It's obviously to Lenovo's benefit to have people believe that RAM prices will not drop, so that they will not wait out the current price surge.
The price will drop if supply exceeds demand, and if competition increases.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Supply demand economics was a great concept in grade 8, but in the real world, price fixing and monopolies rule unchecked.
Myth vs reality type thing. A charitable thing to say is that its an incomplete theory. There are political interests to keep it that way.
Imagine if all of us cared about the regulatory capture rampant in the baby formula industry they gave us that US baby formula crisis at the start of the decade, as much as we care about our computer memory.
Oh when the bubble pops ram is gonna be insanely cheap
Don't you worry if it pops they will just slow down the factories, or close them and fire people to get it stay as where they are.
not if companies go broke
not if companies go broke
That's what a bubble popping is. NVidia is over-inflated. AI datacenters are over-inflated. The bubble will pop, many will go out of business, and all of their hardware will be liquidated.
Realistically, a whole lot of the high bandwidth memory products that they are producing will never find their way into consumer products.
When the dotcom bubble popped there were a lot of Assets in by products which could be adopted by other companies or distributed to a wide array of potential users, but the E-Waste and byproducts of this era are going to be niche and esoteric.
I think a lost decade is much more likely than a Renaissance of repurposing.
I'm just hoping the big three memory manufacturers that have essentially contracted all of their volumes across the next several Cycles will be able to survive whatever collapse hits their account receivable when they've done exactly what they said they would but the people with the purchase orders leave them holding the bag.
LOL. The biggest area of tech investing right now is alternative video cards and RAM for the home consumer market. The Wang dropped the ball on what made the company chasing a Ponzi scheme. This is so ripe for perturbation.
See Bolt Graphics...dual PCI connect options, upgradable VRAM, non proprietary hardware...
Ah yes, history has shown that prices never fluctuate.
They're basically saying the AI companies are going to keep demand elevated to the point that supply will never catch up. It's possible but with variables like public backlash, unrealistic power requirements, eventual financial and AI regulation, I would bet on a painful collapse.
There’s always a collapse on the horizon, I believe many of these stories are worst-case scenarios or a way to help billionaires believe their own hype and swallow the turds to keep capitalism on life support.
Nah they're saying the like 3 places that manufacture RAM won't drop their prices after
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I wouldn't say "never," but it's very likely that RAM prices will not return to pre-AI (read: bullshit) levels. Many markets do this; hike up to crazy levels during a boom, come back down 80%, rinse and repeat.
The only thing that might put a stop to it is competition or the unicorn business that focuses upon everyday consumers and not purely profit (lol). I'm hopeful China is able to be a spoiler to this current tech hegemony, given general US hegemony is basically over, but the home computing market is probably fucked in the meantime.
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Quite frankly, we abuse ram anyways. So much software uses way more ram than is actually necessary. I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals. Doing far more with far less.
It's the only thing we are empowered to do, buy less ram and use software that runs smoothly with less ram.
Agreed, but still fuck data centers
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Expect an import ban on Chinese made ram to be coming soon.
The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.
Trump was told the enemy could see him across the map.
It is critical to national profits. I wonder how trump's kids are involved in this like every other scheme he rigs.
Thinking about that is most of the packagers for RAM are in china. Even if that silicon wasn't pressed in china, the company that actually buys up the modules slaps them on dims or sodiums, and ships them with custom Packaging are in China.
There is a whole middle step that most of us are completely missing, between the actual memory manufacturers and the distributors.
Expect an import ban on Chinese made ram to be coming soon.
Yes. I do half-way expect that.
Of course, I also look forward to investing in novelty keychains, which just coincidentally come with a free teddy bear, which itself has a couple of RAM sticks sewn inside.
I have a work issued Lenovo Thinkpad P14S Gen6 AMD with a Ryzen 9 AI, 2TB nvme, and 64GB of GDDR5 RAM. It cost $2600 last October.
Went to buy more of them for other devs last week as their Dells are just hot garbage and are being refunded, who wants to guess what the price of the exact same machine though Lenovo directly again is now?
$6800.
Absolutely insane.
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The article ignores several points.
First, this is one of the conditions where capitalism actually works. Many players in the field dropped out because of the razor thin margins of the past. Fabs take years to ramp up, and are insanely expensive to set up, so getting in to take advantage of a temporary shortage was an unacceptable risk. Now there is a decade(s) long projected shortage, making the investment attractive again. Plenty of players have experience in Fabs, even though they are not up to date.
Also, the market is going to accept that slightly slower ram is quite fine in many applications, and they are easier to make. DDR5/6 is really not that important. I have an AM4 Ryzen 9 with 64Gb DDR4 that flies, I mean the thing cooks! This environment is going to make Chinese Fabs competitive in the mid-term, and give them the opportunity to catch up, especially since the Chinese government subsidizes whole sectors to catch up, and often surpass the west (see EVs, solar, airliners, etc.) maybe they'll take years to get there, and maybe they won't match the very top end, but they'll take over.
We are going to have a shortage and obscene prices, but not as long or hard as doomsayers scream.
Another factor is that the AI bubble is going to pop. LLMs are a dead end, and are already at an extreme diminishing returns point. There is no way the major players are going to recoup investment, and the market will eventually wake up. Open source models are at single digit distance of the most powerful commercial models, so much of the resources are going to shift to in-house.
JEPA is one of the next steps in AI, and is way less hardware intensive. There are several new approaches to AI that are way less hardware intensive. LLMs are plain brute force approaches, and evolution makes efficiency a major goal.
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Oh course not. Why lower them when they can keep the prices high and pocket the profits? When you live in hell you can't expect the devil to not profit on the vices.
That assumes Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron won't have competition in the next few years, but that's already not true with the Chinese CXMT and YMTC. And the more they drive the prices up, the highest the reward for a new competitor to get established. They have a few good years (for them) charging these prices, but it won't last.
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Yeah, I'll be there waiting for them to rotate their inventory at a loss when it does go down. Meanwhile, fuck Lenovo.
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