DataDome said that the bots used a day-and-night pattern to mimic human activity and also deployed cache-busting parameters — that is, the addition of unique parameters to every request to ensure that they get the latest information and not the one stored in cache. Despite that, there were several telltale signs that these were automated bots. For example, they exclusively targeted RAM listings, and they didn’t interact with other site features like search or shopping cart. The traffic also did not vary to consider breaks, reduced traffic during weekends, and the peak in activity during early evening. When the bot encountered a technical issue, the traffic dropped considerably for several minutes before returning to 100% capacity — something that just does not happen with organic human traffic.
This incident shows how bad the AI infrastructure build-out is hitting the memory and storage industries. Data centers are already expected to consume nearly 70% of the world’s memory supply this year, resulting in limited stocks for every other segment. If this continues in the next several years, analysts say that this will spell the end of entry-level PCs by 2028. We hope that the memory chip manufacturers like Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix increase their manufacturing capacity to stabilize prices once more, but this is easier said than done, with new fabs and production lines taking several months, if not years, to build from scratch.
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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/pc-components/dram/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/dram-bots-reportedly-being-deployed-to-hoover-up-memory-chips-and-components-one-operation-ran-10-million-web-scraping-requests-hitting-ddr5-ram-product-pages-every-6-5-seconds#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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