I’m going to be honest and say I don’t know much about hardware.
I want add some more RAM to my PC, but I’m not sure if I should wait for lower prices. I don’t need the RAM urgently, but I’m not sure if prices will go down enough in the future to justify waiting for months or years.
Do any of you expect that there’s going to be substantial drops in RAM prices within the next year?
Generally speaking discounts come when retailers have more product in stock than they want, so they need to dispose of it. It is not likely that retailers will somehow end up with a glut of RAM that they need to get rid of, because there’s not a whole lot of consumer-usable RAM being manufactured right now.
RAM itself isn’t scare, it’s the silicon wafers that can be made into consumer RAM chips or specialized integrated RAM/GPU layers that consumers can’t use. OpenAI is paying Samsung and Hynix to hold the wafers for them, which means that others can’t use them for either purpose.
If OpenAI goes out of business or scotches the deal, those wafers will become available, but not necessarily for consumer RAM. Another AI builder may scoop them up. Or Samsung and Hynix will just hold on to them to purposely create artificial scarcity. Either way, retailers aren’t likely to end up with overstock to discount.