Comment by jsheard 2 days ago
Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project, which then caused everyone else to start panic-buying, and now we're here: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
I got one of the Newegg circulars in my email advertising a sweet little uATX AMD server board and got to thinking that my home FreeBSD server could use a CPU bump and more memory. As soon as I saw how much 128GB of DDR5 ECC would cost my jaw dropped and noped the fuck out. The cheapest 32GB modules are around $300 and upwards of $500. Thought I was going to gift myself early this Christmas. Depressing indeed.
The strix halo mini workstation is 128gb of ecc. Good machine. Source https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c09086887
...till supplies last. Which won't be long when people do exactly that (hey, that mini PC is now cheaper than building similar setup)
Exactly this.
I'd been planning to upgrade my desktop as a christmas present for myself.
Now I have the cash and was looking at buying my PCPartPicker list, the cost of the 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM I planned to buy has gone from £300-400 to £700-800+, a difference of almost the price of the 9070 XT I just bought to go in the computer.
I guess I'll stick with my outdated AM4/X370 setup and make the best of the GPU upgrade until RAM prices stop being a complete joke.
> We need high RAM prices for manufacturers to expand fab
Manufactures aren't dumb, they lost a lot of money in the last cycle and aren't playing that game anymore. No additional capacity is planned, OEMs are simply redirecting existing capacity towards high-margin products (HBM), instead of chasing fragile demand.
The proles will get dumb screens tethered to their sanctioned models; and we will be grateful!
I understand hating at people like Musk who destroys human lifes but what is Sam Altman doing?
Because of (c) of images or just because he bought ram?
People should be happy that commercial entities invest that much money into compute, especially on hn.
This will leap frog cancer research, material research etc.
> Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project
That sounds like a lot, and almost unbelievable, but the scales of all of this kind of sits in that space, so what do I know.
Nonetheless, where are you getting this specific number and story from? I've seen it echoed before, but no one been able to trace it to any sort of reliable source that doesn't boil down to "secret insider writing on Substack".
Samsung directly announced that OpenAI expects to procure up to 900,000 DRAM wafers every month. That number being 40% of global supply comes from third party analysis, but the market is going to notice nearly a million wafers being diverted each month however you slice it. That's a shitload of silicon.
https://news.samsung.com/samsung-and-openai-announce-strateg...
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
> Samsung directly announced that OpenAI expects to procure up to 900,000 DRAM wafers every month
The article says: "OpenAI’s memory demand projected to reach up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month", but not by when, or what current demand is. If this is based on OpenAI's >$1T of announced capex over the next 5 years, its not clear that money will ever actually materialize.
I dont even get this trend, wouldnt OpenAI be buying ECC RAM only anyway? Who in their right mind runs this much infrastructure on NON ECC RAM??? Makes no sense to me. Same with GPUs they aren't buying your 5090s. Peoples perception is wild to me.
OpenAI bought out Samsung and SK Hynixes DRAM wafers in advance, so they'll prioritize producing whatever OpenAI wants to deploy whether that's DDR/LPDDR/GDDR/HBM, with or without ECC. That means way less wafers for everything else so even if you want a different spec you're still shit out of luck.
You forgot to mention that everyone else also raised their price because, you know, who don't like free money.
Last year I brought two 8G DDR3L RAM stick made by Gloway for around $8 each, now the same stick is priced around $22, a 275% increase in price.
SSD makers are also increasing their prices, but that started one or two years ago, and they did it again recently (of course).
It looked like I'll not be buying any first-hand computers/parts before the price can go normal again.
ECC memory is a bit like RAID: A consumer-level RAM stick will (traditionally) have 8 8-bit-wide chips operating basically in RAID-0 to provide 64-bit-wide access, whereas enterprise-level RAM sticks will operate with 9 8-bit-wide chips in something closer to RAID-4 or -5.
But they are all exactly the same chips. The ECC magic happens in the memory controller, not the RAM stick. Anyone buying ECC RAM for servers is buying on the same market as you building a new desktop computer.
> Anyone buying ECC RAM for servers is buying on the same market as you building a new desktop computer.
Even when the sticks are completely incompatible with each other? I think servers tend to use RDIMM, desktops use UDIMM. Personally I'm not seeing as step increase in (b2b) RDIMMs compared to the same stores selling UDIMM (b2c), but I'm also looking at different stores tailored towards different types of users.
> you just have 9 bits per byte rather than 8 bits per byte physically on the module. More chips but not different chips.
For those who aren't well versed in the construction of memory modules: take a look at your DDR4 memory module, you'll see 8 identical chips per side if it's a non-ECC module, and 9 identical chips per side if it's an ECC module. That's because, for every byte, each bit is stored in a separate chip; the address and command buses are connected in parallel to all of them, while each chip gets a separate data line on the memory bus. For non-ECC memory modules, the data line which would be used for the parity/ECC bit is simply not connected, while on ECC memory modules, it's connected to the 9th chip.
(For DDR5, things are a bit different, since each memory module is split in two halves, with each half having 4 or 5 chips per side, but the principle is the same.)
Till they hit your program memory. We just had really interesting incident where one of the Ceph nodes didn't fail but started acting erratically, bringing whole cluster to a crawl, once a failing RAM module had some uncorrectable errors.
And that was caught because we had ECC. If not for that we'd be replacing drives, because metrics made it look like it is one of OSDs slowing to a crawl, which usual reason is drive dying.
Of course, chance for that is pretty damn small, bit also their scale is pretty damn big.
On the flipside, LLMs are so inconsistent you might argue ECC is a complete waste of money. But Open Ai wasting money is hardly anything new.
Using digital chips instead of some novel analog approach is even greater waste.
> China's AI Analog Chip Claimed to Be 3000X Faster Than Nvidia's A100 GPU (04.11.2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144619
> Q.ANT’s photonic chips – which compute using light instead of electricity – promise to deliver a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency and a 50-fold boost in computing speed, offering transformative potential for AI-driven data centers and HPC environments. (24.02.2025)
https://qant.com/press-releases/q-ant-and-ims-chips-launch-p...
Good point! But they are slightly more energy hungry. At these scales I wonder if Stargate could go with one less nuclear reactor simply by switching to non-ECC RAM
Most server CPUs require RDIMMs, and while non-ECC RDIMMs exist, they are not a high-volume product and are intended for workstations rather than servers. The used parts market would look very different if there were lots of large-scale server deployments using non-ECC memory modules.
Do you have a source for this?
I would not want to rerun a whole run just because of bit flips and bit flips become a lot more relevant the more servers you need.
That DDR5-4800 2x16GB price tend is crazy. It tripled from August/September until now.
It reminds me very much of the crypto mining craze, when there was a run on GPUs and one couldn't be had for any less than 5x it's MSRP. I know that eventually passed and so too will this but it still sucks if you had been planning to purchase RAM or anything needing it.
not much use for the 100GB+ AI boards or server RAM for consumers. Tho homelab guys will be thrilled.
Enterprise wise, the used servers kinda always have been cheap (at least compared to MSRP or even after discount price), just because there is enough companies that want a feel good of having a warranty on equipment and yeet it after 5 years.
It's kind of depressing to see that it takes just one asshole to screw the entire electronic market. If you read this, Sam, FU.