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RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices (www.pcworld.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.

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[–] 18 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Thing is, this isn't new in the slightest.

I remember calling around to different PC stores in the 90s and early 00s to find the cheapest RAM and hard drive prices.

Before that, I remember my grandfather, an IBM employee in the 60s-90s calling places looking for best pricing on 64k-128k SIPP memory for an ibm pizzabox 286.

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago

    That was the norm before it was so easy to buy online from across the country, local stores set their own prices and a few minutes of calling to find the best deal is like searching on Google for a few minutes to find the best deal... But they weren't doubling in price in a couple months, that I can recall anyway.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I'll never forget the time someone in my neighborhood found out one of the local PC shops had a deal on 8MB of RAM for like 100 bucks. That's not a typo kiddies 8 Megabytes. We were so excited, a bunch of us piled into one car and rushed over there before they sold out!

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Yeah the "shopping around" aspect isn't even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

    Today the situation is flipped. It isn't difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you'll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

    The problem is that right now the "good" prices are crazy.

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