RAM Is So Expensive, Samsung Won't Even Sell It To Samsung (pcworld.com)
- Reference: 0180286985
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/04/1739230/ram-is-so-expensive-samsung-wont-even-sell-it-to-samsung
- Source link: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2998935/ram-is-so-expensive-samsung-wont-even-sell-it-to-samsung.html
> Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was reportedly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of memory supplies for its newest smartphones as the company ramps up production for 2026 flagship designs. But with so much RAM hardware going into new "AI" data centers -- and those companies willing to pay top dollar for their hardware -- memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing data center suppliers to maximize profits.
>
> The end result, according to a report from SE Daily [3]spotted by SamMobile , is that Samsung Semiconductor rejected the original order for smartphone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division. The smartphone manufacturing arm of the company had hoped to nail down pricing and supply for another year. But reports say that due to "chipflation," the phone-making division must renegotiate quarterly, with a long-term supply deal rejected by its corporate sibling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was reportedly hammered out.
[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/29/0629207/how-bad-will-ram-and-memory-shortages-get
[2] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2998935/ram-is-so-expensive-samsung-wont-even-sell-it-to-samsung.html
[3] https://www.sammobile.com/news/rift-emerges-between-samsung-phone-memory-divisions/
Free market at work (Score:2)
Sure, DIY PC builds will be a thing of the past, but that is the price of freedom right?
Re: (Score:2)
> Sure, DIY PC builds will be a thing of the past, but that is the price of freedom right?
Wish we could say a couple of decades of leftover RAM is gonna sell like fucking Charizard one day, but I kinda doubt it.
Re: (Score:2)
> Sure, DIY PC builds will be a thing of the past, but that is the price of freedom right?
32 bit OS's coming back because no one will be able to afford 4GB :-)
Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe this will me be good. If the software people had to start caring about resource consumption again, instead of just thinking "hey lets use Electron" no reason my stupid IM can't have 4gigs of resident memory, after users will just buy more RAM!
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, your 8 year family conversation with your family needs to be searchable for a keyword ON THE FUCKING SPOT. Oh, and if the keyword happens to live in an PDF you send your dad 4 years ago, it better show up when searching. There is a reason resource consumption is high, and bloated code is like #9 on the list.
Re: (Score:2)
Fair enough - it is easy to forget just how much real functionality there actually is in these stacks. It is nice to live in a world where a handful of lines of glue code yield a rich application.
However, there is a lot of stuff that does not *need* all that and generally isnt worth the trade off for many/most users. There is also the reality that all that to frequently gets delivered in the laziest way possible. Rather than a few shared libs that the OS could map into multiple virtual address spaces, we g
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't hold my breath ...
My view is: that battle has been lost, for a long time now ...
Bloat is here to stay ...
Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right though.
time for the AI bubble to burst (Score:3)
Touching prices of electronics just isn't done. Slashdot, rise up and, heh, let's trigger the Slashdot effect!!
On a more serious note, the DDR5 modules I got for 45 last year June are now at 290, what I got for 55 is now 480. And it's all out of stock...
But, as someone here mentioned in the comments of the last memory story, the fact there's no capacity buildout does mean that the common view is that the bubble will pop within the next few years.
Re:time for the AI bubble to burst (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hot on the heels of Micron bailing out of the consumer RAM market, SK hynix is apparently committing over $500 billion to build four new memory fabs, with the first to be finished by 2027." - PC Gamer
Re:Hollywood Accounting Mk. 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Samsung has famously not allowed their subsidiaries to subsidize each other. If the price of their own memory is not competitive, the memory that goes into their other products shall be bought from outside. The memory subsidiary, like any other, has to be able to stand on it's own, otherwise you end up with dead weight everywhere.
This is now the flip side of that. The market conditions are unpredictable, so they won't make long term commitments, and if our their electronics cannot pay the going rate of their memory, they shall not piss their potential earnings into the wind either.
I would call maybe some internal protectionism is in order. Their consumer electronics won't be able to source memory from anywhere else either, might as well close shop. But they are pretty much the only consumer electronics company that could deliver based on their own supply. Could use it to wipe the floor with competition...
Who knows, maybe the higher ups have not weighed in yet. And let's not forget Samsung like any other chaebol is heavily intertwined with SK government, too. Whether it's owned by the Lee family or SK govt, and/or is the SK govt owned by Samsung instead... these are questions which depend a lot on who is asking, when, and in what context... The current memory bubble is unprecedented in semiconductor history, and there is no playbook to follow. But consumer electronics are pretty much completely priced out of the memory market, and we can expect all sorts of weird stuff to follow.
And it's all because of LLMs (Score:2)
The AI craze is causing so much damage on so many fronts. It could end society as we know it, in ways that have nothing to do with Science Fiction scenarios such as taking over Earth and supplanting Man.
AI is causing disruption of markets, loss of jobs, negative mental health effects, increases in AGW, and on and on. And increasingly, it's being used to make propaganda more pervasive and more effective. By not pushing back harder against these trends, the 99% of us are voluntarily putting the yokes designed
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like less than a week ago that the /. experts were telling us the only thing gating AI was gigawatts.
Re: (Score:2)
You left out the robots. Enslaved to do what when the robots are cheaper?
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't have peons to step on, can you really call yourself "wealthy"?
Re: (Score:2)
Or ants as Gates flew over the stadium with Homer.
Short sighted pricing vs. long term relationships (Score:2)
During COVID, a company called [1]Catalent [catalent.com] was a key player in the manufacturing of vaccines. They were a public company and hteir stock price went through the roof, despite the fact that historically their sales and stock price grew around 5-8% a year; during COVID it surged 50%. Management of course thought they were brilliant, and also their capacity got drained, so they jacked up prices on everyone else while rapidly expanding.
When COVID subsided, their stock crashed 70%, as not only did they lose the
[1] https://www.catalent.com/
It's the Shoe Event Horizon (Score:2)
... except instead of [1]shoes [fandom.com] becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.
[1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon
This can't be the right way to run Samsung (Score:2)
US auto manufacturer General Motors became infamous in the 1990s when it got out that their various divisions were mostly trying to outdo each other and viewed corporate siblings with more disdain than they did actual outside competitors like Ford, Toyota, etc. "Sux to be YOU, Samsung Electronics" can't be the correct reply here. Where is the CEO to step in and fix this?
Re: (Score:1)
I don't know how their structured sounds more like a parent holding company with subsidiaries that are their own legal entities not just divisions/departments.
So they probably independently have their own CEOs. The folks running the holding company though might very well be asking, well why would we not want each sub to make itself as profitable as it can be.
They only reason to step in is if/when Samsung Electronics is actually endangered in terms of market share. If they have to design around cheaper slow
Ram is wasted by the vibe coder generation (Score:1)
The original MacOS X required 128MB, the original Mac only required 128KB. Now modern Macs are seen as useless if they don't have 16GB. We mostly write the same spreadsheets and documents as we did in the 80s, just pissing away supercomputers worth of ram for liquid glass effects. This ram shortage should make vibe coders not even employable at McDonalds.
Re: (Score:2)
My first computer had 128B of RAM (MC6802) and 2KB EPROM. When programing in machine code using a hex keypad it felt like a reasonable amount of RAM. Now this machine is using 59GB of it's 64GB, mostly due to Firefox and it's web extensions to block ads etc. While some of the demand makes sense I can't help but wonder how much waste there is with layer upon layer of code that assumes RAM is cheap.
Given that a large percentage of the current AI investment is "me too" investment that will fail, then hop
LLM's eat RAM... (Score:3)
Most people don't realize how much of a pig LLM's actually are. All the focus is on the big AI machines PSU's, multi kW fan boards, GPU's, etc... Most of them have maybe 8 2.5" disk slots. They're not storage beasts. But what they do have is HBM processors with multiple Tb's of registered ECC DDR5. The OS boots locally, and then the RAM receives the training data from a remote data lake. It gets loaded into RAM and stays there. Multiple Tb's per node.
T
As an alternative (Score:2)
I can keep my cell phone for a few more years.
Re: (Score:2)
Yea, when the market has stupid prices for stupid reasons this is the likely response. People will only replace phones, tablets and PC that actually fail, not just to get a trendy newer model. Fortunately there is little reason upgrade as the only difference with older models is the addition of AI features that few buyers actually care about, and, with exception of live translation, are not needed on the device itself.
Market has gone crazy (Score:2)
So, AI firms are gobbling up ram to power AI-services that most consumers do not want (apart from making the occasional meme or whatever), which is at the same time hurting consumers by increasing ram pricing for everyone.
So it's a double whammy. This would be like ice cream companies monopolising drinking water to make, say, pee-flavoured slushies.
That explains it ? (Score:2)
I ordered a single run of the mill 16Gb SoDimm DDR4 to upgrade a laptop 2 weeks ago. After a week the order was showing delivery in... april 2026 !!! I canceled the order and ordered from somewhere a bit more efficient. I dunno if that's related as AI uses top of the line ECC DDR5 in banks way bigger than 16Gb... But if so that's fucking dumb.
Workstations (Score:2)
It'll be funny if genAI flops because no one can afford workstations and smart devices to use it anymore.
vast demand for AI (Score:4, Interesting)
I see comments here claiming it's a bubble and most people don't want it, but the numbers say otherwise. OpenAI claims to have about 700 million active weekly customers. Anthropic is forecasting "$70B in revenue by 2028" and I believe it.
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2025/11... [techcrunch.com]
Google's Gemini 3 is incredibly good in my experience, as is Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5. Google has been forced to rate-limit access to Gemini 3 so as not to be overwhelmed.
I use these products every day for coding assistance and they are amazing. The difference in quality of the models compared to this time last year is stunning. But I suspect there is a limit to what these 'conventional' LLM's will be able to do with the current architectures. Throwing exponentially more hardware at the problem will have diminishing returns. Considerable research is happening to try to get good results while using fewer resources, so it could be that this will eventually put a ceiling on RAM consumption.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-demand-to-boost-revenue-to-70b-in-2028-report/
Re: (Score:2)
Are they 700M unique users? How many are paying? For reference the US total population is around 350M. So 2 USA's. And the USA population includes everyone, babies, kids, working people and retired. I'd expect maybe 30% use AI, maybe. I don't and I am a techie. Could they be fudging the numbers????
By your uid number I'm guessing you missed the Netscape bubble. I recall asking engineers why would netscape be so valuable if they lose money? They'd just shrug it off and say because. I also recall a finance gu
Re: (Score:2)
> Are they 700M unique users? How many are paying?
Good question. The numbers may be fudged but it looks like unique users;
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/0... [cnbc.com]
"700 million weekly active users, with usage growing 4X year over year."
"OpenAI now counts five million paying business users, up from three million in June"
As for being extremely popular while losing money, that's the commonplace tech trajectory now. You spend whatever investment money it takes to achieve market dominance, and then it's gravy trai
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/04/openai-chatgpt-700-million-users.html
Re: (Score:2)
> You spend whatever investment money it takes to achieve market dominance, and then it's gravy train.
Historically speaking, that last part is frequently elusive. Lots of crashing and burning of once "sure thing" tech companies. Some have survived, but it's hardly an assumption that can be made.
Re: (Score:2)
70 billion is nothing compared to the investment costs. AI is driving the whole world into massive computer product price inflation and it is all debt on top of more planned debt. We now risk an energy shortage even after residential prices skyrocketed to help pay for the infrastructure stress caused by the data center build-out just for AI.
Every AI query should be billed at the actual build-out and electricity consumption price instead of hiding the enormous waste of resources within everyone's electric
Re: (Score:2)
> 70 billion is nothing compared to the investment costs
True but the trend line is way up. They need to spend that money to capture market share or Google will get it.
As of August "OpenAI now counts five million paying business users, up from three million in June, as enterprises and educators embrace artificial intelligence tools."
I agree with your complaints about the price inflation and other detriments to society. The question is, are the impending productivity improvements going to more than off
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and how many of those users would pay for an LLM if forced to? They haven't monetized it yet, I do see people using AI. I don't see companies buying AI employees to do their work in the next 5 years. The AI industry does. If we don't have AI that is AGI (whatever that means) in a year an a half, the bubble pops.
Apple overpriced RAM upgrades (Score:2)
Who would have thought that Apple's ludicrously expensive RAM upgrades would some day align perfectly with current RAM prices...
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you think they will maintain the same price and lower their profit margin? It's Apple.
AI sucks. (Score:2)
and just keeps sucking. First GPUs, then Crucial entirely, now Samsung. Where do we go now for reliable RAM?
I am not a fan of big government, but fucking do something for the retail market.
Re: (Score:2)
I know how you feel. I was pissed about it in 2020 when bitcoin miners made getting a GPU damn near impossible, and damn impossible to find one at MSRP (which is now what the miners pushed it up to, thanks a-holes), now it's RAM, and thus also graphics cards.
It's really damn annoying to get screwed by market conditions. If it weren't for the other disastrous consequences, I'd be praying for an AI bubble to burst so these things can go back on the open market.
Does anyone accept billionaires want this? (Score:2)
I know there are a handful of people who are kind of freaked out at the suggestion that we should put a halt to any new technology. But besides that knee jerk reaction is there anyone who genuinely wants to see these data centers built out?
We could just tell the billionaires no. We would have to take their money away because money is power but we could do that. There's about 8,000 of them. There's 8 billion of us.
We could just tell them no.
AI (Score:2, Insightful)
If not bubble, then why bubble shaped? This is just the hyperinflation that happens before any good collapse, but it's being focused on tech.
Macroeconomics 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
There will be a correction. There is ALWAYS a correction.
Re: (Score:1)
Right... And my 5090 didn't cost 2200 still. Any minute now they'll be giving them away in cereal boxes.
Re: (Score:2)
This is not a bubble. This is going to be the way of things for a while. The economic activity AI is producing is going exponentially, and the inputs are trivial vs the future productivity. These are the facts. DRAM, GPUs and the infrastructure to power them just got slammed with a huge demand, which WILL drive up the cost. Thats not inflation, thats normal supply/demand curves coming into balance. Inflation is when all things rise equally. Here, these components are rising faster than the overall cost of t
Re:Macroeconomics 101 (Score:4, Informative)
Be careful there. Lots of AI is being put to silly, useless, or unreasonable uses. OTOH, lots of it is being put to extremely productive uses. (OK, 20% improvement in output, but also an increase in expenses.)
ISTM, that PART of the AI hoopla is a bubble. Possibly much more than half. But the other half is not a bubble, and is growing rapidly. What the collapse will look like depends in part on how much the productive segment grows relative to the other part before it happens.
Re: (Score:2)
The massive amount of capital put into AI is not going to yield results. There will be mostly losers and only a few winners. This is assuming AI sticks around and is the paradigm shift that many people believe it will be.
If it's entirely fake, just a bunch of nonsense that people wasted money on, then it will pop quickly. But if it's somewhat real, like the dot-com boom. We'll see society transformed, and a lot of failed businesses, some of them very stupid, scattered along the information superhighway.
If t
Re: (Score:2)
> The massive amount of capital put into AI is not going to yield results.
To clarify my own statement. I mean not going to yield results proportional to the amount put into them. You can double the investment and not get double the return. I think this is reflected in the wacky P/E ratios we see in the market for AI related stocks.
Re: (Score:3)
> This is not a bubble. This is going to be the way of things for a while. The economic activity AI is producing is going exponentially, and the inputs are trivial vs the future productivity. These are the facts. DRAM, GPUs and the infrastructure to power them just got slammed with a huge demand, which WILL drive up the cost. Thats not inflation, thats normal supply/demand curves coming into balance. Inflation is when all things rise equally. Here, these components are rising faster than the overall cost of things in the marketplace (though there is going to be spillover as many non-involved things have to pay for the increases to maintain their requisite supply (smartphones in this case).
AI investment is growing exponentially and has been for some time. Meanwhile, AI productivity is already slowing, and shows further signs that as we move forward it will slow still more. While tech companies are attempting to shovel more of it at the businesses and end-users that rely on them, there's only so much the current LLM driven systems are going to be able to accomplish without some massive change in basic operation that, thus far, doesn't appear to be happening. And while they continue to rake in
Re: (Score:2)
Is AI producing economic activity outside the building of AI datacenters? I know that the buildout is a massive chunk of America's current GDP, but what activity is AI itself generating? Does AI represent a net gain?
Re: Macroeconomics 101 (Score:2)
Are you saying internet/tech stocks weren't a bubble in 1999/2000 because they were the way of the future?
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, if you're feeling bitter about it, I'll help out by letting you mail me your 5090. I mean, it will be a terrific hassle for me, but I'm willing to suffer through it to take that burden off your shoulders. You have more than enough to worry about.
I like to help.
Hey, remember when the x090's only cost about a grand? You know, back before bitcoin when an x080 was around $800. Someday, I'm going to find the guy who invented bitcoin and I'm going to punch him in the face several times. Then I'm go
Re: (Score:2)
> There will be a correction. There is ALWAYS a correction.
To the article? Yes there was... [1]apparently it is not true at all [sammobile.com]
[1] https://www.sammobile.com/news/rift-emerges-between-samsung-phone-memory-divisions/
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with that? When Apple bought Intel's modem team some years ago the designs they had weren't up to snuff so the iPhone kept using Qualcomm modems instead of being forced to use the inferior in-house solution. They only recently started selling some products with their own modems now that they're close to what competitors offer.
It's no different from you buying something for personal use but deciding to sell it to someone else who would offer you more money than what you paid for it instead of