• Kjell@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I regret so much that I didn’t, I was planning to build a new PC now or in the beginning of next year. But with the current RAM prices I will stick to my 5 years old AMD 5600x. I will have to start playing games in my backlog if the framerate in new games becomes too low.

      • renrenPDX@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 hours ago

        It’s insane. Back then I still had to deal with GPU prices and availability. I had to buy the 9070xt in a MOBO bundle that I’ll never use and was cheaper than buying alone at the time. The same GPU now is $50 US less than what I paid for then so it was a pretty good price considering.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      I wasn’t sure how bad it was until I just checked.

      last December I bought a 2x32gb DDR5 kit for $160. right now, same kit, almost $600.

      this is fucking insane man.

      fuck AI.

    • moonshadow@slrpnk.net
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      7 hours ago

      I’m in the exact opposite position… hoarding bits on the cheap, all I need is ram and psu but ram now costs more than I paid for everything else put together and scavenging sources have dried up completely

    • Asmodeus_Krang@infosec.pub
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      9 hours ago

      No kidding! I postponed replacing my old Sandybridge in 2020 because of pandemic prices and then jumped on building my new rig in early 2024 when prices were the lowest I’d seen in some time. Also, grabbing a couple more sticks of 32 Gb DDR4 for my homelab this spring now seems like it was a good choice.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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      8 hours ago

      Power availability is actually a primary consideration when choosing a location for a Data Center. Sometimes they’ll site a DC even if there isn’t enough power and then build out the power generation that they need.

      An example are the two DCs that Microsoft is building in Cheyenne, Wyoming and the absolutely massive 1.2 Million panel solar farm being built to power them. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/05/11/massive-1-2-billion-1-2-million-panel-solar-farm-planned-for-south-cheyenne/

      This is at least the second time that Microsoft has done this in Cheyenne. In 2016 they contracted for 237 MW of Wind Energy, which led to the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms being built / expanded. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2016/11/14/latest-energy-deal-microsofts-cheyenne-datacenter-will-now-powered-entirely-wind-energy-keeping-us-course-build-greener-responsible-cloud/

      No matter what you think of AI the folks that engineer these DCs aren’t stupid. They are well aware of their extreme power requirements.

      • bthest@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        In the middle ages machines where powered by peasants in human-sized hamster wheels. I think that tech may make a come back.

    • Naz@sh.itjust.works
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      10 hours ago

      Nope. A couple of them have been built and they’re just sitting there unpowered

      Imagine you had infinite money and no consequences

      I mean you could like— build entire city size data centers right?

      But this infinite money goes away if you’re not building them

      So your choices are to build something that you don’t need or to have no money

      You see, humans were not very evolved or adapted to their planet, given their own social structures

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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        8 hours ago

        A couple of them have been built and they’re just sitting there unpowered

        Most of them in California because that State simply cannot get its shitty power grid sorted out. The damn thing barely works at the best of times due to a combination of corruption, greed, and Government interference.

        As an example the utility company promised Digital Realty and Stack Infrastructure that they’d have the power ready for them by the time their DCs were built but…SURPRISE…they lied. The only fault for DR and SI here is trusting a California Utility to deliver on their promise.

  • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    12 hours ago

    Why has RAM suddenly got so expensive? We’ve been chasing this AI shit for the last 3/4 years and GPUs etc have been expensive the whole time, but somehow RAM has been ok until literally the last couple of weeks?

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      OpenAI abruptly bought 40% of global supply, and announced it.

      Other companies found out about it when OpenAI announced and thought holy shit, if we hadn’t heard of this massive deal, what else haven’t we heard of?!, and so they started panic buying.

      On top of that, because of US tariffs and trade restrictions, the Chinese “B-tier” memory companies, who usually buy old machines from the big 3 (SK-Hynix, Samsung, Micron) and sell this lower spec RAM at lower margins, didn’t buy up these machines as much as they usually do. They weren’t sure they’d be able to make a profit given their lower margins, should tariffs suddenly change again or other restrictions get put in place.