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Valve Says The Companies Making RAM Give Them A Price And If They Say No, They ‘Never Talk To Us Again’ (kotaku.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 134 points 2 months ago (19 children)

It's related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they're cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they're buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.

As soon as the first one fails, it's all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.

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  • [–] 101 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Let's not forget that almost all memory is made by a cartel of 3 companies known for price fixing. They're all being as slow as possible about increasing production capacity.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Is that not for good reason though? Only for them really, but if they did ramp up production and then the bubble pops... I wish they would ramp up production, it's just easy to understand why they won't.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    If there is a demand for ram, which there is in the consumer market, then it shouldn't be a risk. If DCs get cancelled, then they should have contracts in place for at least a minimum buy, which should offset cost risk. If they don't have that, then that's just shitty business. Even still, they can just as easily slow down production if needed. If the bubble pops, either they'll have inventory that the world will buy and they can throttle back prod, or they don't have inventory and they will have to throttle prod anyway since demand for DCs as a whole has to be more than just the consumer market.

    Idk, it's probably just the cynic in me, but I think it's likely this is just manipulation of the prices, especially given the history of these companies doing just that.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    They definitely have contracts that ensure the ai companies buy the ordered amount.

    However building new production factories is expensive as fuck. They know they need to do that. But why buy a factory for billions and sell RAM at a lower price when you just don't spend billions and earn even more with less RAM

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I'm sure they're already running their factories at 100% capacity. Ramping up would mean building more factories, and ramping down afterward would mean letting those factories sit unused. That's risky.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Once the US economy craters into the recession it should by all rights currently be working through... Oh I am sure at that point there will be all sorts of companies dumping all sorts of things into every market they can to try to survive.

    The AI bubble bursting will fuck the world in ways that will take decades to unfuck. If sanity was even slightly fashionable right now governments around the world, especially the US would be using every power they had to put some limits on this whole mess. Regulation, taxation, environmental controls everything would be on the table.

    Instead we seem to be racing at the wall as fast as we can with NVidia and co in the driving seat, and governments around the world in the passenger seat screaming "Go! Go! Go!"

    That's OK though, economic turmoil is felt by the individual based on their starting wealth. The rich often manage to become wealthier, it's the poor who get buried. Yay capitalism.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC

    This is a wild theory if I ever heard one

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I mean, it seems pretty obvious at this point. The data centers aren't getting built in time for all the hardware they're buying up to get used, so it's just sitting in warehouses and will be obsolete by the time any of these new data centers are built (if they ever actually are). And Jensen Huang has been waxing poetic about a future in which people don't own computers anymore, they rent them to run AI agents on.

    I'm not saying this is a sane and rational thing they're pursuing, and it's certainly doomed to failure because no one wants to rent computer time to run AI agents. But trying to prop up the AI bubble certainly seems to be the primary goal of all this ridiculous hardware purchasing.

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  • [+] -18 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Yep. Just like how nobody uses Windows since Linux is easily accessible.

    Wait

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It's not the average consumer spending thousands on tokens. Even my work just had a meeting about how "the free lunch is over" now that AI costs are expanding, and they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.

    Linux is widely used in the enterprise world. It's the home consumer world that doesn't use it as much and even that is rapidly changing as things enshitify.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.

    That's going to be incredibly hard to make economical I bet, unless you have the ability to basically max out the utilization of the hardware around the clock.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    Having an option vs not having an option

    Also Linux and Windows are pretty different in use cases and capabilities. Meanwhile, local AI models have a very similar user experience. If hardware was cheaper and people could run better LLMs locally, they wouldn't pay monthly for it.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    You're right, the general public doesn't use Linux due to the lack of ability to browse the web and file their taxes—Windows exclusive functionality.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    In the workplace, there are still a lot of domain specific programs that don't have Linux support. Companies don't have much of an incentive to port that stuff over. As for the people who just need a web browser, they probably would use Linux just fine if they could buy a computer at BestBuy that comes with Linux preinstalled

    Compare that to LLM programs, where it's a matter of "download this app instead of that one, because this one is free and that one costs $25 a month"

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