This OpenAI RAM buyout really was a "If we're going down, we're taking everyone with us" move.
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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The "when you're out of money and you pretend you have even more" tactic.
Damn, I was hoping to upgrade my ram in the next 6 months. When I built my PC last winter I couldn’t find any decent 64gb sticks so I went with 46gb instead figuring I’d upgrade when they got reasonable. Oh well, guess I’m rocking them for a bit longer.
46 gb should suffice for the next years.
You always can move your swap onto the cloud.
Or actually put it on a fast nvme
Ah yes. This surely will have no long term consequences.
Definitely won't do anything to hurt the common person
I thought that was the final goal of neoliberalism.
We are living the paperclip maximizer problem, except instead of paperclips it's data centers.
Well, we’re not even anywhere close to AGI yet, and the underlying problem of “the people running everything these days are not programmed to value living things - only money” Is pretty fucking obvious at this point
i wish it was agi doing this, then maybe it could be reasoned with. rich pieces of shit that are detached from reality and humanity can't.
The AGI you are talking about sounds woke, and that’s illegal under an executive order that takes effect at the end of the year, at least in the US.
We thought we'll get artificial intelligence, but all we got was organic stupidity.
That you don't need AGI for a paperclip maximizer was obvious a decade ago https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html
ho-ly shit. this was a good read and it damn well predicted where we are almost 9 years on. 2 things that stuck out
-
"It's not like I'm predicting that airliners will fly slower and Nazis will take over the United States, is it?"
this one... just like, reading it was like oh boy little do you know. -
"It might be Facebook or Twitter messages optimized to produce outrage, or it could be porn generated by AI to appeal to kinks you aren't even consciously aware of." This one really hit the nail on the head. Whether its boomers on Facebook watching fake baby interviews, or everyone else on Reddit and TikTok falling for rage bait (and the gooners on X). Just... man. Why don't people get off their asses and fucking do something about this stuff? Why didnt they? I try to vote, and call local electives, participate in my community and keep people informed but Jesus. i dont know where we'll end up by 2036 if we aren't enslaved by that point.
We don't even know if AGI is possible...
Funnily enough, I was just introduced to this fascinating little game about being a paperclip making machine.
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
I spent a good 3 or 4 hours playing instead of sleeping.
So glad I built my computer earlier this year. RAM prices now are triple what I paid for.
Me too, the only regret that I stayed with 16Gb instead of going for 32Gb or more
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.
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
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.
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 $50 US less than what I paid for then so it was a pretty good price considering.
Normally the GPU prices decreases so 50$ cheaper in 1 year is completely normal. However, in the coming years I fear that the GPU prices will increase again when the GDDR production decreases to make room for the HBM production for AI.
Yeah, but that was a bundle promo price offer. I essentially got a free AM5 board and still paid less than the GPU sold separately. Classic Newegg dumping unsold merch. What sucks is you can't return one without the other, even with an RMA.
I'd upgrade to your cpu lmao
I was thinking about upgrading to 9600x or 9800x3D, so the 5600x is old and slow compared with those CPUs.
I just upgraded to 5700x to future proof my PC, lol
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.
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?
Basically as I understand it sam altman made a deal to buy a majority of the semiconductor wafers needed to make ram from the two biggest manufacturers, and the third biggest saw that and went "oh ok time to make a killing selling tam to businesses" qnd pulled out of the consumer market so now there's just fucking none being made for consumers because of one giant fucking dickwad
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.
Ah, so it's the 2020 toilet paper crisis all over again, but with RAM
Micron actually just closed their consumer business to sell all their RAM to AI firms instead
Fucking slop factories.
El Chavo del Ocho Reference!!!!!! Elite ball knowledge 🤝🤝🤝
Is there even enough power on the grid for all these data centers? Wtf?
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
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.
No, some of them are running generators on site to get more power.
Of course, you just turn off the power for all the poor people
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.
There's many new jobs opening in the AI sector, pedalling on dynamo bikes.
In the middle ages machines where powered by peasants in human-sized hamster wheels. I think that tech may make a come back.
We have such copious amounts of excess power but its all in off peak times. We need to build batteries or other storage methods so we can capture it in off peak hours for use during peak hours. It also helps stabilize and strengthen the grid.
We should force these data centers to help foot the bill for that instead of doing the stupid shit they're doing like portable generators, bring coal plants back online and what not.
Samsung put 12 gigs of ram in my phone. I don't even use that much.
Just open a second tab in chrome and you'll be redlining that puppy.
Damn Samsung, they ruined Samsung!
You chaebols sure are a contentious people.