Occasionally, I build on-prem hosts for customers and ship them to be racked later and finish building the environment once I can add the VMs to the domain. Today was a new one. It was a modest 1x24-core/512GB with 6x1.92TB drives.

I boxed it up and the all-in total of the box was just shy of $86k. Almost $53k of that was in the 14 32GB sticks that went into the machine. The drives were just about $18k. UPS has a $50,000 Ground value limit, or we'd have to sign up with a third-party freight service to ship it on a tight deadline and likely wouldn't make it with account setup delays and availability.

After a quick call to the customer/IT Manager dude, I pulled 10 sticks totalling $38k and put them back into OE packaging, double taped them and they were shipped separately, so we could make the shipping cut off today and still be able to ship UPS.

This wouldn't have been necessary a year ago, but in order to get this RAM when we needed it, it was 1000% more than we've paid in the past, before AI took off. It was $500/stick cheaper with another vendor, with a backorder fulfill date of late July 2026 when the server needs to be racked and in production 6 weeks earlier than that.

Skynet is hungry for the hardware, I tell ya.