Yup, welcome to AInflation

Nvidia has purchased billions of dollars worth of RAM modules that have yet to be manufactured so they can put them in AI cards that have yet to be fabricated so they can be installed in server farms that haven’t been built yet. They did this using money they don’t have yet from profits they haven’t generated yet from a service that supposedly solves a problem they haven’t identified yet.

Don’t worry, the entire economy is currently betting the house that this situation will pay off. If not, we’ll just have a quick little economic depression on our hands. Nothing a little World War III economy won’t solve

The ship is sinking and everyone is grabbing what they can before the mother of all hype cycles comes crashing down.

Same thing happened to me back in 2017(?) when a ram factory was damaged by a tsunami; my 2x16 ddr4 3200 kit went from $200 to $700+.

My current 2x32 ddr5 6500 kit was $214, and is now discounted to $999.99.

I was about to buy some more ram as a little treat, but had to get thermal pads with my ram. HAD TO. They didn’t fucking have thermal pads in stock early November, so I figured, hey, I’ll tie it to a behavioural reward, I don’t need the RAM badly. My computer works fine, it’s just got some light overheating issues anyway. Maybe I’ll get it december, or in the new year.

FUCK ME. I didn’t even put the termal pads back on after seeing that they didn’t resolve my overheating issue. But the RAM certainly went through the fucking roof, even though it’s Sodimm DDR4 for fucking laptops.

I mean, it’s just headroom, but I don’t like sitting with just the OS (and some bg stuff, web browsing) running at 5.5/7.5 in use.

A few years ago I bought 2x8 GB ddr4 for about $40 and now they are being sold for $120. And I naïvely thought that I could just buy 2 more sticks if I ever need more. (I primarily play indie games so 16 GB is still plenty for me unless I want to play oblivion or something)