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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.\u00a0 Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.\u00a0 ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
Tiz.io Poor apple, what else could they do? They're only marking up RAM about 6-10x right now. It stands to reason they need to increase the multiple as prices go up. Reply
bigdragon I worry the RAM market has entered a feedback loop of higher prices causing competitive booking of capacity further out causing even higher prices causing… just repeat over and over again. This is exactly the sort of situation a new competitor can disrupt. Good thing the politicians are racing to ban those new competitors! https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/018/012/this_is_fine.jpeg Reply
vanadiel007 bigdragon said: I worry the RAM market has entered a feedback loop of higher prices causing competitive booking of capacity further out causing even higher prices causing… just repeat over and over again. This is exactly the sort of situation a new competitor can disrupt. Good thing the politicians are racing to ban those new competitors! https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/018/012/this_is_fine.jpeg The new competitor will do the same thing and sell mostly to the AI market as they are willing to pay very high prices right now. There's only 2 ways out: 1. Flood the market with memory so abundant that the price collapses. Not a good idea since it requires production capacity we simply do not have. 2. Regulate the RAM market on a temporary basis until pricing stabilizes. Something will need to happen soon. Reply
tommo1982 I think flood as in rain is needed more than RAM atm. With all the heat waves in 2026 Reply
ezst036 Yall should be switching to Linux so you can use le $$ memory. $ ave $ mon $ y. Reply
DougMcC vanadiel007 said: The new competitor will do the same thing and sell mostly to the AI market as they are willing to pay very high prices right now. There's only 2 ways out: 1. Flood the market with memory so abundant that the price collapses. Not a good idea since it requires production capacity we simply do not have. 2. Regulate the RAM market on a temporary basis until pricing stabilizes. Something will need to happen soon. Here's a third: Literally any of the thousands of AI researchers working day and night on this problem find a meaningful optimization of the memory usage for frontier models. A single significant optimization and the memory demand goes poof. Reply
bigdragon ezst036 said: Yall should be switching to Linux so you can use le $$ memory. $ ave $ mon $ y. That doesn't work for everyone. Many of us rely upon programs that use a lot of RAM. Blender hoards RAM whether you're on Windows or Linux — it doesn't matter. High resolution sculptures are very demanding to work with. A lot of other development tools can be that way too. Not everyone is simply a gamer or web user. Reply
Mark Knight This is comical, he's upset that now he has to charge 12x rather than 6x as much as he did previously to the issue 🤦♂️ Reply
Ricket5 vanadiel007 said: The new competitor will do the same thing and sell mostly to the AI market as they are willing to pay very high prices right now. There's only 2 ways out: 1. Flood the market with memory so abundant that the price collapses. Not a good idea since it requires production capacity we simply do not have. 2. Regulate the RAM market on a temporary basis until pricing stabilizes. Something will need to happen soon. If someone built up the capacity (takes years) too flood the market and it did collapse that means anyone who built capcacity would go bankrupt and we'd be left with less RAM companies and back to where we are. This is a great idea if you want to bankrupt RAM companies and be stuck with the one company who wasn't stupid enough to build capacity. Regulation is not going to happen. Unless you declare RAM a sort of national security/critical resource at which point what will happen is it will ALL go to productive use. IE nothing for gaming and hobby stuff at all. You want to kill PC gaming this is how you do it. PC gamers need to accept we are going to the cloud. It was always going to be this way. PC gaming master race will lead the way to gaming as a pay per tier service and everyone who's bought a video card since the 8800gtx or a game on Steam has voted for this and shown they want it with their money. We got what we paid for and voted for. Complaining about it now is childish. Reply
ezst036 bigdragon said: That doesn't work for everyone. Many of us rely upon programs that use a lot of RAM. Blender hoards RAM whether you're on Windows or Linux — it doesn't matter. High resolution sculptures are very demanding to work with. A lot of other development tools can be that way too. Not everyone is simply a gamer or web user. My comment was mainly for the web browser bros and even a level of gamer. Plenty of them complaining though meanwhile their reasons and barriers are a whopping zero. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/apple-nearly-doubled-its-inventory-to-11-09-billion-as-memory-costs-ate-its-gross-margin#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.