Another reason to hate AI: DRAM costs increasing faster than gold!

[thewayne]

Memory costs THIS YEAR is up 171% year over year! As an example, "Corsair's Vengeance RGB 2x16GB 6000MT/s dual-channel DDR5 kit is going for $183 on Newegg (at the time of writing). But if you check pricing history with PCPartPicker, that same kit cost just $91 in July." WOW. I'm really glad I upgraded my system over a year ago!

That's 32 gig of memory. I've got 64 in the PC that I'm on right now. The servers they're using to return AI queries? I expect they're running 256-512 gig or more.

So not only are these server farms consuming land, electricity, water, jet engines, they're now creating shortages of memory for computers. And since they have the money to pre-empt anybody else in the supply chain, they're jumping to the head of the queue with memory manufacturers like Samsung so these prices are going to remain high for several years.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/dram-prices-surge-171-percent-year-over-year-ai-demand-drives-a-higher-yoy-price-increase-than-gold

https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/05/147220/dram-costs-surge-past-gold-as-ai-demand-strains-supply

Comments

[disneydream06]

That is a massive WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The prices doubled in four months? :o :o :o
Hugs, Jon

[kaishin108]

This is awful! I wish we could do something. They are really integrating it. :(

[richardf8]

At first I misread it and wondered what Trump's tariffs on Scotch had to do with AI!

[thewayne]

Heh!

[dewline]

Horrific.

Not kidding.

[thewayne]

It was one thing several years ago when DRAM spiked due to flooding in the East destroyed several plants.  This is entirely something else.

[silveradept]

Capitalism at its finest failure condition, where the people with all the money can pervert and distort the market and have all the resources eaten up by unproductive things because they're able to pay the most for it.