The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I’ll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.
it will be ironic when consumers cant afford the end user devices needed to interact with the AI servers. House of cards??
Let me put on my tinfoil hat really quick.
They want to kill personal computing. You don’t need a full blown computer, you need a fire stick style device that plugs into your monitor and allows you to remotely access the virtual machine you rent from Microsoft on a monthly basis.
this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.
Looking back at computing history, cloud computing is basically reverting back to the original mainframes and dedicated terminals.
There was a hype of using thin clients, the concept is that you get just enough hardware and software to be able to connect to a session running on a shared server, the admin can allocate more resources like CPU cores, RAM and storage as individual needs change over time.
As an IT guy, I do like the concept in a corporate environment, especially when looking at the SunRay system from Sun, which used smartcards for easier access, you put your card into the client and if configured properly, you got your old session loaded and ready in a few sec, regardless of which client you put your card into.
The YT channel Clabretro has several interesting SunRay videos.
You may hate AI, but it’s not the reason we are seeing RAM costs skyrocket.
Looking at the manufacturing data and the historical strong-arm tactics used by Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix, who collectively control about 96% of the global DRAM market, AI just gives manufacturers the perfect public justification to stop chasing cheap bit growth, starve low-margin consumer channels (our RAM products), reprioritize wafers toward premium products (data center RAM), and force customers into multi-year contracts at shortage-era prices.
Sure it lets them make more money off us, but they really love locking in these rates with their data center-based customers.
And all this is just because … AI demand.
How long does it take a company already established in the sector to build a RAM factory?
Around 4 years. The creation of any microchip requires extremely stable geology, pristine rooms, high levels of training, Scrooge McDuck moneybins, and so on. It isn’t an industry that can turn on a dime.
4 years after they break ground. God knows how long to decide the location, bribe the authorities to get tax breaks…
