Good thing AI sucks
Back in my day, we downloaded ram. 8GB at a time.
I downloaded a gallon of cum and my parents got really mad
Going to be fucking hilarious when all the western companies get fucked by China taking over the market they don’t seem to care about.
Hmm I know China has a big push for AI as well, I wonder what their market is looking like.
Edit: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-much-ai-does-1-get-you-in-china Ah seems like their AI isn’t as big due to lack of access to western chips.
Don’t count on China. They are going to invade Taiwan next year and the global trade embargo will be a rounding error to the destruction of the tmsc factories during that war. Or they will capture the fabs and prohibit export to the US. Loose loose for us.
“China, a country that hasn’t invaded another country in 50 years, is going to invade this country” said the country that invades a country once a decade.
China a country that has been trying to unify Taiwan since the civil war they couldn’t quite finish.
yes, because what happened in the past can perfectly predict what’s going to happen next.
not saying you are definitely wrong, but if someone wants to have a bet i wouldn’t bet on the side of China not invading.
They’ve been going to invade Taiwan next year for the last 30 years
If they do it Trump strikes “a deal” to give them Taiwan. That’s my bet.
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I don’t understand this thing about anyone destroying those factories for any reason. I don’t think that would happen.
What’s your source for that. China has no more reason to invade Taiwan next year than they have at any point in the last 30 years
Umm hundreds of Chinese ambassadors to Xi Himself. How many do you want I’ll start pulling them.
China has been wanting to reunite with Taiwan ever since the founding of the PRC. the reason has always been there, and right now they are more ready than ever.
keep a close eye on what Chinese military is doing.
Why are they more ready now than they were 2 years ago? Politically nothing has really changed I know Americans like to think that Trump is a big factor but he isn’t, since even he is just as bullish on China as any other US president has been and it’s not as if the military is left.
Well, our economy is collapsing from bad debt and inflation, we’ve alienated ourselves from our ally’s, we’ve relocated aircraft carriers and are starting new wars.
It’s honestly a great time for china to exert some force.
you really are asking me to do the research for you huh.
a quick web search finds me:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/china-live-fire-military-drills-around-taiwan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Navy_landing_barges
and it’s not hard to find more.
Why would they need to invade Taiwan? They already have their own companies making RAM.
It’s called unfinished business. Xi is not going to give up on reunifying all of china. They got their Hong Kong now they need the Taiwan
they have more than practical reasons.
It’s well known that Taiwan has all strategic factories mined. If a single Chinese soldier steps on the island, anything industrial of value will be blown to bits. China is interested in the land.
AI is the last great bubble.
And it, like all bubbles, will pop.
You are already seeing the people in the know flee the field.
You see reports that every company that has adopted it has at best changed nothing, at worst lost money on it.
Outside of the psychotic linked in CEO bubble, literally no one wants AI. And every day its generating more and more hate due to its halucinations, mistakes, and bullshit.
Its garnering massive negative attention for its use, and for anyone stupid enough to adopt it at this point (cough intel cough)
Its a dying star, and people are frantically trying to harvest the last bits of warmth from it before going off in search of new horizons.
I can only assume you haven’t used it for anything it’s good at lately. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Just like we still have websites after the dot com bubble, there will still be LLMs after the AI bubble pops.
Certainly, but hopefully you won’t turn on your PC and have 50 popups and 10 different buttons blinking and getting in the way of each other begging you to try AI.
And they told me I was crazy for putting 64 gigs into my machine back in early 2021. I “only” paid about 200 USD
I bought a netbook (GPD Win Max 2) with 64GB of RAM last year. It was really expensive, by 2025 standards.
But now I feel like I have the power of the universe in my jacket pocket. Best irresponsible buying decision I ever made.
I got mine 2 (or shit, is it 3 now) years ago - 10/10 best laptop purchase in a long while.
GPD have done well for themselves in the small screen laptop space!
I knew somehow similar thing would happen in coming years. Alas, I had neither money nor requirement for that.
Same
Go ahead, make a lucrative market for consumer ram, see how fast china figures out how ot start filling that need :)
I’m fairly certain that spinning up RAM fabs isn’t super quick nor something that doesn’t require the most cutting edge tech.
China is definitely ahead of the US in a lot of tech, but unless they do invade Taiwan they might not have quite a deep enough bench.
And if they complain, just shout “free market” at them
I can’t wait till these companies shutter their AI shit and that supply gets dumped back into the market
Knowing real life some other party will juice it and ride the ram shortage for another few years, just keeping the supply as a speculative income stream.
Sadly a lot of this is chiplet interposer mounted HBM and not UDIMMs. The HBM cannot be removed from the products it’s installed from so unless you want an H100 it won’t be off much use. The remainder is mainly server RDIMMs and LRDIMMs. UDIMMs for desktops are in short supply because they cut manufacturing to make other things.
I‘m switching hobbies to gunpla. No one has managed to put DRAM in an airbrush to the best of my knowledge.
i mean, i thought you were wanting to save money…
Just you wait. Ai airbrushes are coming soon
Yet
The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn’t really exist to be put into GPUs that haven’t been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven’t been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn’t actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible.
😎
All that to create Artificial Intelligence that isn’t really intelligent.
What do you mean?
Just walk the car wash!
On the bright side, at least the entire global economy isn’t ridiculously overextended on this delusional bubble.
The price crash is going to be great. Such a massive yo-yo. Most of the AI companies will just completely eat shit out of it.
Yes and no. The hardware companies have already said that they’re not interested in expanding production. They know it’s a bubble, and don’t want expanded production now to cause a glut in the future when the inevitable pop happens. So prices may not actually drop, (even after the pop), because the companies still won’t be producing more hardware than they currently are.
My best guess is that we’ll have some dark data centers sitting around collecting dust, but the hardware they bought won’t actually flood the market and crash prices. If anything, since the US dollar’s value is essentially tied to Nvidia and OpenAI’s market share, a pop will only make the dollar less powerful and will counteract any potential drops in prices that may have otherwise happened. The companies will get a trillion dollar bailout when the pop happens, (because they’re too big to fail) then nothing will change about the current hardware prices.
…except that PC sales will fall off a cliff, so they won’t have a market to sell to. Its not like you need a PC to access the internet anymore.
Are you just like, completely unaware of workplaces?
So prices may not actually drop, (even after the pop), because the companies still won’t be producing more hardware than they currently are.
There’s also the risk that they simply may not drop the price even after, because the customer base can bear that price, so it becomes the new normal.
All the ram being bought up is going to end up in the 2nd hand market as the hardware is all liquidated out. The prices will crash, and despite manufacturers not increasing their productions lines to build more ram, will still have to compete against themselves from the used market, meaning they won’t be able to keep trying to charge crazy high prices.
The problem is it’s manufacturing capacity that is being bought. They’re going to use that capacity to build HBM modules and data centre GPUs that cannot run outside of specialized servers. There will be a lot of high end gear gathering dust, but nothing you or I can use.
Maybe if you’re a large business/enterprise you could get some hardware on the cheap during the crash, but it’s not ot like those things are full of DDR5 DIMMs and RTX GPUs.
Well that sucks. I dug into your info a bit as well, and it seems true. Registered ecc ram that servers tend to use won’t work on consumer desktops.
Good thing I don’t plan on upgrading my PC for at least a few more years.
As a side note, I’m pissed off the ram and storage inventory issue has delayed Valves new steam VR headset release. I’ve never bought VR anything before and was looking forward to it.
Did you use ChatGPT to write this?
AI’s are more important than humans now. I guess we should get used to this. Line must go up.
Line must goes up until it hits a ceiling, then system collapses… but line go up again after!
Soon it will just be a bunch of AIs buying, selling, and interacting with each other.
That is what we in the professional world would term the “poop” scenario.
Go Go Gadget zswap!
I’m aware, thanks.
Now I’m just contemplating whether I should upgrade from 32 GB DDR4 to 64 or 128 while it’s still within the realm of possibility, or bet on memory prices coming back down within the next few years, and upgrade to an entirely new platform with DDR5 then.
At least I’m not planning on buying a brand new car anytime soon, or even a nearly new one. And my phone’s fine for a few more years.
Just get a 256GB SSD and boom, cheap RAM - albeit slow
Those are also unobtainium.
Read/write cycles are absurd with RAM. One good way to break SSDs if I am getting this correctly.
I’ve already got a 64 gig swap file to complement my 32 gigs of RAM tbh. I just wish I didn’t have to swap lol
What do you need all that ram for?
Since you asked: some games or if running heavy processors for simulated projects
Not everyone just uses their box for writing emails and surfing TikTok.
Or for things like video editing. Video editors tend to be quite RAM heavy.
Absurd stuff in Blender
SOMEONE has to render boobies with 30k polygons in 8K, it’s an important foundation of the Internet
DCS
To get rid of swap and mount /tmp entirely in RAM. Right now I only have 32 gigs and a 64 gig swap file to compensate.
Anyone remember RAMdisks?
remember that ram drive that gigabyte made like 20+ years ago?
That worked by putting sticks of ram in it, with… i think AA batteries? to maintain the data during power downs?
I’d just point out that now might be a good time to add a whole-house surge arrester and/or get a bunch of new surge arresting power strips for your hardware. They have a useful life measured in joules dissipated so replace them if they’re old too or your cheap RAM (among other things) may let out the magic smoke one day.
My most recent hobby has been an old Suzuki Samurai that I dragged out of the woods a few years ago. It doesn’t use much RAM. It doesn’t even have fuel injection.
I’ve also been getting back into archery with my kid.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think that making it harder to get a computer and play games is a huge miscalculation. If everyone is distracted by Call of Battle: Dutyfield then you have fewer bored assholes casting about for something to do, and if people can still play Factorio, you don’t end up with bored, autistic, organized assholes casting about for something to do.
That is ok we will get more videos of cats making lattes.
Jokes on you…
