RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

RAM price spike and suspected causes

  • Many see recurring DRAM price spikes every few years, often coinciding with standard transitions (DDR2→3→4→5), and suspect opportunistic price-gouging masked by hard-to-verify excuses (factory floods, process issues, etc.).
  • Others note this spike is mid‑DDR5 lifecycle, so not a generational change, and attribute it instead to:
    • Sudden AI demand (especially large long‑term contracts).
    • Capacity being shifted to higher-margin products like HBM.
    • The inherent tightness and cyclicality of the DRAM market, where small shocks cause big swings.
  • Multiple commenters point to the industry’s past DRAM cartel scandals and argue collusion and deliberate supply constraint are more likely than pure market forces; others counter there’s no clear evidence yet and that manufacturers would profit more by selling all they can.

Fabs, supply, and geopolitics

  • Strong sentiment that RAM and memory fabs are now strategic infrastructure; calls for more fabs in “friendly” countries (US, Europe, Australia, NZ).
  • Debate over overbuilding: one side says $20B fabs are too risky if AI is a bubble; the other says relying on a few foreign suppliers is a bigger long‑term risk.
  • Some argue that given high barriers to entry, firms rationally “enjoy the margins” instead of racing to add capacity, reinforcing cartel‑like behavior.

AI boom, externalities, and resentment

  • Widespread frustration that AI build‑out is raising RAM prices and electricity costs for ordinary users who don’t want or need AI.
  • Complaints that:
    • Data center‑driven grid upgrades are often socialized onto ratepayers.
    • AI firms are not “underpricing” so much as offloading costs onto other markets (components, power, real estate).
  • Some see deliberate attempts to keep local model inference expensive (via RAM scarcity) aligned with regulatory capture, to centralize AI in a few big players.

Impact on consumers and hardware choices

  • Numerous anecdotes of RAM kits going 2–4× in price within a year; many postponing builds or clinging to 5–10‑year‑old systems.
  • DDR4 and even RDIMM/LRDIMM prices are also spiking, partly because DDR4 production is winding down and demand is spilling over from DDR5.
  • People cope by:
    • Buying corporate e‑waste workstations/servers (old Xeon/ThinkPad/Precision gear).
    • Upgrading older DDR3/DDR4 platforms instead of moving to DDR5.
    • Hoarding RAM when cheap; several note their RAM is now the most valuable component in their machines.

Samsung’s internal market and corporate behavior

  • Samsung’s chip division refusing favorable deals to Samsung’s phone division is seen as typical of chaebol structures: subsidiaries compete as profit centers, sometimes more fiercely with each other than with outside firms.
  • Debate over whether intra‑company competition is “healthy discipline” or destructive siloing, with historical comparisons to Sears’ failed internal market experiment.

Software bloat and efficiency debate

  • Some argue that modern browsers/apps are so bloated that they normalize huge RAM use for basic tasks, unnecessarily increasing demand.
  • Others reply that companies optimize for developer time and cross‑platform uniformity, so heavy stacks (Electron, React, etc.) are economically rational even if technically wasteful.
  • A few suggest that if RAM remains expensive, economic pressure might finally push software back toward memory efficiency.