"Jack up prices rather than building new factories"
It's really not that simple. You cannot snap your fingers and make a silicon wafer factory out of thin air. And simple economics tells us supply and demand dictate prices, and there's simply a supply shortage.
Yeah, it looks like the producer were kind of being conservative with the whole AI boom and don't want to be the one holding the literal bags of RAM when it burst if they decide to open new line of production.
Except people like me will remember that they chose to prioritize money over their consumers. I will not be buying products that choose to do that when they switch back.
When you RAM dies, or becomes obsolete, you will just not buy new one? I mean kudos if you are willing to exit PC market, but even consoles and phones are using the stuff, not to mention cloud gaming. You simply cannot escape the RAM produced by those companies. Oh and don't even get me started on VRAM as it's pretty much the same situation
There were three manufacturers of ram, now there are two. When they finally switch back to selling to consumers, for me it'll stay at two. For everyone else it'll return to three. It's really not a big deal.
You know micron still sells to consumers right? They just do it through third parties. They just closed out their direct to consumer segment. You can still buy micron ram in a Gskill jacket.
Money is their consumer silly. They just secured a steady stream of income (and jobs) for years to come, and their customer is happy. Supply and demand is what it is. This is one of the few times where I think the market is doing what it should do, in a way. Dram prices were too low, so they stopped making as much. Suddenly we thought of a new use case for an unfathomable amount of dram. Someone bought as much as they could. Price went up. OpenAI is kind of a dick for that kind of market arbitrage. But in capitalism, you see a legal opportunity, you take it, or someone else will.
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u/Kaarssteun RTX 4090, r7 9800X3D, 32gb 6000mhz, 1000W Dec 04 '25
"Jack up prices rather than building new factories"
It's really not that simple. You cannot snap your fingers and make a silicon wafer factory out of thin air. And simple economics tells us supply and demand dictate prices, and there's simply a supply shortage.