“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
I just got a 2x64GB 6000 kit before its price skyrocketed by like $130. I saw other kits going up, but had no clue I timed it so well.
…Also, why does “AI” need so much CPU RAM?
In actual server deployments, pretty much all inference work is done in VRAM (read: HBM/GDDR); they could get by with almost no system RAM. And honestly most businesses are too dumb to train anything that extensively. ASICs that would use, say, LPDDR are super rare, and stuff like Hybrid/IGP inference is the realm of a few random folks with homelabs… Like me.
I think ‘AI’ might be an overly broad term for general server buildout.
why does “AI” need so much CPU RAM
It doesn’t really, though CPU inference is possible/slow at 256+gb. The problem is that they are making HBM (AI) ram instead of ddr4/5.
Same memory production capacity can be allocated to ddr5 or to hbm and openai signed contracts with sk hynix and samsung, the two largest ram manufacturers in the world, and bought a significant percentage of next year’s production.
DDR5 prices started spiking as that deals impact propagated through the supply chain. I bought a 2x32 6800 Cl30 kit for 195 euro 12 days ago. It was 330 euro 4 days later.
…Is it that interchangeable?
TBH I know little of memory fabs and HBM ICs, but I know (say) TSMC can’t just switch from a power-optimized process to a high frequency one at the drop of a hat.
Slightly different part, same process. The bigger bottleneck is packaging - HBM is 3d stacked.
Ah. Yeah. And its on the fab to do that.
I always though it’d be cool for CPUs to switch to packaged RAM, too. Samsung apparently tried to do it with Wide I/O for mobile ARM stuff, but it never caught on.
If I’m following what you mean by packaged RAM, Apple does that. It’s fast, but you can’t upgrade it.
That’s (as I understand it) a misconception.
Apple attaches their laptop RAM the same way all smartphones do. It’s a wide bus with LPDDR, which makes it an unusual configuration amongst laptops, but it’s technically conventional. And relatively cheap.
AMD’s Strix Halo chips are the same. Apple could use LPCAMM to make the memory upgradable if they wanted, they just… don’t.
When we talk ‘packaging’, we’re talking putting chips on advanced substrates with denser wires than one could possibly get on a motherboard (or a ‘mini’ motherboard which is kinda what Apple/smartphone RAM is packaged on), stuff silicon fabs have to do:
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/advanced-packaging
And HBM falls into this bucket. The way its hooked up to the processor is physically different than PC RAM sticks, or Apple’s RAM. This is mostly not done on consumer stuff because its very expensive, and most of TSMC’s advanced packaging production capacity is reserved for server stuff.
There was a recentish model, qwen next that was advertised as smth that can be run entirely on RAM.
They can ALL be run on RAM, theoretically. I bought 128GB so I can run GLM 4.5 with the experts offloaded to CPU, with a custom trellis/K quant mix; but this is a ‘personal use’ tinkerer setup basically no one but hobbyists will touch.
Qwen Next is good at that because its very low active parameter.
…But they aren’t actually deployed that way. They’re basically always deployed on cloud GPU boxes that serve dozens/hundreds of people at once, in parallel.
AFAIK the only major model actually developed for CPU inference is one of the esoteric Gemma releases, aimed at mobile. And the bitnet experiments, which aren’t very big so far.
(In case it’s not obvious, this is my special interest, and I’m happy to ramble on about how to set up ‘niche gaming rig hybrid models’ for anyone interested).
I for one would enjoy triggering your unskippable cutscenes in setting up local CPU based AI if it can work on Linux with an older amd card.
Don’t have funds for anything fancy, but would be interesting in playing around with it. Been wanting to get something like that setup for home assistant.
You can use Vulkan fairly easily as long as you have 8G vram
https://blog.linux-ng.de/2025/09/27/running-llms-with-llama-cpp-using-vulkan/
Only got 4G vram, unfortunately
The key is which model, and how.
For the really sparse MoEs, you might be better off trying ik_llama.cpp, especially if you are targeting a ‘small’ quant. But the dense Gemma models (as good as they are) are probably not the best choice for 8G RAM these days.
If you just want an easy way to setup AI on Windows or Linux, KoboldCPP is my recommendation for your backend. It supports the GGUF format, which allows you to use both RAM and VRAM simultaneously. It won’t be the fastest thing, but it is easy enough to setup, with a bundled GUI for prep and actual usage. Through the IP address it gives, you can hook the backend into a frontend of choice.
Plenty of folks do AMD. A popular homelabsetup is 32GB AMD MI50 GPUs, which are quite cheap on eBay. Even Intel is fine these days!
But what’s your setup, precisely? CPU, RAM, and GPU.
Looks like I’m running an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU, and 32GB RAM
4GB VRAM
Mmmmm… I would wait a few days, and try a GGUF quantization of Kimi Linear once its better supported: https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct
Otherwise you can mess with Qwen 3 VL now, in the native llama.cpp UI. But be aware that Qwen is pretty sycophantic like ChatGPT: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF/blob/main/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf
If you’re interested, I can work out an optimal launch command. But to be blunt, with that setup, you’re kinda better off using free LLM APIs with a local chat UI.
Thanks for the info. I would like to run locally if possible, but I’m not opposed to using API and just limiting what I surface.
I have a MI50/7900xtx gaming/ai setup at homr which in i use for learning and to test out different models. Happy to answer questions
People buying RAM: oh no, what do we do?
People buying GPUs: first time?
What?
You think this is the first ram crunch?
It’s not even the first one in this decade…
Well, I was aware RAM prices fluctuate.
I’ve never been so unfortunate when buying larger RAM, or building a new system with a new DDR version.
They don’t real fluctuate, it’s more oscillating.
Sometimes it’s “normal” but due to a wide range of issues that can change quickly and stay that way for months because everyone waits till prices go down. So as they go down, people stop waiting,
Those are the same people.
Welp, it’s probably about time for my PC to break its RAM again.
Just in time for all those windows PCs that MS is trying to force people to upgrade
Waiting for upcoming patch tuesday to see if mas scripts work
Doesn’t Windows 11 in practice require even more memory than Windows 10 to operate with decent performance?
Meanwhile my Linux gaming PC seems to actually use less memory than back when it was a Windows machine.
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My work laptop was upgraded to Windows 11 and performance has severely suffered.
As someone who usually uses 3 monitors (sometimes 4) and does GIS, it’s an issue.
Oh yeah. If you’ve got 4 GB ram, win 11 is going to absolutely skullfuck that machine.
Are you using scaling?
On my work laptop dragging a window from one monitor to the next would make them “snag” in between borders as they struggled and stuttered trying to change the scale.
It looked soooo fucking stupid I couldn’t believe my eyesYou can tell just by the fan noise or monitoring cpu usage. Win 11 uses more cpu regularly.
I’m not sure if it’s bad, because they changed other things too like the start menu, and it’s less responsive.
Single app performance is about the same as 10.
The city is buying me like 15 grand in new software licenses this year, but I can’t convince them to spend another 2 grand on a new fucking computer because mine is “supposed” to be good for 2 more years.
Many such moments with the PCs at work. I can’t wait to retire and never have to deal with anything modern again. What absolute dogshit and slop computers have become.
I got unreasonably upset the other day when I realized that windows can no longer seem to sort folders by size anymore.
Constant surveillance will do that. Legit “telemetry” wouldn’t be using that much processing power.
I’m thinking Recall is just Microsoft trying to cut costs on their servers processing all the surveillance, and force users to pay the costs of all the extra electricity and equipment needed.
Nah it’s probably just Edge (aka Chrome) all over the new UI.
That wouldn’t show in the task manager as telemetry.
soon the bubble will burst and RAM will be so cheap! (I hope)
It always does. I remember buying my DDR4 RAM 200€, and two months later the same kit was 550€. Some month later it was back at 220€.
RAM used to cost 8x that. It’s the reason why HP cases have locks.
I don’t think the bubble bursting will slow AI that much, it’ll just be a round of hot potatoe over, the losers will lose their money and others will come in hoping to be profitable since they can skip a bunch of R&D costs.
AI is overhyped, but just like the internet after the dotcom bubble burst, it’s not going anywhere.
Plus I suspect that this time will be a dollar collapse rather than stock market collapse, which would mean prices would go up even more.
Buy one RAM and you get two GPUs thrown in for free!
RAM prices fluctuate but always return to normal pretty fast, at least compared to gpus and cpus
Far as RAM goes, it will become a good thing: it gives companies incentive to invest into the development of bigger RAM, more speed, and making the motherboard bandwidth big enough to handle it.
The next big generation of hardware will be much better IMO, simply because the companies will have to compete by their merits. The downside is not having enough supply right now, but once the logistics and tech is in place, even non-AI people will benefit.
No, it won’t. The DRAM market is dominated by three companies, and they’ve colluded before. They get their wrist slapped by some government body, they promise not to do it again, and then they wait a few years and do it again.
They’ll also have an electrical outage the millisecond demand starts to go down, so they’ll have to sell the old stock at inflated prices first before restarting production, oopsie-woopsie
Old computer blew up, had to buy a new one. Nice 128gb ddr5. Just mobo, mem, cpu. Cpu is a rhyzen 9 9700
The memory was well over 40% of the cost, wtf?
Uhm what exactly do you need 128GB for? xD
Probably VMs.
not OP, but I guess that’s futureproofing, 128GB RAM should be more than enough for a long time
First crypto miners came for my video cards, then AI came for my DIMMS…
Remember when “Chia coin” came for our HDDs too?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hard-drive-prices-skyrocket-asia-scalpers-making-bank
Remember that shitcoin that made HDD prices shoot up like crazy just because?
Now we just need a new nonsensical fad to drive Cases, Motherboards, CPUs and PSUs up and we’ll have come full circleNext tech-sector grift will probably go for our network adapters or some shit…
I’ve got a stack of old 14.4 modems I’ll sell them if they’ll grift on that for a bit.
next the tech-bros will come for you and there will be nobody left to speak up.
Not sure if it’s exactly the same kit but you can get that for £300 in the UK.
Wonder if the guy in the article is in the US. Tariffs would probably explain the extra $200 price difference.
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What are the odds SAltman and the circular investment crew are pivoting to a pump and dump scheme on server hardware (as well as just GPGPUs) after finally admitting to themselves LLMs have hit a wall not even trillions of dollars will fix (architecture failure, no AGI for you, no getting away from those pesky workers like promised). If everything pans out nicely the world will end up with a bunch of new chip fabs (a real bottleneck) and nothing to use them for, cheap computers for all. Probably won’t, instead we’ll get a geopolitical shitshow as China (and hopefully Europe) will have functional, actually producing valuable stuff, economies. What happens to the US is left as an exercise for the reader.
SAltman and the circular investment crew are pivoting to a pump and dump scheme on server hardware
Or just resell their contracted RAM that they can’t pay for, for even more.
Indeed awful. AFAIU, it is stockpiling HBM memory ahead of next generation “GPUs”, rather than existing product volume. I’m especially disgusted that prices in non-tariff countries are higher than in US. If this were to last, gddr5/6 computer ram would start to make sense. NVIDIA has been behind starving memory supplies for competing platforms (usually AMD) in the past.
This pricing is both huge inflation, but also huge drop in sales, because we have to wait for it to get sensible.
The non tariff nations getting hit with higher then us prices just shows how little they think of customers. They assume we will pay, they feel entitled to our money. The products have stagnanted, the prices are made up and clearly based on nothing but good old fashion “fuck you pay me” logic. My guess is they are assuming “AI” companies will just buy whatever they make.
If people keep buying however they will keep doing this. If the market drops out from them (AI bubble bursting at the same time people cut back on buying new systems) then they will likely ask for bailouts (your money again).
Apple specifically is provably charging countries without tariffs: https://iphone-worldwide.com/
Have the world subsidize US sales, just because they’re used to paying a little more. Not surprised that other goods would use same strategy.
Its just naked greed, the sooner the world can move away from america and these companies the better.
Turkey sells the iJunk for twice as much as in the US 🤮
Nice article but the numbers are a lot lower here in the EU.
While there is some pricing increase it’s currently more around 50% and not 100%.
The selected kit is also extremely expensive (350€ was ~300€) - similar kits are available for a lot less (270€ was ~180€) - so I doubt that anyone was buying it in the first place.
I also think it’s not completely AI related but more likely that this is another RAM price fixing scandal happening right now. Pretty much the same that we see today happend in 2017-2018.
Europe is also hit hard. The kit I was about to buy increased from 850 to 2K euro…
Bruh, my whole mid-to-high range gaming PC costs 850 to 2K euro. What is the intended use of such an expensive RAM kit? Is it LLMs again?
Not LLM in this case actually. Virtualization mostly with qubes OS
Scientific applications. My lab has a PC running 196GB RAM for processing 3D and 4D microscopy voxel datasets.
Sounds more like the applications require some serious optimizations to me…
Assuming that you don’t need the absolute tightest timings and highest speed, you can get 192 GB from Corsair for “just” 660 euros where I live, pretty far still from 2000 euros. The speed and timings are the same as the 1300 euro kit, also from Corsair, it’s just that the cheaper kit has no RGB.
So at 2k EUR I’m assuming it’s going to be either more than 192 GB (in which case, is that even a desktop motherboard or are we talking about servers?) or some super high speed RAM.
256GB at 6000. In a desktop motherboard yes.
This kit. G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB F5-6000J3644D64GX4-TZ5NR
One of if not the only kit that can run with high capacity and at high speeds. In a “desktop” system
OpenAI’s “Stargate” project has recently signed an agreement with Samsung and SK hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month. That figure alone would account for close to 40% of global DRAM output.
High-density NAND products are effectively sold out months in advance. Samsung’s next-generation V9 NAND is already nearly booked before it’s even launched. Micron has presold almost all of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) output through 2026. Contracts that once covered a quarter now span years, with hyperscalers buying directly at the source.
If China’s going to compete on AI, it’s going to be doing so with a limited supply of memory, I expect.
They’re going all in on domestic chip manufacturing, and they are catching up much faster than armchair generals, and even actual generals, predicted.
I bought 16gb of ddr4 for 110eu back in 2018. Welcome back to the DDR wars, with NAND soon to follow.
