TLDR:
OpenAI made a deal to secure 40% of the global supply of wafers from both SK Hynix and Samsung (2 of the 3 large providers of RAM) ostensibly for project Stargate server farms. But it gets so much worse, they made both deals on the same day without advising the other company, and have not provisioned any way to actually use (make chips from) the wafers. It looks more like they’re just trying to keep RAM out of the hands of their competitors.
From there the laws of supply and demand and panic buying by everyone else took over, RAM prices are going to the moon, and Micron (the third big provider) dropped out of the consumer market because they’re gonna make bank in the server market as the only unencumbered company. Consumer general purpose computer customers are royally boned. This will flow through into the SSD market as well.
In short, Fsck the AI industry in general and Fsck ‘OpenAI’ and Sam Altman in particular. If you pray, pray that this deal gets a legal injunction in South Korea, coz you know the US will just applaud this fsckery.
I had everything in my cart.
I was waiting for Black Friday.
I get an alert saying the RAM in my cart was unavailable.
I’m thinking, okay, maybe they’re out of white RAM, I’ll just do black.
The $200 kit in my cart was now $1,200, but worse yet, everything but the slowest RAM was out of stock.
I decided, fuck this, fuck them, and I bought everything but the RAM.
A few days later, I told my friend my troubles, he says: “DUDE! I HAVE SPARE DDR5 in my closet!”
I tell him: “I will pay for shipping, fair value, and 20% extra for your trouble”
The moral of this story is fuck these greedy bastards, you can train your 10T models but please leave gamers alone; they are a tiny % of the demand for DRAM chips.
P.S: Pay the kindness forward, help your fellow friends with any spare parts