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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

(www.buysellram.com)
160 points redohmy | 7 comments | 15 Nov 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 1s | source | bottom
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mrsilencedogood ◴[21 Nov 25 21:22 UTC] No.46009135[source]▶
All I can say is,

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

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1. Retr0id ◴[21 Nov 25 21:43 UTC] No.46009327[source]▶
I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.
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2. smallmancontrov ◴[21 Nov 25 21:55 UTC] No.46009438[source]▶
There is a way, and if anyone tells you we have to go full Hitler or Stalin to do it they are liars because last time we let inequality cook this hard FDR and the New Deal figured out how to thread the needle and proved it could be done.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics on tap at the moment.

Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course, but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get very serious very quickly and we have to start making better decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.

3. swatcoder ◴[21 Nov 25 22:17 UTC] No.46009667[source]▶
> Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure?

There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds.

Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped us economically outcompete the adversary during the Cold War. Broadly, we're now afraid of having any kind of brake or dampener on investments and we are more afraid of inefficiency and corruption if the government were to intervene than we are of speculation or exploitation if it doesn't.

In democratically regulated capitalism, there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control, but the arguments against pulling them remain more thoroughly developed and more closely held than those in favor of them.

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4. amelius ◴[21 Nov 25 23:20 UTC] No.46010264[source]▶
> there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control

Care to share some keywords here?

5. octoberfranklin ◴[22 Nov 25 00:23 UTC] No.46010758[source]▶
A tax on scale.

Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that.

If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation.

Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought over, just like the Fed prime interest rate. But it's a single scalar instead of a whole executive branch department and a hundred kilopages of regulations like we have in the antitrust-enforcement clusterfuck. Which makes it way harder to pull shenanighans.

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6. zozbot234 ◴[22 Nov 25 00:35 UTC] No.46010844[source]▶
> If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

Why? That's exactly the circumstances where the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior. You get lower costs (due to economies of scale) and a very low chance of monopolization. so everyone's happy. In the case of this DRAM/flash price spike, the natural "small" actors are fabs slightly off the leading edge, that will be able to retool their production and supply these devices for a higher profit.

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7. octoberfranklin ◴[22 Nov 25 01:52 UTC] No.46011330{3}[source]▶
the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior.

If that were true, "you're in Amazon's kill zone" wouldn't be something VC's say to startups. And yet, they do say that.