RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates ‘much higher’ prices

Memory-maker Micron has warned that RAM shortages will persist into 2028, and perhaps beyond. Speaking on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call, CEO and company chair Sanjay Mehrotra reminded investors that Micron has already sold most of the memory it will make next year and said customers will pay “much higher prices” than they …

[cookiecutter]

disgusting!

i hope all these nand and ram companies go to the wall to chinese rivals when the AI bubble inevitably bursts & they cry about it!

Short term 3 month thinking - the only thing CONsultants & useless CEOs with their MBAs seem to be able to do & completely void of intraspection.

this is not "market forces " - this is price gauging & im refusing to buy any samsung product at thier involvement in this shite too! Western digital et al can bugger off too.

and when suddenly there's no demand for AI hardware - these same CEOs will be crying about losses because they didn't plan for it & consumers as well as server customers still be so fucked of with them that a Chinese firm stepping in will take sll their business & we'll have to listen to another CEO with a 3 month memory crying on tv like a child "I don't know how the chinese do it!!!"

[simonlb]

Re: disgusting!

"warned those facilities won’t immediately help to improve availability or ease prices"

Of course they won't. Why the hell would you increase the supply and reduce the end user cost when you can just use the Nvidia post-pandemic playbook and nail prices where they are for years as the prices have 'normalised' and people have no choice but to pay the extortionate prices?

[Spazturtle]

Re: disgusting!

Were you complaining when they were selling RAM at a loss a few years ago and warning that they won't be able to build new fabs with prices so low and warned of future supply shortages?

Or did you like it when market conditions were to your advantage and are only now complaining when that has changes?

[cookiecutter]

Re: disgusting!

yes I was... this short term thinking, lack of planning just shows what utterly useless and pointless pricks CONsultants and the board are!

the ultimate example I think is Pelaton - COVID coming - oh no we can't plan for these block swan events - oh we're making LOADS of money!!! This is going to go on forever!!!!!

followed by ---- WHAT DO YOU MEAN COVID IS ENDING AND NO one WANTS OUR BIKES ANYMORE?!!!

Or Nike - let's close all our stores and go as online as possible!!! what do you mean no one is buying our stuff anymore?!!

[Stuart Castle]

Re: disgusting!

None of these companies are thinking beyond their next infusion of Venture Capital. None of the AI companies has published a coherent plan for how they will make profit, and their suppliers (Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft) are taking venture capital, or just loaning them money with the condition that that money is used on their products and services.

We are just seeing a repeat of the Dotcom boom, but on a much larger scale.

The dotcom boom startups all followed a similar pattern to what the AI startups are now. They come up with an idea, present it to a venture capitalist, who then funds it. They build the company, and start developing the product or service. But that capital is also used to build state of the art, even luxurious facilities for the company, and also multi million dollar payouts to the CEO and senior management. Their product may or may not be viable, but that almost doesn't matter, as long as it looks viable enough to attract investment. Look at Theranos for an example of this. They burned through hundreds of billions of dollars developing a blood test machine that most scientist said was absolutely impossible, and ultimately failed to develop it. Every single one of these startups has no plan to make profits. They hope they will..

Then, we had another boom during Covid. Thanks largely to the fact people were stuck at home, and unable to go about their normal lives. Companies like Zoom, Meta, even Youtube suddenly had mindblowing amounts of users. They declared working from home was the new normal, and that we would also socialise online. Hence, they invested heavily in things like Horizon Worlds, and Microsoft actively pushed teams as a way of socialising (side note, I went to a virtual friday night at the pub meet up with friends on teams, and it was one of the saddest, most awkward events I've been to).

These systems absorbed billions in investment, and not one has seen a profit. Now that all are reporting severely reduced user numbers, they will not see a profit. Working from home turned out to not be the new normal (although more people work from home post covid than they did pre-covid), and neither did socialising via instant messaging systems..

Out of the hundreds of startups formed during the dotcom boom, only a fraction are remotely profitable, even now. and most went bankrupt. This will happen with the AI companies. Some will survive, and may even make a slim profit, but most will not survive.

[retiredFool]

Re: disgusting!

Just saw where broadcom is loaning anthropic 42B to buy AI chips. Hmm, that seems like a bad idea.

[Spazturtle]

Re: disgusting!

It's just 2006 style debt shenanigans.

Broadcom give Anthropic $42B, Anthropic buys $42B of Broadcom chips, Broadcom bundles the debt up with other debt and sells it on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: disgusting!

Keep the conversation about things that would interest everybody, you know; nothing about memory or RAM.

[Stevie]

Re: Keep the conversation [ ...] nothing about memory or RAM.

It's RAM. It's in short supply thanks to massive AI build-outs. Prices have been hiked into the stratosphere. All computers will now be more expensive as a result.

Er ...

It comes in oblong 'silicon chip' packages with pins sticking out ...

Er ...

It used to come in two sorts, dynamic and static, back when people were breadboarding computers.

Er ...

Its name is an acronym for Random Access Memory.

Er ...

Er ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep the conversation [ ...] nothing about memory or RAM.

WHOOSH

[Zepheris_]

Printing Money

CEO brags to shareholders, you're going to be even richer.

[cookiecutter]

Re: Printing Money

and when it all explodes it will be someone ELSES fault... global conditions etc

I think the most limiting aspect of my career has been my need to do the best job possible & take responsibility for everything I do

[Sproggit]

Where's the DPA When You Need It?

In March 2020, President Trump - facing the early stages of what became the Covid Pandemic - announced that he would invoke the Defense Production Act to address severe shortages of critical medical equipment and supplies (such as ventilators and PPE).

Whilst I'd absolutely concede that the AI-fueled tech shortage is nothing compared with the millions who lost their lives in 2020, it is the case that tens of millions or more could lose their livelihoods thanks to the artificially-generated boom-and-bust cycles being caused by a tiny handful of companies that are constraining supply when it suits them to do so.

There are two possible legal violations in play here, both covered by the Sherman Antitrust Act.

First, if there are multiple competing companies supplying resources and they all act to intentionally limit production or restrict supply to drive up prices, that's illegal under Section 1 of the SAA.

Second, if a single company with existing monopoly power intentionally restricts output or creates artificial scarcity to maintain or expand that monopoly unlawfully, it can be prosecuted under Section 2 of the SAA.

Really? What's that you say? But hang on a second... wasn't it Micron Technology that officially withdrew from the "retail consumer market" to prioritize high-demand orders from the hyperscale AI and cloud providers? Wasn't it Micron that completely discontinued it's 29-year-old Crucial brand in November last year?

Why yes, yes it was.

So where is President Trump now? Apparently he's cozying up to the very people doing this to the world, issuing Decrees [sorry, Executive Orders] declaring that AI is now to be known as SI.

Color me cynical... but I have to wonder if President Trump didn't simply tell some of these companies - especially the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI - that if they wanted to avoid getting regulated in to the ground, they would have to let him and his family in on a few rounds of private equity financing before the companies file their IPOs...

I wonder if 1789 Capital has made any investments in any of these companies?

[elsergiovolador]

Advice

Just open the factory for one day a year, produce a handful of sticks and charge billions for them.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

There is only one good aspect to all of this gouging - when the Artificial Ignorance Bubble bursts, there will be an absolute flood of super-cheap RAM and parts on the hardware market that were originally slated for the Ignorance BIt Barns that need new buyers... I expect a corresponding drop in cloud compute charges due to the reduced expenses as well.

[Francis Boyle]

Quick

someone port Linux to an Nvidia NPU.

Seriously, I'd just be happy if someone would make a motherboard that could use the 64GB of DDR4 that I already own.

[Jamie Jones]

... but it's the wrong sort of RAM.....

And good luck getting graphics from those GPUs...

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

LLM's still do have their uses, even if it isn't as providing any actual "intelligence", so if it can run an open weights model on premises, it'll sell.

[retiredFool]

Of course it will sell, but for pennies instead of dollars. And likely way below cost. Its gonna take micron's share price from a grand to a tenner.

[Anonymous Coward]

They only lack the output stages; these days, really just the connectors and some line drivers as the data to the monitor is serial digital, not analogue down the cable.

Stick in a second minimal video card that provides all the connectors and a minimal RAM buffer to suit the screen size(s), DMA'd across PCIe.

All the hard work, compute and huge lumps of GPU RAM is used up deciding what colour to make the pixels, not in actually displaying them. Create the image on the GPU, DMA it across for display: hey, that display card is doing your double buffering, you can be overwriting the GPU's copy immediately that row has gone across.

Yes, there will be "a delay" whilst the image is DMA'ed across. A small and fixed delay.

Only question is, is it worth having the additional meanest possible display card (and the driver mods to do the copy across) in order to make use of the second-hand GPUish cards?

And how much is anyone willing to pay for them (or how much are the manufacturers willing to charge us for them!)?

[Adrian Richards]

I don't get it?

I don't get it... Micron can essentially charge what they like.

Why aren't they holding auctions for lots of 10,000 chips and making the AI companies and PC manufacturers bid against each other for available stock.

Seems like the fairest way to decide the distribution of available produce.

And the company will make far more money.

[doublelayer]

Re: I don't get it?

By selling it in very large blocks, they may accept a lower price than they could get for small blocks today, but they lock in future purchasing at what is still a very high price. That becomes a liability of the AI companies that have lots of money, meaning that even if those companies decide they don't need to buy as much and would like to stop, they're still contracted to buy some of that and to do so at a high price.

Consider a personal parallel. Some skill that you have but few people do is suddenly in high demand for no good reason. You can accept a six month contract at 10X your normal rate, or you can accept a five year contract at 3X your normal rate that they're not allowed to cancel early without paying you off. Unless you thought they'd go completely bankrupt within the next two years, you'd be in a better situation if you took the long-term one. Even if they decide they don't need that skill after all, they have to keep paying gardening leave, and they don't have an opportunity to change their minds or their supplier.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't get it?

> they don't have an opportunity to change their ... their supplier.

Well, they do. Unless you managed to wangle a totally water-tight sole-supplier deal in exchange for dropping down to "only" 3x normal rates, they can get in another, extra, supplier and continue to pay you the gardening leave.

Which would raise all sorts of extra fun questions, especially if the other guy does a really cracking job and the whole thing turns a better profit for them than they'd get from using you.

[doublelayer]

Re: I don't get it?

That's not changing supplier, that's adding another one. In the end, you still get paid for your work or time. Perhaps the better way I should have phrased it is that they can't drop you as a supplier during the contract. Similar for the RAM contract, they still get to sell their chips at the locked-in price even if the AI companies are buying more chips from somebody else too.

If they turn a profit while paying two suppliers, they had a really good plan. The other situation where the 5 years at 3X deal is not the optimal solution is if it turns out that they had a really good reason for hiring you after all so your rates would continue to climb. That's why you have to decide when choosing between these options whether you expect the demand spike to continue for a long time. If RAM manufacturers thought the AI companies would continue to want tons of RAM for years to come, they'd be building a lot more factories to continue selling to them. They are betting that the demand runs out eventually, so they're selling while the price is high and locking in those high prices while the buyers expect they're getting a deal.

[IGotOut]

Re: I don't get it?

@Adrian

It's a completely different architecture.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't get it?

So we need a new PC mainboard.

To go into a new PC.

PC manufacturers are not exactly strangers to making new boards.

[Doctor Syntax]

Be careful what you wish for. As memory gets scarcer and more expensive it becomes viable to put development effort into making software more parsimonious instead of shinier.

[druck]

Which ironically means not using AI slop code, which tends to be 10x larger than necessary.

[Anonymous Coward]

It can't burst soon enough.

We've just had the leased hardware specs for the next 12 months, the two most popular HP machines are now "AI" and have 8GB less RAM.

With Win 11 and the garbage they produce struggling on 32GB it's going to be a fun year.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: It can't burst soon enough.

A couple of years ago the cheapest Dell server was around £1.3k, now it is £4.5k for same spec (16GB RAM).

[Steve Graham]

There was a gushing review of the latest Mac Mini in one of the newspapers, and I thought "Balls. I'll bet you could spec a superior NUC for less than that," and went to the Scan UK website.

And indeed you can, but I was shocked to find the RAM is fully four times as expensive as when I put 64Gb in my real NUC.

(p.s. You can't upgrade RAM or storage in a Mac Mini.)

[werdsmith]

The sweetspot was Mac Mini M4 purchased with educational discount. It was an amazing bargain. Now used ones go for more than new cost.

[Hellcinder]

Maybe some of these greedy f$%*'s will have a heart attack they're so gleefully happy that their bottom lines are so large because they're gouging the crap out of everyone.

[hx]

Cartels are gonna cartel

I guess it's time for the twice a decade, "DRAM manufacturers reach settlement with 37 countries over price-fixing allegations"