Comment by jsheard
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.