As in producers not over-producing RAM should be illegal? A presumably short-term price spike in RAM of all things is a non-issue. It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about and there is no reason to think this blip is going to last. Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. The world is not static and sometimes the situation changes and lots of supply is soaked up.
> It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about
This is an incorrect and incredibly out of touch comment fragment. Computer part derivatives are an essential item to economic activity in most countries.
> It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about
The world runs on computers. It is as essential as oil for the functioning of societies. Increase in silicon costs is going to increase costs unilaterally across the board. It happened during the pandemic and something similar will happen now. If anything it should be a wake up call to countries to start thinking about securing their own supply chains.
> Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets.
Interesting in that I thought about their purchase of $1B of solid state memory at the height of their iPod run. The difference is that Apple had a hit product that was selling as quickly as they could be produced and there was a legitimate need if they wanted to meet the demand.
FTFA:
> No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM!
I don't consider this legitimate. It's not illegal, but it sure seems unethical and scummy and it pissed me off. OpenAI throwing its weight around is harming ordinary people who aren't competing with them.
> The difference is that Apple had a hit product that was selling as quickly as they could be produced and there was a legitimate need if they wanted to meet the demand.
What if OpenAI expects to be in the same boat? Their "hit product" is just R&D and training for new very large models. Of course if they're wrong, they've just set a huge pile of their own cash on fire.
If there was a law against buying the supplies of materials and letting them rot in a storehouse just to deprive competitors of them, your argument would be what OpenAI would try to make in court...
Who in the developed world doesn't have a few luxuries? Pretty much all of history people have had to make do with RAM being a lot less accessible than it is now. It isn't essential and people can still buy RAM in the rare situations where they actually need it.
There is nothing here worth invoking the legal system over. OpenAI can buy huge amounts of RAM if they want. Good luck to them, hope it works out, looks like an expensive and risky manoeuvre. And we're probably going to have a RAM glut in a few years looking at these prices.
DRAM is one of the categories of advanced semiconductors that the US considers important enough to national security that exporting it to China is forbidden. It's a fundamental industrial product.
Yeah. Companies like OpenAI need a lot of RAM. That is why they just bought up what is apparently a material chunk of the market.
There is a certain level of crazy that crowds can find when people identify something as a fundamental industrial product critical to national security and simultaneously someone is calling for companies buying a lot of it [0] to be made illegal. If something is critically important to industry then companies should be encouraged to dump as much money as they like in the sector. Otherwise industry will suffer.
[0] And OpenAI is probably going to turn out to be closely associated with US national security too.
They didn't actually buy up the finsished product they actually require. Arguably they raised the price of an input they cannot immediately use hurting themselves by raising the price for what they do actually use in order not to serve a need but to hurt others including the 99.9% of households that use devices with RAM.
It is the malicious purpose and the clear harm to most of America that ought to provide motivation to enforce any law this is at odds with.
Pretending computing is a luxury in 2025 is nonsense as is ignoring the obviously manipulative purpose that is so clear.
> It isn't essential and people can still buy RAM in the rare situations where they actually need it.
There are about five billion smartphone users worldwide. An increase in the price of RAM will, for a start, increase costs for those 5 billion, as smartphones do not last forever.
