r/hardware • u/TinFoilHat_69 • 1d ago
Info Ram availability may remain under pressure across multiple product generations beyond Q4 2028
https://www.guru3d.com/story/ddr4-memory-prices-now-also-rise-as-dram-supply-shortages-intensify-through-2028/Two sticks of DDR4 16x2 is now 250-300 dollars
Two sticks of DDR4 32x2 is not 450-650 dollars. Just going to get worse. Soon DDR3 prices are going to spike.
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u/ssongshu 1d ago
Honestly just stopped caring at all. As long as my games run at an enjoyable level thatâs all that matters. Motion clarity via high FPS and sharper visuals at higher resolutions are simply an unaffordable luxury now.
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u/Swoly_Deadlift 12h ago
90% of the games I play are over 5 years old or indie games that could run on a potato. If they want to destroy the consumer market and force everyone to rent their computers back as a subscription service, I just will hold onto my current build forever.
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u/HypNoEnigma 1d ago
This is all under the assumption that hyperscalers will actually turn a decent profit. So far there are absolutely no signs of this. Oracle is sitting on a monstrous pile of debt and they are fumbling already and that's a pretty big one.
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u/corruptboomerang 1d ago
Oracle are more then likely bankrupt, they're just pretending their not...
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u/Cheeze_It 1d ago
God how I fucking hope.....
I fucking HOPE that Oracle dies. I hope they die a horrible, horrible death.
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u/corruptboomerang 1d ago
Don't worry, all Oracle's IP and value will remain, it'll just get bought up by various companies, likely private equity...
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u/Cheeze_It 1d ago
Their IP has value? That's.....news to me my good sir.
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u/corruptboomerang 1d ago
Some of it. Someone will want to put the Oracle name on... something.
They'll have a few portfolios of value, if only patents and contracts. They're so big and diverse that parts of it are bound to be valuable.
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u/venfare64 1d ago
Don't worry, all Oracle's IP and value will remain, it'll just get bought up by various companies, likely private equity...
Monkey paw curl, Majority of Oracle leftovers are being bought by
BroadcomAvago.1
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u/ButtPlugForPM 19h ago
Can we wait till friday though.
they owe my company 1.3m in invoices lol.
after that they are welcome to go bankrupt lol
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u/jhenryscott 1d ago
Yup Wiley Coyote has been off the cliff for sometime. Just gotta look downâŠ
Iâm a construction manager near an Oracle Stargate site and it is a disaster, the subcontractors are taking them for a ride.
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u/Money_Pie8986 22h ago
Not really, the GPUs they bought last year are 2Ă the original value, RAMs in the servers are 6x the original values. The running systems with electricity supply are even more expensive.
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u/sshwifty 20h ago
Who is going to buy the parts if everyone goes broke?
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u/Money_Pie8986 20h ago
They can sell half of their hardware to payoff the debt. The other half are free. You can sell them immediately, there is is shortage in GPUs and memory.
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u/dantemp 15h ago
my dude every software dev is on claude these days, users already start seeing degraded performance at peak hours because so many use the service, everyone I talk to uses chatgtp in one form or another, this reddit circlejerk that there's nobody using AI is really blinding you
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u/HypNoEnigma 15h ago
I never said that no one uses AI. The thing is that all of these people will stop using it the moment any company asks them for a price that would generate them any profit because it would definitely be way too high for what you get in return. That is why all of the AI companies aren't profitable. People can now use it for free or at a pretty big discount. All these data centers need completely new GPU's every 3 or so years. The cost of that alone will be astronomical. They would need to charge people an arm and a leg to use any LLM. Ask all these people that you know if they would still use it if it would cost 1$ every single prompt and they would tap out instantly (unless it's a business expense)
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u/Banmers 1d ago
shits fucked until way into the 2030s
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u/No_Sheepherder_1855 1d ago
Nah, buildouts start tapering off in 2029. 2030 will be the likely inflection point short of any catastrophic financial collapse.Â
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u/myztry 1d ago edited 1d ago
Retro gaming revival. Many programs are still 32bit and my first 32bit machine had 512kb.
> my current machine has 32Gb RAM and 24Gb VRAM which is a stupendous amount of memory.
>> My first 32bit machine wouldnât need RAM. The entire OS plus graphics plus software could exist in the L1 processor cache. If it werenât for Gateâs Law (software gets twice as slow/hungry every 18 months) weâd all be laughing.
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u/uneducatedramen 1d ago
Just wait till somehow next gen consoles get released, and make 16gb+ mandatory for console level texture quality.. but, Seeing how few games come out a year that is actually interesting to me, and even then they more than not arenât the demanding type, I shouldnât care this much.
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u/OttawaDog 1d ago
A lot of talk next gen consoles will be delayed beyond 2028 as well.
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u/venfare64 1d ago
Not for Next gen Xbox iirc. Asha will launch it as contract obligation to AMD.
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u/OttawaDog 1d ago
If it comes during max RAM prices and cost $1200, it's going to flop hard and not going to change much, except put more egg on Microsoft's face.
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u/Aggrokid 1d ago
The upshot is that chip designs are already taped out. So MS/Sony will be sitting on a fixed spec for years, somewhat similar to Switch 2.
This could mean they will debut relatively underspecced for the time, and gaming PCs will surpass with minimal difficulty
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u/OttawaDog 1d ago
Next gen GPUs for PC are also rumored to be slowing rollout.
AI is consuming all.
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u/JonWood007 7h ago
I plan to just not do next gen if it proves too expensive. There arent tons and tons of games I really want these days anyway.
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u/uneducatedramen 5h ago
I fell into the habit (not by my will) that i almost only played eafc last year. A simple 8 minute game is enough. Maybe 3 if i feel daring. Then i wait the 70% off that comes around december for the next iteration.
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u/JonWood007 5h ago
Yeah, like 90% of what I played on PC this year has been Battlefield 6 and COD BO7. Neither one of which particularly push boundaries. Normally BF games push me to have to upgrade first, especially on the CPU side, but after BF2042 pushed things TOO far they played it safe with BF6 where it runs on relatively modest hardware specs.
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u/OttawaDog 1d ago
I'm a trailing edge guy. I only buy games on GOG. Most of my games are 10+ years old.
I used a Core 2 Quad CPU and 8800GT GPU for 15 years, right up until 2023.
Now I have an i5-12400/RTX 4070 that should be good for me until 2030 or so.
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u/jones_supa 1d ago
Now I have an i5-12400/RTX 4070 that should be good for me until 2030 or so.
You can easily use it even after 2040.
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u/Artaxeus 1d ago edited 1d ago
The modding scene for older games will probably go crazy. GTA IV just got a DLSS mod a week or two ago, something I wouldâve thought impossible a few years ago.
And letâs not forget emulation and native PC ports.
There are literally thousands of games out there to enjoy, so weâre not going to run out of things to play.1
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u/got-trunks 20h ago
Retro games? Everything built up to and including now is working fine. I get the point though, I'll be doing tabletop, hopefully we don't get another pandemic (yaya jinxed it.)
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u/Intrepid_Lecture 1d ago
I'm about to pull 96GB of RAM out of my NAS. It can live off 16GB and a 280GB optane L2ARC.
My next desktop is using SO-DIMM. Haha.
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u/Trinitial-D 1d ago
the article says that Citiâs analysis says that shortage COULD persist through 2028⊠subtly implying that they expect the shortage to resolve by then, and it is only a chance for the shortage to continue longer. theres no need for all the doom and gloom guys
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u/Seanspeed 1d ago
Yea, there's nothing in the actual article that sounds super dire or worse than any speculation we've already been hearing.
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u/Bosfordjd 1d ago
It's gonna be through 2030 at minimum.
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u/Trinitial-D 1d ago
according to what basis? with all due respect, I would like to know what information you have that Citigroup apparently doesnt
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u/Bosfordjd 1d ago
They didn't say it's going to end in 2028, but that it's extending into 2028...it will be 100% extending further than that, they're just not forecasting that far.
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u/Risko4 1d ago
CXMT and high bandwidth flash memory will balance it out.
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u/Bosfordjd 1d ago
Not for 3-4yrs minimum.
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u/Risko4 1d ago
Micron Technology has committed 75% of its 2027 production output, not all of it.
While I don't think AI is a bubble, the memory chips industry is.
Every 3 months inference gets a lot more efficient and the footprint for extremely well optimised MoE models is getting smaller.
Sk Hynix is down 21% in the last 5 days
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u/trackdaybruh 1d ago edited 1d ago
> Every 3 months inference gets a lot more efficient and the footprint for extremely well optimised MoE models is getting smaller.
Which means they are going to cram more in there. They will increase the memory capacity because it means they can do more with than ever
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u/Risko4 1d ago
Except no, not every expert will be useful if they did that which is why they don't do it. It's better to have a smaller footprint which allows more kv cache so inference providers can have higher concurrency and batching.
Also inference is extremely cheap, meanwhile training a 20T parameter model is insanely expensive and no one wants to do it, they have the memory capacity to do it yet won't.
Plus you've completely overlooked new techniques such as SSD N-gram offload, which bypasses RAM, which was bypasses HBM.
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u/trackdaybruh 1d ago
Only time will tell, I canât see memory usage becoming static as technology (both hardware and software) advances just because it becomes more efficient.
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u/Bosfordjd 1d ago
stocks going down is going to make it worse, because they'll halt/slow expansion plans. That said the stock being down doesn't change demand...only thing that changes that is major AI players collapsing...which our idiot admin will 100% bail out in the US.
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u/Willinton06 1d ago
China will come to the rescue as always, once they can reliably make this ram, itâs game over
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u/Random_Sime 22h ago
Why would China make RAM for sale to consumers when they could make more money selling memory to data centres?
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u/Willinton06 19h ago
To takeover the entire market, they are playing the long game, if they thought the way youâre describing, they wouldnât be giving away free models, and selling their electric cars for so cheap
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u/Random_Sime 17h ago
So the great plan of China is to flood the market, achieve market dominance, and
jack up priceskeep prices low out of the kindness of their hearts?Â1
u/Willinton06 17h ago
Oh they will jack up the prices, but by that time, South Korea and Taiwan would have doubled their capacity to compete against the Chinese, so the new jacked up prices will be lower than todayâs
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u/Random_Sime 16h ago
That's a bright-eyed speculation.
I think the PC industry is moving away from that model entirely. It won't matter that RAM is cheaper in 7 years if all the PSU and motherboard manufacturers have gone out of business in the time that consumer RAM was too expensive for most people to buy.Â
The future is thin clients with 8-16gb soldered RAM that you rent in a package deal subscription to cloud compute service, like a cable tv box and service. Nvidia and the memory cartel are killing the PC enthusiast market right now to achieve this future. The value proposition will be, "Why spend $5k on a PC that will be out of date in 3 years when you can spend $100/month on a sub that gives you access to the fastest compute always?"
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u/Willinton06 16h ago
Now thatâs some nonsensical shit, Iâm saying China will do the same thing theyâve done 10 times already, youâre saying weâll have subscriptions for ram, like we wouldnât have people jailbreaking that shit in 5 minutes, but itâs fine, you can believe whatever you want, life will happen anyways
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u/Random_Sime 16h ago
Wow. Seems like my prediction upset you.
I know what you're saying, and I think you're naĂŻve. Things are different this time. The status quo has been upturned. Yes, China will dominate, but we won't be building PCs from components any more than people in cities will commute on horseback.Â
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u/Willinton06 15h ago
Your prediction made me sad, to think people can come up with such random shit and spout it publicly is why we got into this mess in the first time
If you think people in India, Africa, South America gonna be paying monthly for ram, youâre nuts
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u/Random_Sime 2h ago
Despite my user name, I'm not coming up with random shit. I'm informed by articles such as this https://www.newsweek.com/computer-companies-subscription-models-11498777
And this https://fortune.com/2026/06/01/jensen-huang-nvidia-pc-reinvention-ai-chips/
They want us to pay a little amount for hardware every month instead of a big amount every few years.
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u/lolfail9001 12h ago
The same reason China takes over (or attempts to) every other mission-critical industry: soft power.
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u/hollow_bridge 1d ago
Two sticks of DDR4 16x2 is now 250-300 dollars
or ~$130 on ebay used... or ~180 on amazon new from smaller brands.
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u/DigitalguyCH 1d ago
Man I was so lucky to get 64GB DDR5 for $230 when prices were starting to go up 1 year ago (I later sold my 32GB DDR5 for the same price)
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u/koolaidismything 18h ago
I'm glad all my stuff is semi-curent. M1 MacBook Air and iPhone 16e and then two backup phones. Trying to sell one but maybe not.. if this keeps up it may end up becoming my smart TV cause the Dex thing
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u/JonWood007 7h ago
Well see. Keep in mind this whole thing is a bubble and when it pops prices will rapidly deflate. We keep acting like this entire business practice of buying up the world's supply of ram years in advance for data centers no one wants and arent even sustainable is a sound business practice that will go on forever. Its not.
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u/Bosfordjd 1d ago
Capacity for shit is already sold out as far as 2030...so yeah it's gonna be way past 2028 who thought '28 was a possibility lol.
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u/OttawaDog 1d ago
I'm prepared to hold out until 2030 or beyond with my i5-12400 PC if necessary. I just hope nothing fails.
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u/Iceber015 1d ago
I donât understand the comments, so is CXMT locked in as chinaâs one and only RAM manufacturer for good? Whatâs the difference that makes RAM impossible to be like the plethora of other products that undercut American manufactured or âassembledâ products
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u/Hater_Hatesaton 1d ago
There's no reason to undercut if everything gets bought (you'd just be losing profit to sell what would already sell), and these high prices are why CXMT can expand as aggressively as it's doing. Another player could enter, but it takes a while, a ton of know-how, capital, and buildout to the point anyone starting now may not be able to catch the wave, in which case they just sacrifice tens of billions for the privilege of selling memory for pennies when demand falls.
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u/FlapSmear78 1d ago
What's the reason for manufacturing not increasing production to meet demand?
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u/lysander478 1d ago
They've been converting anything they conceivably can into the most profitable lines in the current market (HBM) instead of waiting for the build-out of new production facilities, so in a sense they have been doing just that, just not for all components at once and actually the process has led to reduced supply for some components (DDR4 especially, DDR5 to an extent).
In theory, they might convert back at some point once everything new is fully up and working in the next few years, but if demand is still through the roof for HBM or whatever else? Why would they? They can just keep working on what's most profitable/also in high demand. Nearly everything going up is for HBM, not DDR5 and especially not for DDR4.
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u/jrherita 1d ago
It cost billions of dollars to add substantial capacity. If the demand drops they lose that investment.
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u/dingo_xd 23h ago
Right now their margins are closer to 90%. They can afford to shut down factories if demand dries up. They've made unimaginable profits.
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u/jrherita 23h ago
Sure, but investors will completely shatter the stock as soon as the margins drop from 90% to negative numbers. Take a look into previous RAM boom/bust cycles (they've been fairly consistent since the 1970s). The downtimes are ugly and can last a long time.
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u/dingo_xd 22h ago
But that's a problem for the future. Right now they can easily sell bonds at market prices to finance the buildup
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u/jrherita 21h ago
Would you take on $B in debt to expand capacity in a market that always has downturns following temporary upswings?
(Google memory boom and bust cycles - they happen on average every 5 years since the late 1970s).
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u/robotojojo 15h ago
Yes, but factories take a long time to build and so do the machines. They could start building new facilities but it will be years to put them online and by then no one knows what the market will be
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u/HeRmEs3xx 1d ago
"They don't want to expand capacity now, and have it sit idle in the future..." Margins would decrease if their is an oversupply.
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u/GraXXoR 1d ago
When youâre making 90% margins compared to the 10 to 15% you were making before you donât really need to expand much. Also expansion cost money and risks reducing demand.
Weâre back to everyone in the early 90s when RAM was constrained on purpose and prices were inflated beyond all reasonable amount.
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u/dingo_xd 23h ago
One of the primary reasons is the embargo and restrictions on sales of DUV and euv related technology to China.
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u/glizzygobbler247 16h ago
Literally all manufacturing facilities are fully booked for ai year ahead
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
Please Chinese RAM save the day
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u/MaverickPT 1d ago
Doubtful. They will try to extract as much profit as they can get away with, like any other company does
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
True, but more offer means less price. Also, the first time you come into a market there is always resistance, so they will have to sell them at discount to break that barrier.
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u/r34p3rex 1d ago
It depends if the increase in supply will outstrip the increase in demand. If it does, then RAM price will naturally fall
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u/NoPriorThreat 1d ago
drop will also bankrupt some western ram companies and chinese ram manufacturers will be a monopoly
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u/Mako2401 1d ago
Every single item you have that is cheap or relatively cheap, is because of China. The thing with cpus, gpus and ram was that there was no real massive demand like now. Due to the euv machines being banned from China, I don't think we'll get any reprieve on the cpu/ gpu side. But for ddr5 memory? China will save us .Â
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u/Clueless_PhD 1d ago
CXMT is charging DRAM price eve higher than other companies.
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u/Suspicious_Row_6136 1d ago
Redditors thinking that Chinese companies are some savior charity organizations are so funny.Â
They are just corporations that care about profits, not a bunch of random PC enthusiasts on the internet.
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u/WhataNoobUser 1d ago
That's it? I keep hearing about the ram prices being so high then why is a mac studio wirh 256 g of ram 12k? Ram even at 5k shouldn't make apple charge that much
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u/stevekez 1d ago
If I ain't buying 512GB of cheap DDR6 in Q1 2029 I'm gonna be writing a strongly worded post expressing my displeasure... providing my current computer's RAM still works...