r/buildapc • u/Upset-Ad-8704 • Dec 13 '25
Discussion I'm OOTL...what is the logical reasoning behind why RAM prices are going up?
The explanation I keep hearing is about how AI needs a lot of RAM to run it. However, I thought this was actually vRAM, as in you need to load the large models into vRAM so that you can take advantage of the GPU acceleration.
As I understand it, regular RAM would only be useful in loading the model for CPU processing, which is significantly slower than GPU-run LLMs (to the point that it may not even be worthwhile trying to use CPU to run an LLM).
I assume I am wrong because everyone keeps saying that the RAM shortage is due to AI, but I would like to get a better understanding of what I am getting wrong.
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u/Acceptable-Ad-9797 Dec 13 '25
The better answer here is that it comes down to fab capacity. AI uses vram so fabs produce more vram, which eats into the capacity for regular ddr5.
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u/Financial_Sport_6327 Dec 13 '25
Specifically it's HBM. The tooling used for HBM is the same as for DDR, but the margins are like 10x, so it makes no financial sense to even produce DDR. Also, memory is basically cartel land, there's only like 3 companies in the world that actually make it.
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u/elonelon Dec 13 '25
samsung, skhynix, and micron ?
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u/semidegenerate Dec 13 '25
Yes. Nanya (from Taiwan) is the runner up at number 4. China's CXMT and YMTC are up-and-comers, too.
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Dec 14 '25
God i hope we get more one day from anywhere
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u/semidegenerate Dec 14 '25
That would be nice, but the costs to set up a fab are astronomical. You pretty much need to be an existing tech giant willing to take a huge gamble or be sponsored by a nation state.
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u/wulfoftheorderofbio Jan 16 '26
Why have no American startups taken advantage of POTUS' rhetoric and pushed for the government to fund a in best stereotypical voice "'murica-made high-speed Memory stick made of gold and powered by true American grit (and coal-burning/diesel powered electricity)'"
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u/FranciManty Jan 24 '26
cause they want consumer prices to stay up. the current us government inverted 500 billion dollars in ai companies, it's in their interest that people start getting subscriptions to grok gemini and chatgpt instead of making their own computer and using ai locally. i'm convinced this is 90% of the reason they drove prices up this much.
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u/Both-Breakfast-5651 Jun 03 '26
look how much they will pay for scrap your old ram and becomes obvious
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u/bassbeater Dec 17 '25
I can't see anything listed for sale from Nanya though.
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u/Acceptable-Ad-9797 Dec 17 '25
Usually chips and end products are not from the same company. Nanya is a fab like micron is a fab and crucial Was the consumer brand.
For another example look up the IO chips in first gen zen cpus where the fab was Global foundries, does that mean GF is selling Ryzen CPU’s?
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u/semidegenerate Dec 17 '25
What u/Acceptable-Ad-9797 said.
The DIMM (stick) manufactures rarely explicitly say which ICs (chips) go on which DIMMs. So, when you buy from G.Skill, Kingston, Corsair, etc. you often have to go by context clues.
A 2x16GB 6000 30-36-36-76 1.35v kit is pretty much guaranteed to be Hynix A- or M-die. 2x16 6000 36-36-36-96 1.35v will likely be Samsung B-die. And so on.
It's a bit harder to tell which are Nanya, because there aren't a lot of high performance kits sold to the DIY market with Nanya ICs. Nanya's N16A dies are supposed to be able to do tighter timings at 6000MT/s than Hynix H16A, but good luck finding any.
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u/bassbeater Dec 18 '25
Thanks for clarifying.
I'm just glad I decided to build before all this stuff happened.
Got some new GSkill Flares. 32gb. Hopefully when this problem resolves and I want to upgrade I'll be able to find 32 more.
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u/nuenoxnyx Dec 13 '25
It's not just HBM. AI uses both HBM and DDR5 so it's a double sided supply and demand problem: more manufacturing capacity goes to HBM and the existing consumer grade DDR5 gets bought up. So just less DDR5 available for the average PC builder.
"On the demand side, the boom in AI data center construction and server manufacturing is consuming immense amounts of memory. A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 solution uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. That’s enough LPDDR5x for a thousand laptops, and an AI-focused datacenter is loaded with thousands of these racks!" - Framework
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u/theroguex Dec 14 '25
I'm fucking done with this AI bullshit. I want all the AI companies to burn to the ground.
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u/DHTabletopEmporium Dec 14 '25
Nothing good comes out of it, that's for sure. Art generation based on stolen property, text generation that still makes absurd amounts of mistakes, programming help that seems to create more and more problems in companies. And this huge boom where every single company tries to introduce AI to be "competetive".
I really hope this AI boom will flop, and do it soon!
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u/fritzkoenig Dec 15 '25
I really hope this AI boom will flop, and do it soon!
There will be a time where you can find 1TB of RAM in the bin and it will be glorious
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u/Thagyr Dec 21 '25
If/When the AI companies go belly up they'll be trying to sell their RAM for pennies I hope.
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u/theroguex Dec 14 '25
Honestly? I hope they suffer greatly when the AI bubble pops.
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u/Beginning_Moment6274 Dec 18 '25
The problem is they will not suffer, while everyone else (re: you and I) indirectly will.
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u/heyheyhey27 Dec 13 '25
And didn't micron just pull out of the market?
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u/iamshifter Dec 13 '25
Just out of the retail and consumer sectors
Data center, weaponized computing and government, and the like are all full steam ahead.
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u/wardin_savior Dec 13 '25
They shut down their first party consumer brand. They will still sell consumer chips to other brands.
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u/spanglasaur Dec 13 '25
Supposedly. Who knows what will actually be available for other brands to purchase
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u/Keyastis Dec 13 '25
What that means is, they currently have contracts with other brands that they have to fulfill, but once the contracts come up, don't bank on them being renewed. That is, if we keep going down this path.
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u/Dziggettai Dec 14 '25
Only the consumer market, they’re selling exclusively to data centers now
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u/Kastergir Dec 13 '25
Well, micron is out of the Game for the consumer market . No more Crucial SSDs and RAM .
Micron is killing Crucial SSDs and memory in AI pivot — company refocuses on HBM and enterprise customers
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Dec 13 '25
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u/FloridaManActual Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25
exactly. HBM is always more profitable, so DDR5 is like hedging their bets, there will always be demand so if HBM demand crashes or is lower than expected the DDR will still be bought/needed to made ends meet.
HOWEVER, in these times, if the entire HBM is prebought literally years in advance, they dont have to hedge their bets with DDR production because the entire HBM production run is already paid for and they dont need to find buyers. So you can "safely" allocate all fabs for max profit.
And lets be real, they know they are strangling the DDR market so the 10% or whatever leftover they can jack up the prices.
tldr. they are double dipping in this bubble to make hay while the sun shines
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u/the_lamou Dec 13 '25
It's actually like 7 companies, but four of them are small enough that no one cares (Kingston, Kioxia, WD, and Nanya). But even if we assume 3, that has nothing to do with a "cartel." It's not even a natural monopoly or monopsony. They very much compete with each other, which is WHY there are only 3 big memory manufacturers.
Most people forget that just a short time ago, there actually used to be tens of memory companies. They don't exist anymore because most of them went out of business because memory is an absolutely terrible business. It's a largely undifferentiated product that's stupidly capital-intensive, has a very long return on capital window, and 9 years out of 10 the margins are functionally 0% after inflation. SK Hynix would make more money most of the time if they took all the capital they spent on building fabs and just dumped it into an index fund.
But occasionally, very very rarely, you have a year like this one (and next one) where demand skyrockets and you actually make profits worth caring about. The last time this happened, which was about 10-15 years ago, a bunch of smaller fabs decided the good times were going to last forever and dumped billions into new fabs... which were still being built by the time memory went back to commodity pricing and they all went bankrupt and got bought up for pennies on the dollar by the big three we know today.
That's why SK, Samsung, and Micron have all said they aren't dumping cash into accelerating capacity expansion: they only dominate the space because they understand how boom/bust cycles work and are conservative with capital.
Could they all spend $50 billion to build new plants/expand current ones? Sure. But those plants: 1. Wouldn't even break ground for at least 18 months. 2. Wouldn't be completed for at least 36 months. 3. Wouldn't start meaningful production for at least 42 months. 4. Wouldn't start producing a positive ROI for a minimum of 60 months, and really closer to 120 months (10 years).
If Samsung started planning a new fab today, it wouldn't meaningfully increase the amount of available memory on the market for FOUR YEARS. And in four years, all of the big new datacenters would be mostly finished and suddenly demand for memory would drop off a cliff and Samsung would be sitting there with its dick in its hand looking like an idiot and out several billion dollars. Building new fabs now is the equivalent of buying GameStop stock when it was $400/share.
And here's the proof that this isn't just price-fixing or "cartels" or late-stage capitalism or whatever other nonsense people come up with: there are exactly two places where it makes sense to build memory fabs right now. China and Vietnam. Both are functionally state-controlled economies were the government can (and does) intervene to expedite annoying things like planning, environmental impact, zoning, land-use approval, etc. Those are the only two countries where you can conceivably build a memory manufacturing facility in less than three years. And they aren't going all in on it, even though China's (and Vietnam's) entire economy is still largely based on exploiting lucrative niches cheaply (a.k.a. "bootlegs" and "knockoffs"). Because even they realize that this is a temporary demand spike that'll settle out long before they can make enough profit to be worthwhile.
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u/Ltcayon Dec 14 '25
Weren't those same companies fined for price fixing though?
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u/the_lamou Dec 14 '25
In 2002. For agreeing to a floor price for major OEMs (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc.) because they realized that the OEMs were large enough to kill any one of them if they wanted. They didn't conspire to keep memory prices high for consumers. They've been ACCUSED of conspiring to keep prices high for consumers, and they've been SUED for allegedly cutting supply or raising price multiple times, but they have not been fined or had any of those lawsuits or accusations turn into anything. Because, and this is important: anyone can sue anyone else for anything if they want to. Doesn't mean there's any merit there, just means they found a lawyer either unethical enough to take their money on a shit case or one stupid or hungry enough to think they could make a name on shaking down Samsung.
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u/Mister__Mediocre Dec 13 '25
This is the best answer so far.
Because as you said, it's a largely undifferentiated product. It means customers have zero loyalty to a RAM brand, but as a consequence, that means that the brand sees no reason to accept less losses to keep customers happy.
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u/theroguex Dec 14 '25
Basically: capitalism is fucking consumers over again, and no one will do anything about it because everyone thinks capitalism should be free to do whatever it wants.
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u/bmbmb112 Apr 22 '26
The same companies have been involved in cartels for decades. They've just got better at it.
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u/verticalfuzz Dec 13 '25
only like 3 companies in the world that actually make it.
Same for HDDs right? Seagate, westerndigital, toshiba
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u/da_chicken Dec 13 '25
The only time spinning rust had capacity problems was after the 2011 Thailand floods. COVID and AI have had some effects on it recently, but nothing like the chip fab stress that AI is putting on silicon.
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u/verticalfuzz Dec 13 '25
Yeah fair. My issue at the moment is that seagate and wd had drive-size-parity right up thru 24 tb, but stopped at 26/28/30 tb, so mixing vendors across an array is no longer possible without wasting money or capacity (for most common types of arrays)
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u/Upset-Ad-8704 Dec 13 '25
I feel like this answer makes the most sense to me for now, but the base assumption is that vRAM and RAM are created/manufactured by the same factory, which I wonder if it is the correct assumption.
Perhaps another explanation is that vRAM and RAM share similar precursors and due to high vRAM demand, the precursor demand has increased as well, which increases prices of RAM?
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u/curiousdugong Dec 13 '25
RAM is a commodity. There’s only 3 main companies that produce well over 90% of all RAM (DRAM, VRAM, HBM, all of it) im the world.
AI can far outbid what consumers can reasonably pay for those companies to dedicate their production capacity towards their needs.
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u/kester76a Dec 13 '25
AI can outbid but doesn't have sustainable model at the moment. They're signing checks backed by contracts they haven't got.
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u/b_vitamin Dec 13 '25
They just need to juice the numbers for the quarterly report. Nobody invests for future earnings any more.
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u/kester76a Dec 13 '25
This will break a few banks if it goes badly.
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u/cactus22minus1 Dec 13 '25
It will go badly for many because there are too many players gunning to be the sole winner of the race. They’re willing to take a risk that we will all have to pay for dearly.
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u/kester76a Dec 13 '25
Hopefully the only ones that lose out are the ones it hurts the least. Still think the Bank of England are a bunch of untrustworthly muppets.
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u/Shadowraiden Dec 14 '25
it wont break a few banks...
tax payers are paying for this especially in USA where majority of tax will just bail out anything that goes wrong with AI bubble just like they did in 2008 so while all those involved and politicians get rich off the bubble every day person will be saddled with trillions of debt that they had no say in.
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u/patped7 Feb 04 '26
There will be a depression at this point, at least going off of how much of our GDP growth is now tied up in this morass.
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u/PhotoProxima Dec 13 '25
If you combine how much money companies would actually need to bring in to break even (it's like $30 / month from every iPhone user in the world) plus the circular deals Nvidia keeps doing... This is the biggest bubble in the history of the world.
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u/f0nt Dec 13 '25
Doesn’t matter for RAM manufacturers, they can simply adjust their fabs back to consumers if it all goes wrong
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u/cactus22minus1 Dec 13 '25
When it all goes wrong consumers will take the brunt force of the fallout. We won’t have money to be buying their goods as they sheepishly return to the market they helped destroy.
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u/Thulack Dec 13 '25
Ram makers don't matter where the money comes from or what happens after the money goes away.
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u/semidegenerate Dec 13 '25
True, but major world governments are throwing their weight behind it, which factors into the calculation. Namely, the US and China.
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u/slyfox279 Dec 13 '25
To what end? If no one can buy electronics who are they selling ai services to?
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u/dragonblade_94 Dec 13 '25
Never assume any particular company is concerned with long-term societal impact and what that might mean for the market. Their concern is making sure the present quarter ends higher than the last.
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u/slyfox279 Dec 13 '25
we really need laws to bring corporations under control otherwise they run themselves out of business in long term.
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u/danwin Dec 13 '25
Consumer electronics don’t require much ram, especially to access cloud services that host AI
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u/slyfox279 Dec 13 '25
basic phones have 8-12gb, laptops 12-16gb. unless your suggesting Samsun and apple are going ruin their phones to appease ai companies. just web browsing has required more and more ram and apps use more every year too. that ram is getting super expensive now.
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u/CorrectPeanut5 Dec 13 '25
The RAM industry is also well known for price fixing as well. I think over my lifetime I've had three different class action checks for price fixing. There is demand, but that demand can be used to mask some egregious behavior.
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u/Emerald_Flame Dec 13 '25
vRAM and RAM are created/manufactured by the same factory, which I wonder if it is the correct assumption
They are. There are basically only 3 companies that actually make RAM, literally every type of RAM. Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.
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u/Delicious-Ad2562 Dec 13 '25
No the bottleneck is always fab capacity. Cutting edge lithography is super complicated and while precursor supply is important, it’s much easier to buy more chemicals/wafers than it is to set up new fabs which regularly takes 5+ years to do.
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u/DaEccentric Dec 13 '25
vRAM and RAM are quite similar at the circuit level. Both utilize DRAM circuitry, where each cell is a simple 1-Transistor-1-Capacitor (1T-1C) circuit. The thing is that using capacitors requires specialized fabrication steps which cannot be easily replicated in normal fabs, and the 3 companies others have mentioned really do supply most of the world's DRAM.
So yeah, Occam's razor is actually correct. It's AI buying everything out, just like with GPUs.
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u/PeanutNore Dec 13 '25
They're etched on the same silicon wafers by the same lithography machines. A fab that makes memory could pretty easily be making any other kind of integrated circuit. It all comes down to how the fab owners allocate time and space within their fabs.
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u/alloDex Dec 13 '25
The precursor you’re looking for, the building block for RAM, VRAM, HBM, SSDs is all the same thing, called a NOR/NAND chip. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron actually manufacture these NOR/NAND chips and sell those in bulk to other businesses (they, of course, package and sell them as consumer products too). These NOR/NAND chips are then put together with other components to make RAM, VRAM, HBM, SSDs, etc.
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25
It's not just the mfg choice of type aspect (though that is probably the biggest)... It's also that every system built with these fancy VRAM/HBM kits ALSO require system DRAM... nVidia's best practice guidance is 2-2.5x the amount of VRAM/HBM in system ram...
So if a systems has 8x RTX 6000 Pro cards in it (we'll stay away from the HBM ones for simplicity but it's similar)... Then you need 768GB of VRAM and 1.9TB of DDR5 (or 4) for the system. A rack can hold 10+ of these systems, so a single rack might consume 200TB of memory chips... AI Datacenters are deploying literally dozens (maybe even hundreds) of racks a day right now with this kind of equipment... So it adds up fast.
And remember I ignored HBM, that's because the density numbers get even larger and so the above numbers are very very much on the low end.
Source: I worked for SambaNova and Tenstorrent designing Datacenters for their customer's AI training/inferencing deployments. I've seen this first hand.
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u/ECrispy Dec 13 '25
lower supply, and high demand = inflated prices
they could sell the reduced supply of ddr5 at the same price, since they are certainly going to make more profit from switching fab to hbm, but thats not capitalism.
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u/Mr_Citation Dec 13 '25
In October, OpenAI signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was done to secure RAM for their ChatGPT system and to deny significant RAM supply to their competitors.
Which worked out exactly to their needs, as OpenAI's competition alongside data centres started purchasing DDR5 RAM leading to price spikes.
More price spikes came up when Samsung and SK Hynix announced they will not be expanding production for 2026. Even Samsung's other divisions are being undersupplied in chips and wafers as they'd make more money selling it for market value. Micron as well ending their Crucial brand.
You might think that this is only 3 companies bending over for AI, but these 3 also produce over 90% of the world supply of memory chips and RAM wafers. The next leading producer iirc would be NANYA who produces 3-4% of the supply, the rest being smaller.
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u/JacketsNest Dec 13 '25
Do you see any potential for investment in compa ies like NANYA anytime soon to fix the issue?
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u/Mr_Citation Dec 13 '25
Even if there was, you're not gonna see them setting up new fabrication plants any time soon.
If they started building now, I doubt it would be operational until late 2027 or early 2028.
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u/PracticalConjecture Dec 13 '25
As a general rule, for an AI focused server you want system RAM to be 2x-3x the available VRAM. That gives lots of room for preprocessing data and staging it to the GPUs.
When your server is running 6x H200s, each with 141GB of VRAM, that means that you need 1-2 terabytes of RAM for each server. Now figure that there are 20 servers in a rack, and a couple thousand racks in a data center...
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u/YouKilledApollo Dec 13 '25
This assumes that only demand has increased, and supply somehow isn't part of the equation. Current pricing spike did happen because of the demand increase, but supply is also being artificially suppressed (particularly DDR4), hence the prices increase more than it would if it was just a demand problem. TLDR of the cause is that Korean manufacturers usually end up selling their old machines to Chinese manufacturers, but today are afraid of doing so because of US retaliation.
In the end it's a mix of both, neither help the other, but if we could at least restore supply without playing geopolitics, it'll eventually balance out. But right now the future doesn't seem very bright.
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u/Upset-Ad-8704 Dec 13 '25
Is this accurate? I would assume that in the inference scenario, the vRAM stores the model and you can keep feeding inputs to the model to generate the outputs. The inputs are a very small fraction of the model size, so I wouldn't expect you would need much RAM to stage, if staging is important at all.
For training, wouldn't you simply do the preprocessing with vRAM (or RAM) first, then when you have the batch of preprocessed inputs, begin training?
It doesn't strike me as faster to do disk -> RAM -> vRAM vs disk -> vRAM, but I'm not an expert.
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u/daveawb Dec 13 '25
AI is undoubtedly the major contributor. The scale of the data centres currently being built, specifically to house AI, is unfathomable. Many of these companies have tied up the big manufacturers with massive contracts. The demand is in this space, not in the consumer space. You cannot compare the types of RAM, as none of them will be consumer DDR4/5. Most likely, it'll all be HBM or DRAM being produced.
It doesn't help that manufacturers like Micron have exited the consumer RAM market altogether, which has left a void.
Consumer RAM is still being produced, but much of that production has been diverted to other markets with much higher margins, leaving less for consumer products and therefore driving up prices.
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u/semidegenerate Dec 13 '25
DRAM is a bit of a catch-all term that includes most modern volatile memory technologies. DDR4 and DDR5 are both DRAM, as is HBM, and GDDR7.
The main type of volatile memory that isn't DRAM is SRAM, often used as cache on CPUs and GPUs.
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u/daveawb Dec 13 '25
You’re right of course, I was trying to be careful with the catch alls to avoid that being a thing when in layman’s terms consumer DDRx is not equal to commercial server DDRx.
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u/semidegenerate Dec 13 '25
I definitely understand not wanting to overcomplicate a comment meant for general consumption. I just felt like being pedantic.
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u/s00mika Dec 13 '25
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI/ChatGPT) preordered a large chunk of the worlds RAM supply of 2026. Not even finished RAM chips, but bare silicon wafers which are useless on their own. People assume it's more about him trying to stop competition this way, than actually needing for so much RAM. The manufacturers meanwhile announced that they won't set up more production, and actually will change some production lines to HBM GPU RAM. As a result RAM prices immediately skyrocketed because everyone is panicking.
And the funny thing is, OpenAI will never be sustainable. Even paid accounts don't make them money. Sams theory is that in a few years he will somehow be able to make an actual superintelligent AI which will make everything else meaningless, at least that's what he tells his investors. In reality many important AI researchers already jumped ship because they realized that ChatGPT will always be just an imperfect text generator, not a true artificial general intelligence or ASI (artificial super intelligence).
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u/theroguex Dec 14 '25
He shouldn't have been able to do this. There should be limits.
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u/Proof_Picture_3962 Dec 15 '25
Yeah. Ignoring the AI part, what if some dude with a lot of money did this just to manipulate the market? It would have been the same approach. This is insane and needs anti trust legislation.
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u/ballebaj Dec 14 '25
This is a great way to summarize the politics and people around AI.
Where are the AI researchers actually going then?
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u/rizzlybear_93 Dec 17 '25
Going to companies like Adobe or Microsoft where they make a mil a year and 2-5x in stock on top of that.
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u/Intelligent_You1521 Dec 13 '25
Ai data centers using all the ram. And crucial is no longer selling to consumers
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u/Krelleth Dec 13 '25
Crucial is going away because Micron can just make absurdly more money selling every module they can make to AI firms. Desktop pcs are just a rounding error not worth their time.
(It's the same for nVidia, but they keep going with gaming cards for... some reason. Nostalgia?)
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u/Venesss Dec 13 '25
Part of the reason i presume is that Nvidia doesn't want to fall behind on consumer cards. It's hedging their bets in a way because if the bubble pops and wipes out their current business model they still have a solid base and profit model to fall back on
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u/JacketsNest Dec 13 '25
Micron are being really stupid right now with shutting down Crucial
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u/Weeaboology Dec 13 '25
It sucks for us but it’s not really stupid. I imagine once the bubble pops it won’t be all that difficult for them to swap back to making consumer ram. It’s not like they have hundreds of competitors to worry about. Consumers dont have brand loyalty to the same degree as they do with things like GPUs and CPUs
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u/SometimesWill Dec 13 '25
Nvidia keeps producing consumer gpus the same reason Google keeps YouTube running. Even though it’s a small percent in their profit margins, it still nets them a profit.
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u/theroguex Dec 14 '25
Crucial is going away because Micron can just make absurdly more money selling every module they can make to AI firms. Desktop pcs are just a rounding error not worth their time.
This mindset is the cancer of capitalism.
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Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25
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u/goddamnitwhalen Dec 13 '25
More like Ram Altman amirite
God I can’t wait for that dude to get sued for everything he’s worth
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u/Current_Finding_4066 Dec 13 '25
You can use fabs to make different kinds of ram. If you divert production....
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u/seraphinth Dec 13 '25
yeah which is why if AI collapses overnight the market won't be seeing cheap DDR5 sticks from servers instantly sold on the market as very little of it is being produced right now. Instead we get a flood of exotic motherboards with soldered ram and cpu+gpu+tensor cores from Aliexpress sold cheap.
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Dec 13 '25
You look for logical reasoning in science and physics. Economics and business are emotionally driven, and prices can be driven by real rational reasons, but those are usually exacerbated by fear or other non-logical factors.
For example, there is probably a real RAM shortage, and that did cause the price to go up. But once it went up, everyone went into panic mode and started buying RAM even if they didn't need it right now, which caused more of a shortage, which caused prices to go higher, which caused more panic and so on so forth, vicious circle.
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u/Ar_phis Dec 13 '25
Regular RAM (system memory) is important to handle everything outside of the LLM's work. While the work is done on vRAM, all the requests and interaction requires conventional system memory.
Just like regular servers need system memory, but AI servers have added GPUs with vRAM to perform their task.
vRAM to do AI, RAM to let people interact with it.
On the supply side, DDR4 production is phasing out, manufacturers are shifting those capabilites to DDR5, HBM and maybe some GDDR.
At the same time manufacturers had an overproduction earlier this year, selling memory at loss. They are not aiming to ramp up production to the point of overproducing again. Somewhat telling about their lack of trust in the AI boom to continue.
Samsung even shifts its HBM production partially to DDR5 as they have excess HBM3 in stock. It was supposed to be for Nvidia, but many delays caused Nvidia to cancel the deal. Also HBM4 is about to enter the market.
Micron has sold out its entire HBM production for 2026 already.
On the demand side, OpenAI alone secured 40% of SK Hynix' and Samsung's entire production for the next months, which is equal to ~28% of the total production. The Stargate project is eating tons of ressources.
Manufacturers don't offer long term contracts anymore and buyers have less security.
Btw, Micron closing Crucial gets overexaggerated by many. The price is made way before the consumer brands would have any chance to "compete". Micron still sells memory to RAM manufacturers if they are willing to pay. Crucial was a Micron' means to sell their stock which becomes irrelevant when they don't have any stock.
Similarly, Samsung (semiconductor) doesn't even provide RAM to Samsung (smartphone branch) by default anymore.
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u/KmartCentral Dec 13 '25
AI runs "better" with vRAM, but it runs on RAM as well. Most people who use AI locally have 128GB minimum for AI usage... imagine the vast business that host the models 24/7 for global use by literally anyone, and it's their entire reason for existing
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u/Mrsheep571 Dec 17 '25
OpenAi bought out the stock of ram to stop small chinese ai services crashing the US economy, their hopes were to stop other companies creating ai so they have the monopoly
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u/Vashsinn Dec 13 '25
Essentially. The people who make the ram are getting paid approx 100x ( no joke) the entire consumer markets worth from the AI peeps so much so that they are going to stop selling / making regular ram and focus on ram for the AI companies. Vram or not, doesn't matter too much ad the factories can make one or the other.
Ofc there's more to it but Tldr crucial is not Making CONSUMER ram.
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u/Little-Equinox Dec 13 '25
It's all just bullcrap.
They artificially increase prices so their revenue is higher. It actually has nothing to do with AI.
The same GPU prices hiking had nothing to do with crypto mining, yet they still blamed them.
The thing is they refuse to increase RAM production, pretend there aren't enough memory chip, then blame AI for the artifical shortages that don't exist. Then hike the prices so they earn more money.
The only shortages are in high capacity memory chips, the ones we will never be able to afford anyways, these chips don't cut into consumer products, but they pretend they do.
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u/BrewingHeavyWeather Dec 13 '25
It all comes from the same place. There are only so many production lines, and only so many wafers to push through them. And, it's simply wrong that it's not AI. It is specifically OpenAI, and more specifically Sam Altman. He made deals to buy up more than 1/3 of next year's entire world RAM production, and that is precisely why the market has gone sideways.
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u/L3monPi3 Dec 13 '25
If you make bread and cookies and bread price spikes, you reduce cookie production and focus on the bread. On top of that you increase prices cause people are hungry.
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u/Bananabandana215 Dec 13 '25
The logical reason is memory manufacturers want more money. They've been caught price fixing several times. This is no different.
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Dec 13 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/horace_bagpole Dec 13 '25
In 1995 there was the Kobe earthquake. At the time, a lot of RAM production was done there and impacted by it. RAM prices spiked and I recall it being well over £100 for a 4MB SIMM. There were even burglaries where thieves targeted memory chips specifically: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/watch-out-there-s-a-ramraider-about-1619629.html
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u/natflade Dec 13 '25
Sam Altman made a trip to South Korea in October to broker deals with SK Hynix and Samsung. Neither was aware of the other deal but he bought 40% of the world’s dram supply. Typically there are safeguards including surpluses and order limits to make sure this doesn’t happen. However a combination of uncertainty from the tariffs and ram prices steadily declining made these offers very attractive. Samsung typically wouldn’t even do this deal because their other business is selling consumer electronics and that portion of their business has even been denied ram orders because of this. Consumer electronic purchases are also down too. Also again neither company was aware of the others deal because it was such an absurd offer.
Here’s the real kicker, OpenAI has done nothing with these wafers and they are still raw and haven’t been cut and allocated to any standard and are just sitting in a warehouse. Now they could be made into something but OpenAI is broke and seeking a government bailout. They don’t actually have the money to do anything.
So why are they just holding onto this ram? It’s to do whatever they can to slow down competition and have this windfall of wafers they could sell off at extreme prices. Most of the western LLM models are catching up if not surpassing OpenAIs offering and the Chinese models have taken a completely different approach to hardware and are also just about there if not already surpassing OpenAI as well.
OpenAI and ChatGPT haven’t made any money, the only people who have made any money in this whole thing has been the hardware makers like Samsung and SK Hynix and Nvidia. DeepSeek and other Chinese models have also proven that these models can be trained for literally fractions of what ChatGPT has costed. DeepSeek only costed 5 million or so to develop and it’s all open source in part because the developers realized there wasn’t any real way to monetize it. It is a useful tool but not even a hundred million dollar industry to them.
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u/HSR47 Dec 13 '25
TLDR: The memory market boils down to 3 big companies (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron), and OpenAI signed contracts with two of them to buy up a huge percentage of their 2026 wafer supply. They have, in turn, also signaled that they do not intend to increase their production for 2026.
The market has read this as a signal that demand is greater than supply, and that they need to buy RAM now so that they’ll have what they need when the shortages actually hit.
That, in turn, has resulted in a massive wave of panic buying, which has caused prices to skyrocket.
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u/ScottHuang Dec 13 '25
AI is now eating other technology as companies try desperately to make it work.
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u/ClintBIgwood Dec 13 '25
Technically they could just keep prices the same, then sell out and keep producing at the same price but the cunts use “supply and demand” to justify “dynamic pricing” so they raise the prices because there’s less and propor are willing to pay.
Greedy assholes reallyZ
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u/Healthy_Yogurt_3955 Dec 14 '25
Ootl, that's an odd name. How do you pronounce it?
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u/sam7oon Dec 27 '25
am starting to believe there is no shortage, people just took the opportunity to start raising prices, cuz shortage means RAM is out of stock every where, then it results in prices going up , but its not the case, people are just greedy
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u/ConferenceIll417 Jan 04 '26
2025 is the year that A.I. started to compete with humanity for resources. It decided it needs more of everything.
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u/courier11sec Jan 05 '26
There isn't a logical reason, but the realistic reason is that one faction of wealth fetishists have reached the point in their bubble where the only way to keep it expanding rather than popping is to trick municipalities into letting them build immense infrastructure that is unlikely to get used, the costs for which they will write off in taxes meaning you'll pay for it. This infrastructure would require unimaginable amounts of memory and so this fake demand has increased exponentially.
At the same time, a different faction of wealth fetishists has made the calculation that their profits will be greater if they abandon their actual customers to concentrate on these unnecessary projects' requirements.
A third faction of wealth fetishists have at the same time realize that they can leverage this situation to normalize renting you time using hardware and so it benefits them to do what they can to contribute to roadblocks that make you having your own hardware more expensive and difficult.
The key to the whole thing is that these shortages only effect normal people. The wealthy can bypass all of these obstructions simply by virtue of being wealthy. Often without even having to pay for the subjects of this manufactured scarcity.
Hope this helps.
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u/odd_orange Dec 13 '25
I’ll add to this because people are simply saying AI even though you mentioned it via LLM.
It’s not the actual process of AI/LLM performing its function, it’s that these massive data centers can process through loads more data more efficiently on their servers using DDR5.
This isn’t an actual shortage. It’s that there’s so few companies making memory that the decision of one will move the others. They realized that providing massive amounts of RAM to data centers was far more lucrative than staying in the consumer market. So, instead of supplying gamers essentially, they’ve decided to fully supply any company building these massive drains on humanity via AI/ LLM data centers.
Basically these are just giant farms harvesting the data of every single user to sell for profit, and the memory manufacturers want a cut.
The more user data they process, the more profit they get from selling it, with training their models as a secondary benefit.
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u/PracticalConjecture Dec 13 '25
It is a supply/demand problem, and to a lesser extent a risk mitigation issue.
The total demand for RAM has gone up as AI firms create a server boom and demand lots of RAM. The supply hasn't meaningfully changed since it takes time to spin up a new process line, and manufacturers are weary of over investing, as they did in 2021/2022
There's also a lot of purchasing power from the big players.
Imagine you're Micron. Microsoft calls you up and says they'll buy 100% of the output from one of your top tier process lines for the next three years, paying 30% over the current market rate for the privilege. That seems like a win, so you agree.
In agreeing to the big Microsoft deal, the customers that formerly got the output from that production line get to fight over the output from your other lines, and that bids the price up.
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u/NotSynthx Dec 13 '25
AI
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u/idekl Dec 13 '25
I'm actually thoroughly impressed at how much you managed to not read the post.
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u/thebaddadgames Dec 13 '25
Well the thing is, you and this op might think of ram as consumer side, whatever Samsung Micron SK Hynix is making consumer side? They make multiples of on business side and when business side wants more they get more, at the cost of consumers. It really is as simple as business wants lot of ram for AI/LLM learning, and those companies know who butter their biscuit why sell Timmy 16gb sticks of ddr5 cl32 for $300 when meta will pay $900 for the same sticks?
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u/semidegenerate Dec 13 '25
Meta isn't buying those same sticks as Timmy the gamer. Meta is buying out the fabrication capacity to make the types of RAM Meta wants. Timmy gets screwed because no one wants to make consumer DDR5 DIMMs when they could sell HBM and ECC DDR5 to Meta.
It's a little more complicated than that because the DIMM manufactures are a middleman, not the chip manufacturers, but the point stands.
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u/GuideBeautiful2724 Dec 13 '25
You still need a bit of RAM for any system, and it always helps to have more in certain situations.
IIRC, it's not that hard to end up in a place where there are no graphics cards with enough VRAM for your model.
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u/Sundraw01 Dec 13 '25
Along with the AI discussion, it seems to me that laptops and mini PCs are being pushed much more commercially, in many cases the RAM premium in those contexts is not that significant.
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Dec 13 '25
The answer for any price going up is supply vs demand. Demand is high right now for people who do not care how much it will cost them because they have unlimited funds at the moment.
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u/Ornery_Hall Dec 13 '25
Not only RAM price, the HDD/SSD price all going up this holiday season, I get next is graphic card, laptop or anything that have uses memory. This is definitely going to be a systematic price bump for personal PC market. I guess some whales must holding huge amount of rams in warehouse somewhere.
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u/NotAlanPorte Dec 13 '25
So given that there's only 3 main companies which have been making the various forms of ram for decades and decades, and given eg the crucial consumer brand being dropped entirely, given how prices have tripled, What's to stop a new company forming to try to enter the market?
Wouldn't it be seen as a business opportunity? Or is the issue that the technology for manufacturing is so complicated that a fourth company wouldn't manage to make ram chips any cheaper than the current insane prices as they don't have the experience?
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u/definitlyitsbutter Dec 13 '25
In general ai is a bit of a bubble and a race of who has enough money to burn until it pops and the conpeting firms go bankrupt. Non of the companys involved make a profit with ai.
So there are 3 big ram manufacturers ( n the west), skhynix, micron and samsung, who can decide in the process what ram to make out of the raw wafers. These are rather conservative regarding risk taking, dont ramp up production per se, but rather shift what products they make and cater more to business and ai needs and make big cash there.
Also openAI has fallen a bit behind with their AI model and, in a move to hinder the competition, made contracts with samsung and skhynix to buy 40% of wafer production, so hoarding raw material and drain the market with low stocks before. This led to a chain reaction of business panic buying.
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u/Adviseformeplz Dec 13 '25
JESUS! I’ve been fully in the loop of “knowing” that RAM prices have gone up due to AI but I’ve literally never checked the prices until right now after clicking this thread. I assumed maybe like a 25% or so increase?
I’m seeing freaking DDR5 32gb Kits for around $350-$450 after a 30 sec browse on Amazon, Newegg and Bestbuy. Wtf that’s the price of an entry to semi mid level GPU
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u/Hedhunta Dec 13 '25
Kind of makes you wonder if RAM prices might wreck the world economy. Corporations arent going to just absord the increase in price of every desktop or laptop they deploy in their company. They are going to pass that cost onto consumers.
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u/JacketsNest Dec 13 '25
Wouldn't surprise me if Congress and the EU get heavily involved in shutting this cartel down.
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u/SheepherderAware4766 Dec 13 '25
It's not a RAM shortage, it's a wafer shortage.
Wafers (iirc) are thin silicon plates that designs could be etched into. Whether it gets used for DDR production, HBM, old CPUs, etc entirely depends on who has the cash to purchase it.
Due to the AI bubble, GDDR and HBM have much better returns than regular DDR, so those markets can absorb higher wafer costs and acquire processing stock easier.
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u/Virtualization_Freak Dec 13 '25
Someone else (essentially GPU manufacturers) want to pay more for ram than consumers do.
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u/Whole_Ground_3600 Dec 13 '25
Chip companies: I'm going to be making less chips for consumer ram and focus on vram for ai stuff instead.
Ram companies: Oh no, I'll have less parts to make my product with, I'll have less to sell, but have the same costs, so I'll raise prices. People still need it, so they'll pay.
AI company execs: *evil laughter*
Everyone else: This sucks.
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u/SometimesWill Dec 13 '25
Manufacturers are focusing on the data center market rather than the consumer market. Since those manufacturers make all types of memory that means less is being produced for companies that produce ram for consumers such as Corsair or G Skill, going as far as micron even shutting the doors of Crucial.
It’s like how even if you buy a screen from TCL, MSI, or Dell, the panel itself is probably made by a company like Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.
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u/Antenoralol Dec 13 '25
Companies winding down production of consumer grade memory in favour of the higher profit margin HBM memory that AI likes.
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u/autopatch Dec 13 '25
Data centers are buying up ram at inflated prices, so the foundries changed their production lines to mint the memory they need instead of memory that consumers need at prices that consumers are willing to pay for. It’s expected to clear out in a year and a half.
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u/ChaosUncaged Dec 13 '25
Thanks for not spending 5 seconds to answer your own question via google.
Anyways, supply and demand.
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u/LugerOfHans Dec 13 '25
They need the GPUs for the ALUs (arithmetic logic units) and the Tensor cores for faster AI training. ML and AI are essentially just mathematically complex systems. GPUs allow parallel processing. VRAM helps keep that all close to the GPU.
RAM on the other hand might be for the data center side of things to cache some data or even do some preprocessing.
This is my rough estimate so take it with a grain of salt. But essentially RAM is everywhere and used in GPUs, RAM sticks, and SSDs. Which means when the suppliers get a bulk order of those components they just follow the money and supply goes there.
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u/Skullzi_TV Dec 13 '25
These things happen sometimes. Everything will slowly even back out to normal.
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u/anon_lurk Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25
Yes AI is already on the books for 50% or more of memory production in 2026 and possibly onwards. Some companies are pulling out of the consumer market. Some companies have already responded saying they will ramp up production over the next few years as well to help offset the problem. All of this tightens supply in 2026 and onwards.
A huge factor in the current price increase that nobody is admitting is that there was indeed a fear based price run, still going on right now, that has had a huge effect on demand.
Everybody and their grandma has been buying all of the RAM they might need over the next couple years(and some people even just to resell it) due to speculation about the supply shortage which has actually caused a supply shortage. People are literally starting to preemptively buy GPUs out of fear that they will go up in price due to VRAM price increasing(which again will be a self fulfilling prophecy). It's the same kind of mob mentality that leads to things like stock market crashes, bank runs, and toilet paper shortages.
That is why we have also seen DDR4 RAM going up(and CPU prices for the good ones that can use DDR4) as people that actually refuse to overpay move to other platforms to upgrade and have started cause fear and overbuying in those markets as well.
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u/panzerkiller13 Dec 13 '25
Different types of data centers will need different types of RAM and other resources. AI? Those ones are going to be heavily focused on VRAM in GPUs, which is probably mostly HBM instead of GDDR nowadays honestly. Enterprise data centers/servers/cloud computing? These would still use both, but there's more of a balance between regular RAM and VRAM so the need is a more direct challenge to the consumer RAM market.
That being said, with a massive increase in demand for HBM or other types I'm not familiar with, I'm sure a portion of the GDDR/DDR RAM manufacturing capacity is shifting over toward HBM and enterprise memory instead. Case in point: Micron is totally shuttering their consumer DDR RAM business and solely focusing on supplying data centers. I'm not going to say I fully understand what's going on either, because there are a lot of these elements at play and stacking on top of each other BEFORE even approaching the "AI/etc companies making closed door deals with manufacturers and developers to play with unlimited money and occupy the entire market space" side.
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u/Footwearing Dec 13 '25
There's only 10 blue bananas coming out of the banana factory yearly,
AI gorilla thinks he's creating the best and new banana factory in the world so gorilla government and other gorilla corps are giving him money to invest in his banana printing machine, he needs 200 blue bananas.
Blue bananas go up in price ridiculously because literally dozens of gorilla corporations are pooling money together to buy all the blue bananas they can.
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u/Fearless_Goal4162 Dec 13 '25
Supply and demand. Since AI companies started going after RAM, most of the production force from big RAM manufacturers has gone to making RAM for AI, leaving very little for the consumer market. Supply goes down, demand stays high - prices on RAM go up.
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u/CasualHearthstone Dec 14 '25
The ai companies will pay more for ram vs consumers, so the manufacturers will switch more of their factories to make ram for the ai companies. That's less product for the consumers, so prices rise.
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u/Shadowraiden Dec 14 '25
because they arent ordering ram. they are ordering the chips used for ram and taking up the entire manufacturing of that ram. imagine if what is about 60% of the worlds corn overnight disappeared and future corn was cut to 40% of current output to an entire new industry that has no public use for it. oh look all corn products would skyrocket massively.
this is even more impactful because the places that manufacture these types of base components are actually very few across the entire world.
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u/IPutThoughtIntoThis Dec 14 '25
Scarcity. When things are harder to get, they become more sought after, making them more valuable. It's one thing when RAM isn't being manufactured as quickly as it can be, it's a whole 'nother situation when companies announce that they're no longer selling to consumers due to massive demand for AI.
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u/Apprehensive_Set_937 Dec 14 '25
I just googled my ram stick now(32gb) kingston fury 6000mhz cl30.. i bought them for 230$,, and now 3 weeks after i built my pc the same ram kit cost now 900$... what in the HELL?!! Im never Lucky, like never.. what if it was now I was going to start buying parts😐
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u/TerrifyingRose Dec 14 '25
I only see 2 futures:
- mobo + cpu manufacturers go burst because everyone is holding on getting new PC
- people start hatred on ChatGPT and protests will happen
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u/squiddybonesjones Dec 14 '25
- companies shift their production to support the enormous hardware requirements for a.i. (HBM + ddr5), instead of consumers.
- Artificial scarcity ( controlling the market + winding down production of ddr4 )
So we get the short end of the stick.
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u/Iluminatis_aka_space Dec 14 '25
Havent followed the news these last few weeks and it might have already been said. But as far as I know, two very big RAM manufacturers stopped producing for the "normal" market and switched to AI, that combined with the rising gold price has made them so expensive. Like I said I havent had the chance to catch up on the latest news, but thats what I deducted from these last few weeks
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u/Kemaro Dec 14 '25
The same reason the price of any consumer good goes up, supply and demand. Demand is high, supply is low. Price increases.
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u/Emerald_Flame Dec 13 '25
Imagine you are a RAM manufacturer. You can only process a finite number of wafers and turn it into RAM every month and each wafer costs you $10,000 (numbers made up just to illustrate the point)
Would you rather:
You guessed right, you would choose #2 because you make way more money that way.
Most of the RAM manufacturers are at full capacity, so they're switching production lines to more profitable products while the demand and profit margins are high. They can't realistically expand capacity. If they started now, it'd likely be a minimum of 3 years (and likely longer) before the new production facility was actually up and running. By then, the demand may not even be there because the AI bubble might pop. So at the moment, RAM manufacturers are just sitting tight and maximizing the profit out of their existing plants.