The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on.
Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(
gvalkov
GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming.
I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this.
Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?
I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.
randusername
I looked at my eBay receipt from 2023 and I paid $84.98 for a "Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4" listing and now the equivalent on eBay "Buy It Now" is $374.99 for "Kingston FURY Renegade 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 RAM 3200MHz (KF432C16RBK2/64)". What a timeline it has become for consumer computing three years later!
usui
My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened.
Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.
whizzter
I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.
Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.
All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.
I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
nickjj
"The costs are negligible and justified when compared to all the benefits. If you look at the performance gains, the overall cost has in fact been reduced."
- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.
axegon_
Same thing with storage.
I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.
alecsm
I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I've been collecting some DDR5-based systems for months, but with the prices, they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty). I've priced them at about what the CPU + RAM + SSD would sell for separately, and I'm not willing to go much lower than that.
And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).
comments (10)
Scene_Cast2
Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(
gvalkov
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8
brnaftr361
Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?
I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.
randusername
usui
Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.
whizzter
Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.
All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.
I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
nickjj
- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.
axegon_
I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.
alecsm
And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).
theandrewbailey