I believe 2026 is a turning point for how the industry wants the PC and laptop market to go. They want the traditional PC and laptop market to essentially disappear. The future:
- Force everything into the cloud including your desktop OS.
- Just your phone or Chromebook type hardware is needed. Dock your phone to get a big screen and keyboard.
- Anything you need to do that is more resource intensive like video editing will be done by a “desktop” instance in the cloud. Servers that host your OS and all storage you need.
- Games will be forced to dumb down and streamed because having more than 16GB ram will be unaffordable.
How will this be forced? Eliminate the consumer market by making ram and storage unattainable for consumers. If you need more than 16GB ram, you will have to resort to the cloud.
Pushing everything that can’t be done on your phone into the cloud removes all privacy when implemented by Microsoft or Google and something the governments are already doing anyway. So maximum data collection about you is the goal in this change. There is far more cash to be made in monthly os subscriptions and data collection than there ever will be selling you an SSD or ram or cpu.
You upset the super capitalists apparently. As if they haven't seen NVIDIA Geforce Now Scheme which is awful by the way. It doesn't look remotely as good as your own desktop regardless if your streaming on a 5080 because it's not fast enough to stream all the detail in real-time. That's the future they want. They will be able to charge whatever they want.
We in r/hardware like to think that this cartel is immediately obvious to us who track this kinda stuff, but how apparent is this cartel to the average consumer?
Because the border between supply and demand and a cartel is ill defined.
Right now less memory is produced than people want to buy. It will take years to ramp up production. Prices increased to the point of balancing depand. Any company selling for less should be put in court for betraying their stockholders.
Yeah sure. We need them in prison for not ramping up their greed. Hey why not just charge 1 million dollars per 16gb of DRAM? I mean it will make the stockholders more right? Or maybe 1 billion?
Shareholders actively make things worse for everyone. A claw back of dividends should apply if they have benefitted from the proceeds of crime. Not knowing is no excuse.
Production should increase immediately. Prices should not be allowed to be above certain amounts.
If demand greatly exceeds supply, buyers have to compete against each other for a limited pool of supply and end up in bidding wars with each other - and a cartel isn't even necessary - sellers don't have to compete with each other and sell out all of their production.
Of course, but when there are only 3 relevant suppliers and tons of ways to secretly signal between those players, how reasonable is it to presume benign behavior when there's so much money at stake?
Aside RAM might be a problem, but the really worst offenders here are the IP firms; i.e. stuff like microsoft, google, amazon, etc - the artificial monopoly of IP without really any interoperability requirements is just asking for rent-seeking.
On the RAM front - it's possible there truly is just healthy supply and demand dynamics at work without any market manipulation. Yet since we can't see into the firms internal reasoning for choosing to invest in supply as they do, or conversely, for making large exclusive deals as they seem to have (AFAIK the exact terms aren't public?), we kind of have to just blindly trust they're not engaging in market manipulation, even though the opportunity for riches is surely very enticing for them.
In the hypothetical world in which there were way more relevant players, the impact of any one such priority deal would be much lower anyhow - so even if the memory manufacturer's aren't explicitly nor implicitly colluding, a more diversified set of suppliers would have buffered the hit to some degree.
Personally, I think stories like this are too common; I wish we'd have structured markets differently to just avoid making it so easy for firms to enter the danger zone. I forgot who coined the term that the greatest enemy of capitalism are capitalists, but seems apt here. Maybe someday there'll be a constructive backlash, but hard to see that happening soon.
Because recent events are perfectly explainable without collusion by DRAM manufacturers, and collusion of any sort would not have changed anything that happened.
Too much DRAM and NAND manufacturing capacity got built out in the aftermath of COVID as manufacturers assumed the COVID tech bubble would continue, with a ton of capacity coming online in 2023. [Demand for DRAM at the time ended up being much weaker than anticipated](https://www.techpowerup.com/297474/historically-low-2023-dram-demand-bit-growth-at-only-8-3-nand-flash-expected-to-drive-installed-capacity-growth-due-to-falling-prices), leading to [a DRAM and NAND oversupply](https://www.techpowerup.com/308384/report-dram-and-nand-flash-prices-expected-to-fall-further-in-2q23-due-to-weak-server-shipments-and-high-inventory-levels) that led to very low prices in mid-2023 (e.g. [$75](https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/15mcxhx/ssd_samsung_970_evo_plus_2tb_nvme_m2_75_atl/) for a 2TB 970 EVO, [$110](https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/12orhu5/ram_patriot_viper_4_blackout_series_64gb_2_x_32gb/) for a 64GB kit of DDR4). [Samsung](https://www.techpowerup.com/311779/samsung-will-reportedly-cut-dram-and-nand-production-further-after-ususd-7-billion-loss), [Micron](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micron-loses-dollar2312-billion-as-demand-for-dram-and-3d-nand-nosedives), and [SK Hynix](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/sk-hynix-reports-record-quarterly-operating-loss-forecasts-better-outlook.html) all lost billions of dollars as a result from the oversupply and the resulting low prices. Since producing RAM was unprofitable and they were sitting on a ton of RAM that they had already produced, they all cut production; this doesn't require collusion, since people will generally stop doing things that lose them money (e.g. if going to work lost you money, people would stop going to work; likewise, if producing RAM lost you money you stop producing RAM). Since they were losing a lot of money and there was way more RAM than demand, they reduced spending on future production expansion. Prices rose slightly in 2024 and 2025; that combined with reduced expenditures allowed the companies to stop losing money. A huge growth in demand in late 2025 drove prices way up, with way more demand than supply, which was limited due to earlier production cuts and reduced expansion plans; that's the situation we're end up in.
Right now there is way more demand than supply, and collusion among suppliers doesn't do anything when demand greatly exceeds supply, since everything that gets produced gets sold out anyways, and there's bidding wars between buyers driving up prices. The only collusion that would actually affect things in the long term is if they colluded to limit supply increases in the future (e.g. like OPEC), but that's also explainable as fab expansions cost a huge amount of money and take years to build (and require fab equipment like ASML machines that also can't be built overnight). In the short term, there's no reason to limit supply (e.g. throttling fab output) as that's leaving a lot of money on the table, since with prices way, way above the cost of production, any additional production is basically free money.
So, right off the top - I'm not convinced I see strong evidence of collusion, either.
Having said that, the overarching point before getting lost in the weeds is that there's no clear evidence there's *no* collusion either, and because the market is so concentrated the incentives to collude are high and the ease with with they could, too.
Getting into the weeds - the oversupply blip you mention is definitely real, but it was pretty short-lived; [profitability recovered almost immediately](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MU/financials/). And as you point out, COVID was a factor, so there's a clear explanation there, \_even if\_ there were some collusion; a hypothetical cartel might not predict demand well.
One point made in the video that's worth keeping in mind is that last time around the collusion was pretty brazen but even so investigators said it might not have been easy to detect to victims (presumably because they lacked access to the cartel's internal communication). What that means now is that lack of obvious collusion is *not* great evidence *against* collusion.
Reading the financial tea-leaves, I get the impression the margins are quite high for such a mature industry. But they're not at the absurd levels of some tech firms, either.
I don't expect we'll ever know for sure if there was collusion; not everyone is going to repeatedly document their criminality in emails as they did last time round; we'll never learn of wink-wink nudge-nudge style informal and unrecorded hints. Especially not if it's the same folks as got burned last time, and it appears some of the oldtimers are still indeed around.
Hence my hope that at some point we structure markets like this better; it's a shame that market efficiency is so dependent on the behavior of a very small group of people that *also* have strong incentives to *misbehave*. It's just asking for trouble, even if we don't know for sure whether they're colluding now or not.
If you forced me to make a bet at even odds as to whether they've made clear agreements behind the scenes to limit supply, I'd bet not. If the bet were that they tried to publish their intent not to overinvest in supply in ways that their competitors can read, and then to implicitly collude slightly without ever coming to a clear agreement, I'd bet yes, but I think it's unlikely they'll get caught this time. And I bet I got at least one of those three bets wrong ;-).
Well, it's always supply and demand, even when there's a cartel. It's just that under certain circumstances suppliers (or less commonly consumers) are few in number and can collude to influence the supply or demand. That could be happening now, too; hard to say. And I suspect modern communication methods used to talk about this kind of stuff are less easily tracked by investigators, if they're even seriously investigating this stuff at all.
Personally, I think the real problem is that the legal definition of a competitive market is just plain wrong and we also don't do enough to ensure markets stay competitive even once they are deemed noncompetitive. A market in which just a handful of firms hold the majority of the market share is not competitive, and yet it often is regarded as such (i.e. there's a presumption of competitiveness which just isn't reasonable when a market is that concentrated). Also, we don't intervene until a non-competitive market participant is proved to have abused that position - but that places the burden of proof in a way that's just asking for the system to be gamed all the time.
It's ironic that you're acting like the well informed person when in reality you don't know what you're talking about and this is simply an Econ 101 case of supply and demand.
Supply and demand is code for plain old greed. The DRAM didn't become more expensive to manufacture. They realized they could get 10x the money if they sell to AI companies forgetting the PC consumers that built their very wealth they sit on. It's just greed.
the average consumer doesnt know what ram is, the average consumer who does has no idea who SK hynix is and thinks samsung makes phones, the average consumer who knows the 3 companies has no idea about the cartel
If you look based on prior history.
Unlimited AI money coming in provides enough security that i can limit production and charge everybody else more, irrespective to market forces.
If by “flat for profits” you mean [colossal losses](https://www.techpowerup.com/311779/samsung-will-reportedly-cut-dram-and-nand-production-further-after-ususd-7-billion-loss) by [every](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micron-loses-dollar2312-billion-as-demand-for-dram-and-3d-nand-nosedives) DRAM [manufacturer](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/sk-hynix-reports-record-quarterly-operating-loss-forecasts-better-outlook.html) as recently as 2023, sure.
So by the time they manage to prosecute and convict/find liable the participants in the price fixing, DDR5 will already be obsolete and available as bulk and DDR6 will be mid-cycle.
Is that why prices popped 400-500% at the end of \*2025\* in a very similar timeframe as it did back in the cartel days of 2001?
Funny coincidence there.
But sure, go ahead and white knight the criminals billionaires.
Because OpenAI bought out like 40% of DRAM production overnight, and all the other hyperscalers shat their pants and decided to also place big DRAM orders, which greatly increased demand relative to supply and resulted in a bidding war that increased prices.
You don't need a cartel to raise prices when demand greatly exceeds supply, because suppliers don't need to compete when demand exceeds supply. Instead, all the buyers have to compete with each other for a limited amount of DRAM, and end up in bidding wars that drive up the price, while suppliers sell out their entire production without having to do anything.
[OpenAI's Stargate project to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output — inks deal with Samsung and SK hynix to the tune of up to 900,000 wafers per month](https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month)
It signaled to the other AI companies and other hyperscalers that they need to secure their DRAM supply, and so they placed big orders, and global DRAM production is now sold out through at least 2027 (according to [Ian Cutress](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jgcxBl2ks)).
Tell that to nvidia when they revealed that their "deal" with OpenAI for 100 billion investment wasn't anything of the sort.
Just corporate fluffery.
Fraud is legal now.
Prices also popped 250% in 2017 and a class-action lawsuit was started over it. Did it lead anywhere? No, the only thing the court found to be suggesting price-fixing was that they'd done it in the past. And that just wasn't enough evidence to do anything so it got dismissed.
On the flip side, it was *only* 2023, and COVID was a truly extreme external shock that even a cartel might not be able to anticipate, and typical margins outside of 2023 are quite high for what appears to be a fairly mature industry selling a fungible resource. Many other industries can't even dream of these margins.
There was also an oversupply in 2023, so on top of losing money it would have made no sense at the time to invest in additional manufacturing capacity.
yeah many delusional people who think companies should lose billions just so that gamers can play their games at max settings for 500€, oh and if said companies try to innovate somehow(raytracing) then same gamers get enraged because oh muh fake frames.
This guy is also just profiting from this stupid mentality and portrays everything as conspiracy against innocent gamers
grow up numbskull - frame gen feels like shit at lower frame rates (hence the consoles dont use it) and on better cards it tears the UI to shreds at higher motion.
Conspiratorial price fixing is the definition of cartel behavior.
There is evidence that this is being done now, and there are multiple precedents in the past.
Why would a DRAM manufacturer fix prices when there’s a bidding war for the limited supply of DRAM, and no matter what you do you’ll sell out your entire production run?
Noooo booooo, it is not supply and demand at all. Everyone is just against us gamersss /s
A lot of these things also forget that we just have cheap borrowing for ages and now its gone; and its slowly snowballed into everything.
But, I mean, that’s what they did? They overproduced in 2023, so they cut spending on new production facilities and slowed production growth in 2024, and now everyone is paying for that decision in 2025 & 2026.
Nobody is saying it isn’t their doing, they’re just explaining why they did it.
So by the time they manage to prosecute and convict/find liable the participants in the price fixing, DDR5 will already be obsolete and available as bulk and DDR6 will be mid-cycle.
And why do we not have enough RAM producers?
Right, because of years of price fixing cartels where you get a slap on the wrist and can chalk it up the the CODB.
I'm not sure I can agree with the conclusion here. I do work in an industry heavily reliant on the very few RAM producers, and not a single company in my working field (mind you, some of them are among the largest companies in the world) has ANY kind of leverage on RAM pricing due to only medium sales volumes per year.
The only ones able to purchase RAM at reasonable prices are the 5 or so companies building AI datacenters on scale. All others are just outbidden by them.
The AI guys just don't care what they pay. They all think they're going to strike it rich and speed is all that matters.
It's pretty standard SW company landgrab playbook stuff. Trade money for time.
It’s not a cartel. It’s an oligopoly. The GN guy is well meaning and often correct, but his take on competition is getting tired. Is the AI bubble leading to irrational pricing at the moment? Yes! Is it because RAM makers are conspiring in a back room? No, it is not, not any more than GPU makers did the same when crypto bros were ruining those prices. If people understand the problem, they can more effectively address it than if they are misled.
Hi - not only did the DOJ define it as a cartel, but the companies themselves defined their own collusion as a "cartel," a direct quote, as shown within the court documents in this video.
Assuming something that happened close to 30 years ago is alive today despite both the companies involved and market being completely different is just ignorance. Please do better.
Ah, I see. The video’s thumbnail implies a cartel exists today, but that’s just clickbait. It’s actually a pretty well done history of the DRAM cartel that existed in the late 1900s.
>The video’s thumbnail implies a cartel exists today
So does GN. One of the very last sentences of the video is "The DRAM cartel, we think, is alive and well."
Yeah, that’s the conspiracy theory ending. If there’s any evidence for it, that’s another thing entirely. Until then, that take just seems unhelpful. I understand being upset about higher prices on anything you like to buy. That sucks, but no one needs another stick of RAM to avoid diabetic shock. They’re not going to starve if they must make do with 16 gb for a while.
I have a theory that the South Korean government is in on this, by helping both SK and Samsung they will secure investments for the next 50 years. And with the track record of bribes and corruption with both companies over the years, it won’t take a lot of convincing to milk the cow even more.
Yet I got [repeatedly](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1pdag9s/micron_to_exit_crucial_consumer_memory_business/ns3uu5m/) [shit on](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1ppsma3/gskill_releases_statement_on_sharp_rise_in_memory/nus4uc8/) here when I was saying that the DRAM industry is back to its racketeering ways.
And it's not. GN always claimed this but they are simply wrong. In 2023 both companies lost money so obviously they reduced capex for 2024. GN sees this as collusion. It's not. I
Why havent DOJ intervened yet, hynix, samsung & micron are using same language to describe capex in earnings report. This seems like a close & shut case. Thank you GN
DOJ only cares about stuff the so-called 'rivals' of the Pedo-Epstein regime exports to them because that is what the DOW (formerly DOD) tells them to go after. They can't directly tell their vassal South Korea to discipline their CEOs.
Yeah. This current DOJ is prone to not doing anything in defense of consumers - we've seen that actively first hand in the last few months. pam bondi is in favor of what enables the stock market to rise, and this certainly does. maybe in a different administration. but this current one? nothing will happen but enabling it
What's the leverage here?
Oh the US don't want DRAM anymore by.. you know going against companies producing 90+% of all RAM?
Who knows who want some ? Chinese companies ?
Perfect fit then with all manufacturing facilities located in Korea, Japan and China.
Gamersnexus' weekly ragebait video has once again done its job.
That's a job for Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Know your government departments. I don't even live in the US.
>About the FTC. Our mission is protecting the public from deceptive or unfair business practices and from unfair methods of competition through law enforcement,
Tfw I see a gamersnexus video and tell myself, FINE. I have 30 minutes to kill, they're usually worth it. I'll watch it.
Then see it's long enough to be a feature length movie...
Movie trailer guy voice - "In a world where RAM prices are surging, and buying a GPU is considered 'splurging', one man stands against the tide of greed..."
GN is just incredible with their content, so much being produced for sometim s really difficult topics and all over the world. They must be working 24/7
Well, when there's no actual hardware to cover, sometimes you have to fall back on business journalism.
The suckers who voted for this inanity owe me a 5090.
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