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Lenovo Warns PC RAM Prices Will "Never" Go Back to Normal (www.thegamer.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 176 points 3 months ago (46 children)

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.

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  • [–] 70 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 55 points 3 months ago (39 children)

    Nah they're saying the like 3 places that manufacture RAM won't drop their prices after

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  • [–] 41 points 3 months ago (31 children)

    The Chinese fabs should be producing lots of RAM by 2030.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Old/current ram or new ram? Probably be moving on to DDR6 then

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

    We could always just not, and use whatever RAM we can get. I'd rather have a thriving market with slightly worse RAM than motherboards that require a RAM no one can afford.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    DDR2 Prices are up 60% as AI datacenters are slapping together whatever hardware they can get.

    There is NO affordable RAM, and this is by design.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Nope it is for legacy systems which are not upgraded to new standard.

    "Of course, today’s PCs don’t use DDR2, so we’re likely to see the impact of these price increases landing in areas like embedded systems, networking equipment, industrial controllers, automotive electronics, and other long-lived devices that were designed around it and are too costly to requalify on newer memory generations like DDR4 and five."

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

    Even if that's true, I'm predicting either AI companies just buy all of that too. Or the US government doesn't allow the import of it because it's from China

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  • [–] -5 points 3 months ago (16 children)

    China will be running out of people soon. Their birth rate has been in collapse.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    China will not collapse. It produces too many goods and its economy is too strong. Birth rates aren’t a problem to the point that they undermine manufacturing.

    If someone tries to tell you the story that China will collapse and they seem credible, just reach out to me. I have a bridge for sale that will help you short the Chinese collapse.

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  • [+] -8 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    The problem is they modify goods, not produce them.

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

    Intellectual property shouldn’t exist. If China wants to “steal” ram designs and sell them for cheaper, then LeT tHe fReE mArKeT wOrK

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    But they'll still have plenty of people by 2030.

    And if they're not as xenophobic as some other countries I could mention, they could easily solve the population issue through immigration.

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

    And if they’re not as xenophobic as some other countries I could mention, they could easily solve the population issue through immigration.

    Every Chinese book I've read screams at me nationalism and xenophobia, be it modern fantasy, 50 years old detective series or comedy.

    And immigration to China is - currently - heavily restricted. Like damn heavily. And you will not become a permanent resident, and there is literally 0 chance of becoming a citizen, unless you're of Han Chinese descent, preferably first generation, preferably looking Chinese, and you can't have dual nationality (from last census in 2020 about 17.000 people ever got a citizenship, which is what. 0.0012% of population? And the permanent residency in 2017 was about 10k total).

    My country, Poland (about 38m people), grants more than that every year.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, this will probably have interesting consequences down the line, but not in 2030, and maybe not 2100 even

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    maybe not 2100 even

    Chinese government does not seem to agree with you, considering its:

    • Pro natal policies
    • Heavy research into automation being sold as "to fill in labour gaps" (even though the gig work is skyrocketing)
    • Retirement age reforms increasing the retirement age

    Chinese universities also do not agree with your flippant attitude and are literally alarmist about it:

    Tsinghua projections (that accurately predicted peak of population) show halving the population (and that > 50% will be people over retirement age) by the year 2100: https://www.dess.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1226/2472.htm

    On the other hand the dude who was saying something about collapsing in 3 years also didn't knew what he was talking about.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    We'll let the runaway inflation after the AI crash eat away at the currency's value until RAM is back at the old value, even with the much higher prices, then wait for wages to catch up a bit. By then they'll have a nice unsold supply.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    People that think there’s going to be an AI crash are in for a rough future. The genie is out of its bottle and it’s never going back in.

    You may as well be saying that there’s going to be an EV crash.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    People aren't saying AI is going to disappear, although that wouldn't be a bad thing imo. When people talk about an AI crash they're talking about the trillions in investments by the major companies that have been operating at a loss and have no monetization plan that could feasibly recoup even a fraction of that amount. Open source models are nearly as good as the big guys now, and nobody is going to pay hundreds or thousands a month just to keep using chatgpt or Gemini.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago

    It’s not just the models that make the big players great, it’s the proprietary tools to use those models. Claude code, codex, seedance, etc are what everyone wants and what are so groundbreaking, not the LLM that they use.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is "winner takes all", which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We're already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.

    Lenovo are right that prices won't go back to "normal" - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    We don't even know if it's currently being produced at greater numbers (as far as I'm aware). The only public info I've seen is that the data centers that haven't been built will need all of the produced RAM based on handshake deals (not contracts). The RAM makers themselves are doubling down on the bubble by investing into the AI generators as well as increasing costs to insane levels in the process which surely reduces the amount of items sold.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Wrong line of thinking.

    They want you to stop holding out and just buy their crazy high (along with everyone else) priced stuff so they move inventory and make some capital.

    If their ram claim ends up true (I call bullshit) they make some sales and they go happily along.

    If their claim ends up being false, they still made those sales and no one remembers or cares how "wrong" they were about it.

    Saying this is basically a no lose guess for them.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    no they are not. the article was clear. after the ai boom, the memory companies wont drop proces because you dont have a choice.

    my new soap box - the government should regulate this industry because its very important to society and there should be prive caps.

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