Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.
Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.
Too late, I’m afraid. The supply for DRAM basically can’t adjust, and already-manufactured chips can’t be repurposed, so even if Oracle, Meta, and OpenAI went bankrupt tomorrow, it would take some time to build up inventory again.
Look at it from the bright side. Manufacturers are building massive new capacity for demand that will never come. Already produced chips can’t be repurposed but machinery can, easily. In a few years RAM will be dirt cheap.
That’s not true, from what I’ve read:
https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20251113-12780.html
Memory makers seem skeptical, hence aren’t planning to spend on more capacity in 2026.
They also have a history of forming cartels and colluding to fix ram prices, so I doubt prices will normalize for a while.
I don’t actually buy it. It won’t fit on memory modules as they are today, but in the end, it’s just faster, higher density, prob has some extra features, but nothing you can’t rework a motherboard or modules to support. of course, min quantity will be like 128GB :)
edit: looks like the most likely they’ll just put stacks on the CPUs in a few years. Apple is already heading that way. AMD has some open patents to put HBM on CPUs
That’s not true, unfortunately. It’s not economical to transplant RAM ICs once they’re packaged and soldered onto something.
And if they’re produced as, say, HBM modules, they absolutely cannot be repurposed for, say, DDR5 or LPDDR5 CPUs, or GDDR GPUs. There’s no reworking, the memory buses on processors simply do not support them electrically, and altering those processors would have a massive development cost with years of lead time.
Some of the RAM (like the LPDDR5X for the Nvidia Grace Hopper ARM CPUs) can be re-used, but it seems most is being made as HBM.