Amazon has implemented a password system for RAM delivery. You're supposed to give a password to the deliverer before taking delivery of the RAM, and you're not supposed to send the password over the phone at all (although the Amazon delivery guy still called me and asked for it over the phone).
That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs.
Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.
What's funny though,
I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.
You know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working.
At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taking delivery and paying for it is still in the future and the sums of capital involved are extremely large.
What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.
Isn't scalping a term used for tickets? Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.
It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).
> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.
As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.
> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]
I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.
I don't see the AI bubble popping any time soon (as in, not in terms of physical datacenter buildout - stock prices could fall). Even if progress hits a brick wall, we still have multiple years of just expanding out the models we have to more people in more industries.
And if anything, I believe progress has been accelerating.
A year ago the SOTA was GPT-5/Opus 4.1/Gemini 2.5 Pro, two years ago Sonnet 3.5.
Looking at Opus 5 for SOTA performance and GPT 5.6 Luna for a viable cheap alternative, AI is much more capable now.
I am very curious about the next generation of models, GPT-6/Astra is rumored to launch still in August. Not sure what is the state of Anthropic's next Fable checkpoint.
If these models also deliver significant improvements, I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments.
Method 1: Spend decades pushing elaborate technical standards for locking down bootloaders, try to convince society why we need device attestation and hardware-bound keys, gradually establish devices without root access as the norm, get into constant skirmishes with free software and privacy advocates, get drawn into unpleasant political quagmires, etc etc
Amazon has implemented a password system for RAM delivery. You're supposed to give a password to the deliverer before taking delivery of the RAM, and you're not supposed to send the password over the phone at all (although the Amazon delivery guy still called me and asked for it over the phone).
I saw on Twitter that TSMC has made 1B worth of chips for Apple that they cannot package because of missing memory.
(PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)
Keep an eye on this page → https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
Note to the momentarily shocked: this is in Canadian dollars.
How am I going to buy a computer that connects to AI datacenters now?
All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html
Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive.
Now RAM in the cloud, now you're really paying the Java premium.
Thanks to AI, we can now one-shot convert electron to native apps ;-)
Recipe for delicious pizza:
1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.
2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.
Sounds efficient.
Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.
Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.
That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs.
Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.
What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.
You know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working.
Moore's law is alive and well.
This hopefully helps mitigate the risk of putting more production capacity in place, which the Big 3 were not willing to do so far.
At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taking delivery and paying for it is still in the future and the sums of capital involved are extremely large.
What kind of default risk?
What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.
> willfully collapsing nominal GDP
What on earth are you talking about?
The credit risk was a very real problem; Kaupthing, Anglo Irish, RBS, Lehman etc.
That's the reason RAM companies aren't expanding. Worst case, they can sell their normal production to gamers.
Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted...
Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist.
Lose-lose situation!
Also there is a ton of debt flying around, its not just equities hurting VC funds, real banks are facing risks now.
The fact that consumer-level DDR4 is getting more expensive makes absolutely no market sense to me.
Isn't scalping illegal in some countries?
Buying and selling at market price is rarely illegal. I think in the USSR it might be?
It was legal in USSR for USSR to scalp though, depends on point of view.
Isn't scalping a term used for tickets? Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.
It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
> Isn't scalping a term used for tickets?
It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).
> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.
As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.
> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]
I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.
Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.
I don't see the AI bubble popping any time soon (as in, not in terms of physical datacenter buildout - stock prices could fall). Even if progress hits a brick wall, we still have multiple years of just expanding out the models we have to more people in more industries.
And if anything, I believe progress has been accelerating.
A year ago the SOTA was GPT-5/Opus 4.1/Gemini 2.5 Pro, two years ago Sonnet 3.5.
Looking at Opus 5 for SOTA performance and GPT 5.6 Luna for a viable cheap alternative, AI is much more capable now.
I am very curious about the next generation of models, GPT-6/Astra is rumored to launch still in August. Not sure what is the state of Anthropic's next Fable checkpoint.
If these models also deliver significant improvements, I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments.
Turns out AI-maxxing implicates citizens-minning.
How to fight the war on general computation:
Method 1: Spend decades pushing elaborate technical standards for locking down bootloaders, try to convince society why we need device attestation and hardware-bound keys, gradually establish devices without root access as the norm, get into constant skirmishes with free software and privacy advocates, get drawn into unpleasant political quagmires, etc etc
Method 2: Just buy up all the RAM...