Is the RAM shortage a problem worldwide or are there countries that have laws to prevent this/have enough RAM?
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
there are like 3 countries worldwide capable of producing ram chips so no, even if a country has local memory factory, like goodram in poland the chips are still expensive
My first choice for RAM, SSDs, and Flash drives is always Goodram, because they are European, but I'm pretty sure they buy the actual chips from Asia.
Fuck AI
And now the press are calling us 'device hoarders' for taking good care of our shit and not wanting to upgrade to new devices too.
Millennials are ruining the device industry smh
You mean the shortage that's purposefully engineered to price everyone out of the market and push them onto the cloud?
i'm convinced corporations want us all to soon be using shitty computers like Chromebooks running everything in the cloud.
You're absolutely correct. They want their app on your devices and they want you permanently signed into whatever bullshit service they're promoting.
“Cause fuck you…” - news editorial board
If only we lived in a country with consumer protection and anti-monopoly laws.
I do but it doesn‘t matter much because the US Empire holds all the cards here.
enforcement of existing consumer protection and anti-monopoly laws would do wonders(or tax, wage and hour, vehicle and many others). We actually have some pretty decent laws, they have either been deliberately underfunded, avoided per lobby or overruled by appointed activist judges.
Pretty much the only way out is fire and force it seems, as history shows.
Yep, I remember growing up some application of those laws or at least a facade. RICO exists for a reason lol. But I guess since corporations have become so bored with their hoard of gold and following some rules they've decided to take the painful route of learning, again
Then the prices will come back down, right?
Right?
By then a lot of other PC components manufacturers went bankrupt because they aren‘t selling anything when no one is buying new computers. We are likely experiencing the collapse of the home computer market as we know it.

All we can hope for is that the AI bubble bursts very suddenly, and the manufacturers/distributors are left with a huge amount of excess stock and production capacity that will oversaturate the market.
DDR4 RAM prices did drop back down after a huge peak in 2018 caused by smartphones, although this is a much larger scale issue so who knows how it'll play out.
The AI RAM is HBM. It's useless for a PC unless someone releases a desktop graphics card that uses it.
Vega and Radeon VII were a thing, but I doubt we'll see the like again considering they were basically panicked attempts by AMD to find something that worked. At least their efforts with Zen 1/2 took off.
Yes, they will
Their data centers are flammable. Just sayin'
They're really not though.
(Obviously, don't do crimes.) That being said, a warehouse full of toilet paper is flammable... a warehouse full of aluminum racks and silicon isn't.
In addition, their fire suppression systems don't use water and so any fire that you did manage to create would be suppressed without affecting operation.
... thats kinda counter productive... they would order more hardware
Also if the AI bubble does pop and they have to liquidate all these data centers, that's less stuff for us to buy on the fire sale
Losing money in hardware, insurance premiums, increased security are all nice effects though.
Would they actually be able to afford it? Investors have been throwing endless amounts of money onto the fire but in OpenAI's case at least, it was all essentially bought like "I'll pay you later, trust me", right?
I'd assume convincing companies twice that you're trustworthy enough to buy the world's supply of RAM with an IOU wouldn't be possible but I guess I thought the same thing for the first time as well
edit: either way, I'd take a longer period of expensive RAM if it meant a giant "fuck you" to the AI companies
And the recipe is simple as well. Just need a good throwing hand.
Perhaps a slingshot?
Pretty sure that shortage would be indefinite. Same for consumer GPUs. Maybe some other tech shortages will appear.
The new shortage crisis will be in the energy sector.They will want to conserve energy resources and will therefore implement daily planned power outages. They will then transfer this saved energy to AI-like technology companies and the military.
Depends on when the AI bubble pops.
Waiting for the "waiting for ai bubble to pop" bubble to pop at this point.
It‘s funny. The people who betted against the housing bubble knew 2006 would be the year where none of this was sustainable anymore. The bubble burst in 2008 and they had to take several loans to finance their bet. Despite it being obvious to us now and a few insiders back then, that bet was highly risky because you never know who might help the market go down a self destructive path for how long. Even when everyone already knows it‘s a bubble they might spend a $trillion more just to keep up the illusion. The government will bail them out anyway, right? So why not take the entire economy down with them?
Define bubble in this context and lets see if it still applies to something that has persisted despite overwhelming claims it is a bubble about to pop.
Truly at this point it just seems calling the AI industry a bubble is trying to be mean rather than making an observation. You aren't going to hurt an industries feelings you should instead be factual.
Bubbles pop, this is something else. Feel free to be self righteous but if you are just regurgitating something you think is insulting and because you want it to be true you are a fuckwit.