"That's part of the problem," he said. "This price increase I just provided to you, that's not even guaranteed supply." He explained that he needs to place blanket purchase orders at high prices and wait for when suppliers send "buckets of memory here and there."
"This is definitely not the norm; it's never been this way," Santos added. "That's why we're being proactive. We need to adapt without compromising our customers' trust, and that's just the reality of the business right now. Not only is the price high, but we just don't have insight into how much supply we can get, which is very concerning."
There's no specific time limit for Maingear's BYO RAM program. Santos said that he expects it will run through 2026 based on shortages, and he'll keep it going as long as necessary. He hopes that prices will level off in the next six months, though it's unclear what type of increase from typical lows we'll see. He said that it will take a year and a half for new memory production lines to ramp up, leading him to suggest that maybe things will clear up two years from now.
Other system integrators are also looking into alternatives to raising prices on customers with expensive RAM. New York-based Paradox Customs recently announced a program to skip RAM altogether if you'd rather obtain your own on the market or from old builds.
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Andrew E. Freedman Social Links Navigation Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and BlueSky @andrewfreedman.net . You can send him tips on Signal: andrewfreedman.01
Zaranthos The irony that it wasn't that long ago that flash and memory companies cut production because of lower demand. There are probably AI companies sitting on inventory they can't deploy because of lack of power. This crap is hilarious and sad all at the same time. Reply
Christopher_115 Zaranthos said: The irony that it wasn't that long ago that flash and memory companies cut production because of lower demand. There are probably AI companies sitting on inventory they can't deploy because of lack of power. This crap is hilarious and sad all at the same time. I'm surprised this doesn't seem to be being reported on much: "On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply." https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal Reply
blppt Zaranthos said: The irony that it wasn't that long ago that flash and memory companies cut production because of lower demand. There are probably AI companies sitting on inventory they can't deploy because of lack of power. This crap is hilarious and sad all at the same time. Other posters on here were right, its starting to seem like one big Ponzi scheme (or something along those lines). Reply
Shiznizzle I will choose to remember what Micron did to me. They can change names all they want. There is not recourse from what they did to me. I am one of the lucky few who manage to get DDR5 before it got crazy so my path to AM5 is ok until somerthing goes wrong and then its back to the backup AM4 machine which i am hanging onto this time and not selling Reply
acadia11 While the insane data center build out is a key driver of this price hike, Samsung, sk Hynix, and micron actually state they weren’t going to increase capacity. They are going to ride this boom out much like what we saw in the GPU market and the fear is they will redefine the price scale of RAM. I literally bought 256GB of ddr5 4x64gb cl42 for $754 a week before prices started creeping up in September. I was aware prices would increase but the same kits would cost me $3000 today … didn’t see going to these levels. sSD are next on the list luckily they haven’t seen these price hikes yet. But manufacturers have no incentive to produce more Nvidia showed you can ask for insane pricing in this market. Reply
Heat_Fan89 Christopher_115 said: I'm surprised this doesn't seem to be being reported on much: "On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply." https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal This is one of the reasons why I refuse to use AI in anything computer related including on all my mobile devices. These AI companies can shove it :poop: Reply
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/gaming-pcs/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/gaming-pcs/this-memory-situation-is-a-multi-year-problem-says-maingear-ceo-custom-pc-company-offers-up-byo-ram-builds-to-combat-shortages#main
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