Yeah, it's a true cartel scam. They finally found a way to do this with a minimum risk of government/criminal charges. The RAM cartels were caught every time they previously attempted it. This time they became part of the huge AI scam just like Nvidia etc. in order to protect themselves from government/legal charges.
It's the biggest scam in consumer electronics history.
I've seen so many articles about governments investigating AI startups that were immediately valued from billions to trillions of dollars only to collapse shortly thereafter while running away with whatever investments they got. At that point it's too late. The responsible ones were hidden from start, using figureheads to cover for them.
"London AI startup valued at $1,500,000,000 collapses after it's found to actually be 700 Indian engineers pretending to be bots"
"Market Decline: Worldwide PC shipments dropped 4.9% to 5% year-over-year in mid-2026, marking the first decline in nearly three years and ending nine consecutive quarters of growth. Research firms IDC and Gartner forecast a broader 10–11% contraction for the full year 2026."
The consumer PC market has already dropped by 5-6% and is continuing to fall. This will lead to manufacturers increasing their prices of motherboards, CPU's and other PC components outside RAM in order to get enough revenue to continue functioning.
We're fucked.
I'm sooo happy I bought my 32 GB DDR4 kit just before RAMageddon happened. I bought my Corsair Vengeance 2x16 GB kit for €100 two years ago.
Today a similar 2x16 GB kit is... wait for it.. €451
The heads of Samsung, Hynix and Micron should be taken out, put against a wall and shot. There are plenty of class action suits against them but they don't have the capacity or tools to perform thorough investigations and gather evidence. That's something governments or other large entities with enough power must do.
This is bullshit, it's the economy stupid. Now prices are high cause of demand so they make a lot of money. Memory makers were even losing money in 2023. It's a boom and bust cycle. But almost everything they earn is reinvested in new production capacity so things will normalize.
It sucks that we had the covid/crypto price surge first and then this but it's what it is.
where is all this ram AND SSDs plugged into ... the data centers havent been built yet and u arent fooling me that they are buying the ram 2-3 years before the buildings are built lol ... then ddr6 is out
its just sitting somehwere in a warehouse NOT BEING USED ...
and guess what . these centers wont ever be finished when people figure out there isnt customers for them ... they already peaked and the customers will just jump from the one cheaper better llm to the next .... THERE IS NO GROWTH ... ITS ALL FAKE so those data centers will never see real capacity use
It's not just the economy. To say so is also...stupid.
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Now prices are high cause of demand so they make a lot of money.
That's how it works in everything supply/demand. Doesn't mean the consumer has no right to complain. Just its the source of the complaint, not excuse it away.
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Memory makers were even losing money in 2023. It's a boom and bust cycle.
Again, not sure how this is a defense of the prices. Just an observation of the cause of that cycle. And the pending price fixing suits show the boom is being exploited.
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But almost everything they earn is reinvested in new production capacity so things will normalize.
Capex is enormous but not "almost everything" by any means. Hynix is the only one that is close to matching that claim. Samsung is stockpiling. Shareholder returns, dividends, buybacks are eating profits.
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It sucks that we had the covid/crypto price surge first and then this but it's what it is.
Crypto mining primarily hit GPU/VRAM markets, not system DRAM directly. That framing isn't wrong exactly, but conflates distinct events.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Last edited by DXWarlock on Tue, 21st Jul 2026 19:13; edited 2 times in total
What are you smoking, there are tons of data centers being build.
It sucks but no one is to blame. In the end PC hardware will be dirt cheap cause the prices are bloated with margin for the industry. But consider that almost every dollar is reinvested in future capacity, things will be fine in the long run and prices will collaps some day in the future.
Where did I say they wasn't?
The big three are deliberately reallocated capacity for that. Memory manufacturers have reallocated more than three times the wafer capacity to producing HBM chips, compared to conventional DRAM, actively shorting DRAM supply.
This is the issue. No consumer CPU uses it. No consumer GPU uses it either.
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But consider that almost every dollar is reinvested in future capacity
Again, provable not true. Unless you mean HBM packaging. THAT is true. Your statement implies capacity ramping includes end user dimms and chips. Not so.
End user compatible ram capacity is not being increased (not in any meaningful way, only as a offset mechanic). HBM is eating fab and packaging capacity that would otherwise make the DDR5 sticks you actually put in your PC. You're not competing with datacenters to buy the same product, you're competing for the wafers that get turned into different products. (unless you want 512GB stick of server RAM for home use).
They ARE ramping up capacity, in a manufacturing line that cannot down the line be used/transitioned into end user products. So say datacenter demand collapsed tomorrow, that means nothing for us. Most of the tech, machinery, package building line can't be used to make our RAM. It's totally different. So what they are investing in, even if later demand drops for it, is dead weight. The machines are not made, to make ours.
Spoiler:
Digging into it as I was only marginally sure: TSV drilling equipment, thermocompression bonders (TC-NCF), MR-MUF dispensers, and CoWoS-style interposer/packaging lines are HBM-specific. That equipment can't make consumer DDR5. If HBM demand vanished, that specific investment would be stranded. It IS fungible to a degree, but they would need more investment to convert it.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Eventually things will work out. Moore's law is dead. The EUV machines being installed will probably be used for decades to come and the profit margins for the industry will plummit some day and the stuff will be a commodity...someday in the future
It sucks but no one is to blame. Also can't blame the industry for making a profit, you would do the same in their situation. And as I said, a lot of that money is going straight back to production capacity. If they asked a fair price for your VRAM well first it would be sold out anyway and second it would take decades to bump production and then you should realy worry that this will last forever. This will be over in 2 years. I do hope my aging rig survives this period though, allready having weird reboots again.
Or I could just sell some of my micron stock to fund my new rig
I am just sooo glad I upgraded to a 4070 Super and 5700x3D in late 2024. There will not be any meaningful upgrade in the power of PC components for the next years, as they can simply keep selling the current stuff at increasingly higher prices.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
- Albert Camus
@friketje
I could agree, depends on your meaning of: It sucks but no one is to blame.
Do you mean no one person/entity is to blame. Or no one, at all, is to blame?
I can't agree with the second. It's a human driven economy, impacted by human decisions, and human situations. There has to be a set of humans that facilitated its current state.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
I am just sooo glad I upgraded to a 4070 Super and 5700x3D in late 2024. There will not be any meaningful upgrade in the power of PC components for the next years, as they can simply keep selling the current stuff at increasingly higher prices.
I was planning for a new rig with a 50XX GPU but decided not to cause I believed they shipped with to little VRAM
@DXWarlock
No one is thinking hey, let's create an AI bubble so PC consumers have to pay an outrages sum of money for their new rig and we have all the money for ourselves . It just happens. And companies have to make as much as money as they can, that's what they are supposed to do. Otherwise the CEO will get fired. It just happens, there is no evil plan behind it.
I can agree with that somewhat.
But intent to do so, and tangential result of doing so doesn't mean lack of blame. It just means the did not mean for it to be part of their actions, but still is.
edit better example
Sort of like, to me, Climate change. Doesn't mean someone isn't to blame for it. Just no company set out with the intent to affect the atmosphere and global climate structure.
As blame doesn't always mean willingful guilt. Just means catalyst of.
We might mean blame different? You are working in the area of blame = evil intended plan. I mean it = intended, or unintended, agent in cause of.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
No one is to blame. Innovation just happens and we as humans can't help ourselves being humans. It's ambition (and a bit of greed) that got us where we are and it's ambition that will probably end it all.
I don't blame the industry at all at for what they are doing. (although Nvidia is realy pushing it though ). They are faced with shortages in production capacity that is just hard to fix in the short term and the industry relies on couple of semi monopolists that are gaining from it. It's a though buisiness. Intel for instance is struggling for years. AMD is doing a bit better but is by now means safe for the future. It's either keep up, and atm aiming for insane margins is part of the game atm, or go bankrupt.
The memory buissiness is even worse: 100% they will make losses in the next 5 years and they are investing all they are earning atm. It's the pigs cycle. It's a struggle to survive.
And it sucks hardware prices are skyrocketing as a result. It's just how it works. The industry is not a charity. And the greed is pushing things further. Again, if they would ask a fair price, say production cost +15% profit, we woudln't have anything at all to buy cause the shelves would be empty and the quality would be so much lower.
at what point does a phone or a pc and vital compontents for repair become a right like water n electricity ... all these cunt governments with all their consultant wasted .gov websites n platforms u need to use to do ur taxes or make appointments ....
it should be criminal to not produce enough ram and ssds for normal citizens ...
"What are you smoking, there are tons of data centers being build."
"It sucks but no one is to blame."
...
"I don't blame the industry at all at for what they are doing."
Yes, tons of AI data centers are being built and many have already been built. Interestingly enough many of them are just empty shells and some of them aren't even connected to the power grid. Hmmmm. Why?
Because they're used as fronts for pulling in investors to invest ridiculous amounts of money (due to the AI boom). Those empty AI centers are being used as physical "red herrings" to hide behind in order to run their cartel scheme.
The RAM manufacturers was losing money in 2023 because of oversupply, thus putting the consumer on the winning side of the supply/demand game. The manufacturers had severely miscalculated and fucked up. What to do about it?
Manufacturer 1: "Hey, we've lost 17% on gross margins this year because we cut production way too late; in other words, we all fucked up. Let's try the cartel thing again?"
Manufacturer 2: "Dude, the last couple of times we did that we were caught red handed and had to pay ridiculously expensive fines. Nope. Let's ride this out. We've cut a lot of our production and the amount of product in our warehouses are beginning to shrink."
Manufacturer 3: "Hey you two, I've got an idea. We're in this massive AI boom right now. What if we used it to create an artificial shortage of RAM so we can raise our prices exponentially? We've got the connections needed to help create fronts for our little "project". They could form "temporary" AI businesses that will require a TON of RAM. We'll starve the consumer market who will become desperate enough to pay whatever we want them to pay."
Manufacturer 1: "Hey, that's a fucking great idea. Since we're "selling" our RAM to those front businesses we can create an insane demand for our stuff. We won't raise our production to meet the consumer demand. We keep our RAM stocks to ourselves, incrementally raise our prices and become obscenely rich. Using those front businesses as an excuse we can sell 50%+ less RAM for 600% higher price."
Manufacturer 2: "Fuck, you two are geniuses. Any legal probes into our little scheme will have a very difficult time to find any kind of evidence since it will look pretty damn legit from the outside. We're going to roll in money."
Manufacturer 3: "Guys, let's call those AI boom scammer pals and get things rolling. It will be glorious. Oh, btw, I spoke with Jensen earlier today. He actually gave me enough advice about this. He's become a real hero to me."
By using reading comprehension, deduction on existing information (including critical reading), plausibility assessment and looking up information from different sources etc. it's not difficult to see the pattern behind the cause of RAMageddon. Add to that the fact that they've been caught doing this shit before which led to severe fines etc.
There are currently investigations done by DOJ and other entities, there are class action lawsuits against the cartel by businesses and others that have suffered losses due to the RAM-cartel practices.
However, the way things have become since ~2020 I don't hold much hope for thorough investigations. Corruption, esp. in the US, is at an all time high. After all, Trump replaced all the important positions in DOJ with his own goons.
at what point does a phone or a pc and vital components for repair become a right like water n electricity ... all these cunt governments with all their consultant wasted .gov websites n platforms u need to use to do ur taxes or make appointments ....
it should be criminal to not produce enough ram and ssds for normal citizens ...
actually they already are these cartel whores
Our western societies have become extremely dependant on computer tech. It's quite difficult to live without having some kind of computer (smartphone, laptop, PC) for many tasks whether it's banking, contacting governments, payments and so on. Computers have become ubiquitous in our daily lives.
Memory capacity for all of 2027 has reportedly been booked and sold, with no more DRAM or HBM available
According to a new report, Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron's DRAM and HBM memory capacity for 2027 is now sold out with no additional supply available.
Naturally, this is driven by the current AI boom, and several predictions that state that 2027 is set to be the worst year on record for memory supply. Demand far exceeds supply, and memory makers are signing LTAs (long-term agreements) with companies to supply memory for up to 5 years; the situation is pretty dire.
at what point does a phone or a pc and vital components for repair become a right like water n electricity
Hopefully never.
As you can get a used phone or PC if need for one exists to function paying bills online and texts and calls and such. Never ever, to me, should access to current gen new parts 'be a right' you are entitled to.
Do you NEED new parts to survive like water and electricity? Or do you want new parts to do things that are luxury over what older perfectly fine tech could do if you needed it to? I agree access to basic phones and PC's to do the things humanity mostly requires online yea. Dunno anyone that need DDR6, and 5090 to do that.
Should new parts be easier to get? Absolutely.
Be a basic human right? No.
Well I guess yes. long as I can say I need a new Porsche as a human right to get to work. Because I'm 'not feeling' my old 1997 jeep I am using. And it better not not a shitty 2020 used Porsche either. I want a 2026 off the floor one.
"DDR6 as a right!" First world f'ing problems right there.
Edit: dunno how I missed it. Electricity isn't a right. Try not paying your bill. See if they keep giving it to you. You can opt out. They can decide they are not wiring a new building you put up if its too far from lines, and so on. Go live in the woods in the middle of nowhere and see if 'its a right' works for them to bring power to you. Not a human right at all. It's a provided standard of living luxury, you pay to access.
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Here we go again except for the fact that they never went back to normal pricing, this is just another massive price scam on top of the one they've been using.
its a cartel and conspiracy to eliminate personal computers to switch them BY FORCE BY NO SUPPLY to their pointless data centers
if they cant create natural demand , they can force it and they know it ... and there is WAREHOUSES FULL of ddr4 and 5 somewhere full of memory that will never see the light of day just to keep prices inflated
no fucks given . im telling all friends n family to not by anything new and use old dd3 n 4 stuff as for casual joe it dont matter at all , heck even 150 usd refurbed laptops have 16 gigs of ram ...
ididnt think i would ever have to say this ever BUT THANK GOD FOR SOLDERED MEMORY U COCKSUCKER SCALPER FUCKS. they would have put 4 gigs if they could
maybe apple will start making its own memory soon cause china let us down
People will pay, Americans anyway. Sometimes we forget that about 18% of Americans earn over 100k. 25% of males. And almost 45% of households. They stormed that bakery in New York to buy a 60$ loaf of bread ffs
An 8k GPU is nothing for somebody who takes the hobby seriously. Look what they pay for football and concert tickets nowadays. That pecunious target group got big enough so everybody else can get fucked.
Big text about what's going on and has been alluded to by analysts as well as a class action law suit. It describes how the AI-DRAM-GPU trifecta is working the scam:
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The 2026 lawsuit (Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics, filed June 25 in N.D. California) is a private class action. 17 plaintiffs (14 individuals + 3 small businesses) allege the trio coordinated supply cuts since late 2022, using the HBM pivot as cover. Key new allegations beyond "prices went up":
All three simultaneously began vetting customers and policing orders in January 2026 — questioning buyers about who they were reselling to and whether demand was "real"
Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly agreed to commit up to ~40% of global DRAM output to OpenAI's Stargate project around October 2025
Micron shut down its Crucial consumer brand in December 2025 "at the most profitable price point in the brand's history"
No one expanded commodity DRAM capacity despite unprecedented pricing signals
The companies deny everything. As of now, no DOJ or FTC investigation has been publicly announced for the 2026 round — it's still in the early complaint stage.
The historical precedent is what makes this legally interesting. The same companies (or their direct predecessors) were criminally convicted in the 1998–2002 DRAM cartel:
Defendant Fine
Samsung $300M
SK Hynix (then Hynix) $185M
Infineon $160M
Elpida $85M
Micron Immunity (cooperated with DOJ)
Total criminal penalties exceeded $730M. Several executives served prison time. The EU separately fined nine companies €331M in 2010.
Why this case might be different (per legal analysts): the 2026 complaint leans on the HBM allocation as direct evidence of coordination, not just parallel conduct. In the 2000s case, the DOJ had wiretaps and a whistleblower. Here, plaintiffs are arguing that the simultaneous, identical supply-restriction decisions — plus the customer-vetting behavior — constitute an "agreement" under Section 1 of the Sherman Act without needing a single recorded phone call.
Prior civil attempts failed: a 2017–2018 class action was dismissed by the district court, and a 2021 suit also didn't gain traction. The Tom's Hardware piece on the topic explicitly frames the 2026 case as testing whether "HBM allocations can prove collusion" where two prior decades of parallel-production-cut claims couldn't.
So: no government investigation yet, but a private suit that's substantially more detailed than previous attempts, and the shadow of the 2005 criminal convictions makes it harder for the defendants to wave off the optics.
Analyzed AI industry interconnections
Bloomberg, the IMF, and a growing chorus of analysts have been calling it the "circular economy of AI" — and the structural observation is correct. The three layers are deeply intertwined, and the profit flows are asymmetric.
The loop, concretely:
Nvidia has built a $99 billion equity portfolio in two years (up from $2.2 billion in 2024) across its own customer base — OpenAI ($30B), Intel ($30B), SpaceX ($21B, via xAI), CoreWeave, Anthropic ($10B), and dozens of others. The pattern is consistent: Nvidia invests in a company, that company uses the capital to buy Nvidia chips or lease Nvidia-powered compute. Per NewStreet Research, for every $10B Nvidia invests in OpenAI, OpenAI spends $35B on Nvidia chips.
The DRAM layer plugs in at the hardware level: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are shifting capacity to HBM specifically for these datacenters (the Stargate allocation to OpenAI being the most cited example), which is what's starving the consumer memory market and driving the GPU price increases.
As of mid-2026, 30–50% of planned U.S. data center capacity for 2026 has been delayed or canceled. OpenAI's $500B Stargate project in Texas has no physical progress as of May 2026. Two massive California datacenters are sitting empty, unable to power up. The $500B+ in announced capex is substantially ahead of what's actually being built — constrained by transformers (5-year lead times), grid interconnection, and local opposition (75+ projects worth $130B blocked in Q1 2026 alone).
Where the money actually lands:
Layer Who profits How
Chips Nvidia ~92% AI chip market share; $108B guided revenue; equity stakes appreciate as the companies it funded grow
Memory Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron HBM margins far exceed commodity DRAM; consumer price hikes as a side effect
Datacenter buildout Oracle, CoreWeave, Microsoft Massive contract revenue from OpenAI ($300B Oracle deal, $250B Azure commitment, etc.)
AI labs OpenAI Valuation inflation (targeting ~$2T IPO) but no demonstrated path to profitability; burning capital faster than generating revenue
The critical asymmetry: Nvidia and the DRAM makers are selling shovels and gold — they profit whether or not the mine (the AI labs) ever produces gold. The AI labs are the ones taking on the actual risk of whether the end product is commercially viable. But because Nvidia also owns equity in those labs, it has a financial stake in their survival even though its chip revenue is already secured by the purchase commitments.
The IMF flagged this in July 2026. Michael Burry (the "Big Short" investor) has been publicly warning about the circularity for months. Jensen Huang calls the framing "ridiculous." The structural concern isn't fraud — it's that the revenue figures that justify the valuations are partly generated by the valuations themselves, and if the AI labs' monetization disappoints, the cascade goes: OpenAI's spending drops → Oracle/CoreWeave revenue drops → Nvidia's chip orders drop → the equity stakes Nvidia holds lose value → Nvidia's balance sheet weakens → less capital available for the next round of investment.
The trio is intertwined, and the two layers selling hardware (chips + memory) are the ones with the most assured profit, while the layer actually building the "future" (the datacenters and AI labs) carries the execution risk. The DRAM makers and Nvidia are, in the user's framing, the "sellers of shovels" in a gold rush where the gold hasn't been found yet.
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. It just happens. And companies have to make as much as money as they can, that's what they are supposed to do. Otherwise the CEO will get fired. It just happens, there is no evil plan behind it.
