Samsung’s memory price Surges by as much as 60% since September, according to a Reuters report published Friday [1]. The move marks one of the steepest short-term price increases in the DRAM market in years — and underscores how surging demand from AI data centers is straining global supply chains.

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.

If we're going to see retailers price-gouging on DDR5, maybe people will be willing to buy slightly older gear with DDR4 (and corresponding motherboard and CPU).

Especially for systems for which the workloads are actually bound by GPU compute, network, or storage.

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x..

128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set..

I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.