is not magically out of the question with previous instances and some unexplained indicators. (which imo is what this dismissal means)
If you think demand will break down before you can get a return on your investemtn, you should not build.
If you think of a different aspect of "the AI bububle popping", where demand for RAM does not significantly decrease, that's fine of course. But RAM demand by AI going down massively seems to be a major part of what a lot of people imagine when they talk about the bubble going away.
Even if we got back to pre-AI bubble, hell, especially if we got back to pre-ai bubble pricing, we'd see a lot of push for local AI and 32 GB+ GPUs/128GB+ SOC systems
I put up as an example and prefaced it with me not knowing enough about the market and tech. I have not done the calculations, because I have no access to any of the relevant numbers, do not have a relevant model of the market dynamics I would expect, and do not have to suffer the losses if it doesn't play out.
It is great that you have more knowledge to be able to confidently state those things, however, I have to say I have no reason to actually believe you do.
A bubble means something is overvalued. The stock prices will go down if the bubble pops, but not the demand.
One example of people not sharing your definition are the many comments of the form "can't wait for the Ai bubble to burst and ram/gpus getting affordable again".
Also I am not sure about your examples. Same as the other commenter: I have no idea about the rail bubble. But I believe the dot-com bubble burst did in fact reduce demand on compute infrastructure. (Not long term of course.) eg https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2002/01/11/server-sales-...
Neither does its being here to stay does not mean it is good or desirable.
In any case "It is here to stay." does not resemble a falsifiable claim. If you were wrong how could you tell?
Passenger rail versus freight rail also demonstrates how the railroad bubble and aftermath ended up proving that not every use of rail is inherently profitable. In the long term, passenger rail is rarely profitable and almost always has to be subsidized by the state in some way with only a handful of exceptions.
I also think mandatory jail times for the CEOs need to happen. It can not be that they can buy their way out of punishments and damage they cause against society.
Capitalism is defined by:
- the means of production (factories, tools, employees, land,..)
- being owned privately (as opposed to being state owned)
- for profit (so you do not have to live paycheck to paycheck)
A free market is defined by:
- price of goods is set by supply and demand
- the government doesn't intervene (for example through subsidies)
Price fixing is defined by:
- all the sellers (or buyers) agreeing on and therefore setting the price
- price is not set by supply and demand, therefore you do not have a free market
The way this is packaged seems to hinge on the expectation that there isn't some kind of AI revolution under way. Everyone just spontaneously decided to fuck over dram production and instead manufacture nearly impossible assemblies that yield like shit. The semiconductor industry. Famously risk adverse. I really don't buy it.
If the dram price went up and there wasnt something like HBM demand to explain it away, then perhaps we have something more serious to work with.
It gets a little dubious, when the former CEO of Nvidia is broadcast on international news about making friendly recommendations to SK Hynix to focus on HBM over a consumer market they already hit 90% profit margins on. Then a year later hitting 600% growth in a market circularly financed by Nvidia.
These people ruined a lot of other peoples fun, and while not a crime they still burned their brands goodwill with consumers. In court that will matter whether they like it or not. =3
"Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall." (proverb 16:18)
With that said, the market will sort it out. Either the AI companies run out of capital or more production comes online.
rented compute could become so much the norm that owning compute can’t bridge the gap again.
Game consoles are shifting to discless as we speak, so no used game market. Phone leases are a thing now so console leases are probably coming. They maybe even already here if you consider game streaming. In this very thread people are suggesting that renting makes so much more sense than building that it’s almost treated as a questionable practice to own.
But once ownership of compute is no longer tenable, it doesn’t take much for the market to be coerced via money into pushing agendas via marketing. Not just political agendas. "Please drink a verification can" meme, for example.
There will be too much money to be made in leasing compute that it would never make market sense to restore ownership to the people.
Micron had a gross margin of almost 87% last quarter for a commodity. Yes, it takes time to build a factory and money to buy the machines, but memory is a commodity. There is no 'secret' around creating it. That type of margin simply will not last.
Of course, it would be nice if there was enough supply to meet demand, but there currently is not, so it has to be one or the other. I still prefer expensive over not available.
You can still buy 64GB DDR5 RAM today. It just costs a little over a thousand dollars. This price discourages enough buyers for there to be stock left.
Of course, this assumes there is no price fixing going on, which hasn't been determined, yet.
But since Bell systems breakup billionaire caste have been heavy at work to never allow government to wield that kind of power
Supply goes to those willing to pay the highest price (because they can use them at a high productivity).
RAN has a long lead time, so supply isn’t created overnight. That’s not a “market problem” that a physics problem.
It’s not a “market failure” because some customer can buy it at the price they want. Those customers always exist (people who wouldn’t buy 2 years ago unless it was cheaper)
Communism has brought more people out of poverty in the last 100 years than capitalism did in 500.
It's currently being tried in France and the results are, unsurprisingly, devastating. France officially entered a recession (two trimesters in a row with negative GDP growth). It's a country where close to 60% of the GDP is public spending: a circular economy where the government confiscates all the money to give it to public servants and public aids, which then goes back to the government doesn't work.
There's an article, the main article, frontpage today on the biggest (leftist of course) french newspaper:
https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2026/11/15/le-lent-d...
"Le lent declin economique de la France face au reste de l' Europe"
"The slow economical decline of France compared to the rest of Europe"
As a sidenote I'll point out the most of Europe, including the Eurozone, has seen basically zero growth inflation adjusted since the Euro was introduced, while at the same time the GDP of both the US and China have experience tremendous growth.
So that headline is saying: "A planned economy is eff'ing France in an already eff'ed Europe".
> while at the same time the GDP of both the US and China have experience tremendous growth
On the other hand, China is a planned economy
Not fighting on the other side of the world would be a good starting move to avoid increasing energy prices.
Donwe let them buy 40% of food production next, so that they can sell it back at insane prices to starving people ?
If you cap profit margins, it encourages volume, since the only way to make more money is to increase sales.
Perhaps it could encourage new entrants into the market if a new entrant meant that the entire industry's profit margins were uncapped.
……… “denied”
Regulations are inherently against a free market. This is not an ideological stance, it's just what the words mean.
Sometimes there is an argument that conditions do not favor a free market and regulation is required to fix that defect, but that's rather situational.
I mean, we had this discussion before a very long time ago and then it seems like libertarianism took off in start up tech spaces...who are relying on the lack of monopolies and price fixing specifically for their own businesses to be able to be successful...so I don't think the libertarian attitude of a lot of HNers really fits, given the amount of effort the government of the past has put into making the market actually "free" in a real sense and not just a liberal philosophical sense of it technically being possible for you to start a company to try to enter a business (only to get eaten alive by an entrenched oligopoly, for instance).
In some types of businesses, I think there is also good reason to not want it to be a free market. For instance, the nuclear weapons business. So we accept that the "free market" shouldn't apply to everything already.
I think with chip companies, the danger is that it is incredibly risky and expensive to enter the business, so you need to be very wary and on the lookout for things like price fixing and oligopolies...it is in the interests of the established players to do those things. And we haven't really seen very many new entrants to these markets for perhaps good reason (being very difficult to get the amount of VC needed for hardware startups and general wariness about hardware startups in the VC world)...but also perhaps if there was a price fixing schemes...that would also be a reason we haven't seen any new entrants.
So let's say we have regulation meant to combat price fixing or perhaps a judgement from a court of law against parties engaging in price fixing, like what happened with DRAM manufacturers 20-ish years beforehand. Well, by the logic you presented, those are also detrimental to a free market. However this leads to a contradiction, as both regulating and not regulating is a detrimental choice. Either you don't regulate, in which case price fixing -- and also we of course have to take into account that a similar argument argument against regulations also works for (unregulated) monopolies, monopsonies, and other sundry cartel actions -- will negatively undermine the free market. On the other hand, regulating price fixing, monopolies, monopsonies etc. will also negatively undermine the free market.
So, we have a logical inconsistency here as presented. So we realistically have three possibilities:
a) the free market itself is logically contradictory. I mean, many socialists in particular have argued for this position, but I at least don't find this consequent very attractive. It _could_ be true, but let's look at the other two.
b) that price fixing is not detrimental to the free market. Well mayhaps, but that really doesn't seem to correspond to the consensus around price fixing and other similar anticompetitive practices. And as said, the same argument could be made for monopolies and such, so you'd basically have to argue that none of them are detrimental to the market either.
c) that regulation isn't necessarily detrimental to the free market. You kinda already conceded this point, as you said
> Sometimes there is an argument that conditions do not favor a free market and regulation is required to fix that defect, but that's rather situational.
And if we assume this, then the question is no longer whether regulation is always bad for the market, but where the line is between regulation that is bad for the market and which is either neutral or positive for the market. But then the words no longer mean what they should mean by surface analysis, and that's a travesty!
So where does that leave us? Well, for myself the answer seems obviously to be that regulation can be non-detrimental to the free market, etymology be damned! And so in this case, at least from where I'm sitting, a free market advocate should be for legislation against price fixing. But they might think differently, in which case they should justify their views.
So it doesn't just work like that in practice.
Difficult when Capital is global and the companies making all this stuff are global. But I think they'd accept a US court decision given the centrality of that market...
- price of goods is set by supply and demand
- the government doesn't intervene (for example through subsidies)
Price fixing is defined by:
- all the sellers (or buyers) agreeing on and therefore setting the price
- price is not set by supply and demand, therefore you do not have a free market
If the government doesn't intervene, there's no control, so sellers can do whatever they please. Hence price fixing, dumping, monopolies, etc., are all possible in a free market. There's no contradiction.
> [If] price is not set by supply and demand, [...] you do not have a free market
You can't even define what "set by supply and demand" means. Supply and demand are variables in some equation that does not and cannot capture reality.
Example: I, like I'm sure others did, saw the M.2 SSD prices starting to rise. Even though I didn't see the data center build up coming, I bought a small supply of SSDs. Unfortunately I didn't realize the future memory situation!
If this isn't cool with the Hacker News bylaws, I withdraw this idea :)
I think that most people here just don't mind, or even favor this if they're AI accelerationists. Case in point are all the high-scoring hobby projects that are just "I asked Claude to make me X and then write an article about it".
-- particularly given that it's easy to use AI to do the skut work that it's good at, like digging up citation links, without using it to write which its extremely poor at.
I just find myself instantly closing without reading a large percentage of HN submissions these days.
I flag all such articles. I can generate them myself if I want them.
Going after the memory suppliers is fashionable because they've gotten in trouble for collusion before-- but the claim's own text really undermines the collusion argument.
A more interesting question is probably: did large AI companies buy out the ram supply using their fountains of investor money in order to suppress competition in AI ... but that isn't a question that will be explored by this case.
Same here. I'll probably be so old I'd be dead by then.