my 10 year old ram need no die

Dig up that old invoice or receipt if you can since even your ten year old RAM might have a lifetime warranty on it.

I was thinking of selling my old DDR4 RAM but at this point, I think I'll keep it as a backup in case my current dies for whatever reason between now and the next 10+ years.

Not a bad idea, just keep in mind that a lot of memory companies have lifetime warranties on their higher end modules too that you can try. I recently had success RMA'ing my 2.5 year old sticks that went bad but of course YMMV.

So when is the free market gonna correct this?

Never, you know how this games goes.

Turns out the invisible hand of the market isn't so much a hand as a single outstretched middle finger.

When the AI bubble bursts, or the various electronics suppliers and their suppliers get more factories/capacity online in 2028

Eric Andre as "The Free Market" shoots consumer RAM production; "Why would Samsung do this?"

Where's this free market you speak of? All I see is corruption and corporate welfare.

We know.. Here in America everyday is worse than the one before.

What does "double-digit price increase" mean?
$10 is two digits.
I imagine it's a percentage increase? But then again, it could be anything from 10% to 99%.

If they'll even honor it. No, there are no legal requirements for anything in the US any more.

How mich margin is enough?.Gamers nexus just did a video on Micron's gross margins, and its absolutely disgusting. Its gone from mid 30% to 90% in some of their divisions in a few years.

Or maybe adding two more digits to the price?

Where is the best place to sell DDR4? I have 128GB mixed DIMM and SODIMM.

Good lord... I was just recovering from the shock from current prices...

It's never enough.

I had the same thought, it's such a terrible way of talking about it. I'm guessing it means one order of magnitude.

RAM isn't a free market; it's a cartel.

Right here dogg, hook it up! Honestly anywhere things are sold will be fine, it's pretty much the most liquid commodity besides weed right now. For real though DM me if you're willing to cut a fellow poster a deal. I'm super broke but almost have a free trash PC put together, 10th gen i7/rx580/case/mobo/power supply. For whatever reason people just aren't throwing out old ram these days :p

The Worst Day of Your Life So Far....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpPArfDTGw

Suppose you're a RAM maker. You're raking in fat profits from this maybe-a-bubble situation. Your market forecasts show there's a risk the bubble might pop. Or that new Chinese sources of your commodity are about to become widely available in the West, cratering your beautiful margin. What do you do?

One thing you might do is: encourage the public to buy now, while prices are still high.

Certainly you don't invest in more production capacity, if you suspect that demand will crater before your new production comes online.

Let as all sacrifice a rock and chant the sacred chant!

I guess I'll double down and not buy new hardware even harder!

Ah, the free market and the conundrum of infinite growth

Meanwhile, Amazon is just putting GPUs into warehouses so their competitors don't get them. WTF.

Just go somewhere el.... Oh wait, it is fucked everywhere!!!

So I guess I should get more ram now before it goes even higher....

I thought ASML was backordered for like years?

~2-3 years when the new fabs come online, assuming we're not still spamming new DCs.
If we keep spamming new DCs for the next 3 years, then longer.

If those companies that ordered suddenly go boom, those orders are financially worthless.

Increasing prices is a valid instrument to reduce demand. They are far beyond their capacity.

This is text book market mechanics. Demand rises and so do the prices. As a consequence the demand is somewhat dampened and therefore the market can slowly (!) heal. Due to the shit ton of money that is and can be made, new actors are incentivized to enter the market and existing actors are incentivized to increase their capacity (so no one else jumps in and grabs parts of it).

Now the question is: is it a good sign if such a big number of buyers are willing to throw such an excessive amount of money at you? Probably not, so you might bet on this not playing out in the long run. And the following crash will be hard, because then all the components from the closed data centers would hit the market at the same time with all your backorders going poof.

That's the way they like it. Building more capacity costs shitloads of money, and reduces the price of your product. ASML, TMSC are a racket.

If a major player like the US govt decided they wanted an ASML machine and didn't want to wait, ASML would find a way to make more in parallel. It would cost billions more, but that just makes it expensive, not impossible. With the right incentive, anything is possible. ASML and TSMC aren't incentivised to change the current market.

So it outpaced the profit margins of scientific publishing? Damn! And that article is from 2020 and cited it as 40% for Elsevier, it certainly went up since but surely not to 90%.

Along with Nvidia (and the RAM manufacturers) requiring people to buy shitloads of components in advance, or they just sell to someone else.

"Lifetime" warranties are for the lifetime of the product (however they define that), not for the lifetime of the owner. There are court cases where a "lifetime" of less than 5 years has been upheld.

It's one of the most clever doublespeak things most consumers remain unaware of, so they keep doing it.

There still is not a path for data center components to be used in your gaming rig. They are not compatible and you can't really adapt something like RAM I would wager. You'd have to tear off the chips and make new boards.

Well, when hockey equipment got too expensive I set my sights on soccer. When RAM gets too expensive I'll reset my sights again.

When the AI black hole inverts.

Not only that, if it does crater, your product can still be sold to consumers and businesses like it used to. They have no incentive to change anything.

But the prices never come back down, unfortunately

That depends. If it turns into the other direction that they have much less demand than they produce, they have to reduce prices until enough people buy again so "it keeps flowing".

Don't worry, they'll be outdated soon. If you mean AI GPUs that is. Those are obsolete once the new gen is out because there are massive generational improvements (particularly amount and bandwidth of memory which is what matters most)

That's what they want you to do, yes. Because margins right now are massive. They could be even bigger next year or they could drop. If you buy now, they're guaranteed a fat stack of cash.

It's also HBM not DDR or even GDDR in those GPUs. Good luck finding a consumer board that takes those.

The used GPGPU (is that still a term?) server market will have a metric fucktonne of supply I suspect.

Nvidia is already bracing for this. They did a bunch of stock buyback instead of investing that money in anything that could lead to more future sales. 150 billion dollars I believe.