"The US tariffs imposed on China on 1 August 2025, played a substantial role in the increase in DRAM prices. " DJT say he gonna lower prices on day one. NOPE.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Well, he didn't necessarily lie, August 1st wasn't day 1 of his presidency. He didn't say anything about rising costs afterwards!
I'm pretty sure we could all have quite reasonably expected rising costs, destruction of science, frittering of international standing, increased morbidity and mortality, etc.
I'm sure those tariffs have some impact in the US, but ram prices are outrageously high outside the US as well. They're not the real factor here.
I'm just quoting the article. Sounds like you have more to add, care to comment on what IS 'the real factor'?
Deals between AI giants and ram manufacturers. That's what's creating the shortage and driving up the real prices.
If nobody can afford anything with more than 8 gigs of ram for their office workers, they'll all just pay for more AI tokens because otherwise the 900ms keystroke latency in MS Word would make it impossible to work, right?
I would be shocked if that wasn't on some AI company's brainstorm board as a positive side effect (for them) of all of this.
But theres a happily ever after, right? Right?!?
Considering Crucial is killing consumer chip production, and is only one of three companies making consumer chips, no.
In the span of 5 to 10 years, do you think there will not be a return to consumer production?
I'd love to see someone explain to me how the current rate of AI capex will continue to grow in that time span, and how it will be financed. I don't think it's feasible.
Manufacturing capacity though doesn't seem very limited in that kind of time scale, it just needs investment and time to expand. Once it's there... if it's not used it's lost profits. AI hardware deliveries are at an all time high but sentiment has been on shaky ground on the investor side starting this year.
The three memory producers have always exploited market disruption for profits, generally cooperatively. They're really good at profiting during all disruptions which just happen with newer technology. It doesn't last.
In the span of 5 to 10 years, do you think there will not be a return to consumer production?
Manufacturing will expand and the higher consumer prices will ensure some manufacturers still service that market. Price will be higher, but it's not going to get to the point where you can't buy a personal PC.
The thing is that the consumers of DRAM aren't just home users, it's businesses. Businesses all over the world literally can't absorb hundreds of dollars of extra cost. I've set standards for global computing at a business with offices in all continents except antarctica, Dell can handle giving you a global price but you can't just ship a $1000 laptop to a business in sao paolo and expect the business there to be able to afford it, the margins are not like the US or Europe.
Prices will come down much faster than people think imo. We'll see a flood of slower DDR5 from substandard processes first, but I would be amazed if in 2027 AI spend is even half of what it was this year.
The AI bubble is certainly going to burst at some point. Assuming manufacturers are ramping up production to profit off of the higher prices, the bubble will result in a glut of supply after demand collapses. So we'll likely see a year or two of depressed electronics prices.
On top of that, DDR5 is worth more than gold until DDR6 comes along and suddenly you have companies who own a significant percentage of the 2025 global production of RAM that want to purchase newer hardware. I doubt all of that RAM is going to be shredded, so we may have a thriving secondary market when that happens.
It'll suck for the next year or two, so get used to your current PC and pray that you don't have a RAM failure.
Micron is stopping Crucial, but they will still sell to companies like Corsair.
Yeah, but at what price?
Killing DIMM production.
That's of the three major companies that make RAM chips.
There are other companies that make DIMMs. They just buy chips from the RAM chip manufacturers to do it. PNY or Kingston, say.
Micron was just doing a vertically-integrated thing where they did both the chips and DIMMs.
EDIT: Looking back at the article, it does say that.
I feel like the end goal is us to be using thin client that can't even browse the web, we will have a content slop scrolled in the middle, you swipe right and you have an AI chat box to search information, send messages, it all has to be done with AI. Oh and you need scan your ID and pay subscriptions for each AI feature you enable, you will own nothing and work all day you won't have time to browse the web so the AI will do it for you
You'd think, but web apps take immense amounts of ram
Create artificial scarcity to drive up prices thanks to foolish venture capitalists dumping money into GPU- and RAM-hungry AI vaporware. Free money.
Consumers get hosed due to high prices, major investors make bank on overinflated stock value, eventual crash, everyday consumers and investors get hosed, companies get bailouts while employees get laid off.
You forgot the part where the poor revolt and the rich use drones to quell it. Good luck.