Wow.  This unhappy development really does not bode well for our hobby...memories of the ugly prolonged Bitcoin mining and COVID-era GPU shortages are still all too fresh.

The 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM kit I paid $199 for two months ago at Micro Center is now $550.  (edit: in the 13 hours since I wrote this yesterday, it has gone up to $750!)  And seeing Micron/Crucial just summarily abandon the consumer sector after being a major player there for nearly 40 years is shocking to me.

That giant sucking sound coming from the AI world is becoming impossible to ignore.  They are driving up electricity costs, which when paired with our manic and unplanned adoption of electric replacement of all things fossil fueled could quickly evolve into brownouts/blackouts.  They are displacing human labor on a mass scale.  And now they're inducing market dislocations like this impending DRAM drought. 

All this really has the potential to start generating rapid and widespread public resentment.  It's one thing for the masses to not grasp the implications of the emerging AI age...quite another for them to deal with privation and palpable impacts to their lives that can be directly traced back to worship of the AI Gods.

This will be short lived.  LLM can only go so far until training is just wasted time and money.  

Narrow AI (what most call AI) is NOT the same as AGI ... nobody has succeeded in AGI (aka real AI).  Narrow AI caps out, it's not some infinite training/learning process.  Over training can actually be a detriment to the results and is just a waste of money/energy.

Most AI processing via LLM is performed on hardware with ECC RDIMM and not typical SDRAM you see in most regular PCs.  The V-COLOR DDR5 256GB (64GBx4) 6000MHz CL34 4Gx4 2Rx4 OC R-DIMM (Overclocking ECC Registered DIMM) cost me $1900 a few months ago ... it's now just over $5000.  This is the type of RAM you want for LLMs due to it's error correction and performance. 

Sure, it's no surprise memory providers have shift markets ... nVidia did, AMD slowly doing it, RAM, and NPUs, and CPUs and ... this isn't exactly a new direction and it will be have a point of diminishing returns sooner rather than later.

Narrow AI is useful and I use it daily and yes it has the potential to make about 11% of the global workforce redundant (good reason to diversify one's skill set).  BUT, it's not the end of the world has will reach a point where growth will plateau (sooner than you think).  When AGI becomes a reality, then the human race might need to pay attention. 

The big danger is lack of regulation on what corporations can do to obtain your personal data and monitor everything you do ... and I do mean EVERYTHING as just about every electronic device these days will have some form of monitoring ... my Amazon remote power plugs (require Alexa App which use my phones GPS) for example ... Amazon knows what's in my house, how much power I use, who's my energy provider (and even can determine if the source is grid or solar) what type of devices I have based on energy profiles, TV, etc. ... data, personal data, you can't use anything without agreeing to terms that gives up all your privacy.  Our current government is doing NOTHING to ensure our privacy, in fact, going the opposite direction.  But hey, US government banned DJI drones for spying on us ... the irony ... without a shred of evidence ... the hypocrisy is ridiculous.

4 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

The 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM kit I paid $199 for two months ago at Micro Center is now $550.  And seeing Micron/Crucial just summarily abandon the consumer sector after being a major player there for nearly 40 years is shocking to me.

Ouch. 

Not only RAM.  From an X post by Grummz near the beginning of the video:

Quote

- nVidia says they are no longer a game hardware company, but an AI infrastructure company.

- Rumors are swirling that all GPU production will HALT except for high end cards useful for AI.

Also from the video, we might hope that the AI companies will be more interested in the higher end hardware, but it's possible that manufacturers will shift away from the consumer stuff making it harder to find and more expensive.  

They also mention that some consoles may be less effected because they don't go for the highest end hardware.  However, see above paragraph.

I posted that video here because it's general interest for the flight sim community and it was time sensitive due to the Cyber Monday sales and more people would see it here.  I hope anyone looking to upgrade or buy new hardware did so by now.

Hook

Edited December 4, 2025Dec 4 by LHookins

https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-capacity-to-produce-ddr5-lpddr6-and-gddr-chips/

This is code for we can now make more of the cheaper stuff and charge a lot more and make bigger profits. The consumer will will have no option but to pay up.

I am so glad that I decided to buy a new PC before these price "upgrades" took effect 

11 hours ago, LHookins said:

Ouch. 

Not only RAM.  From an X post by Grummz near the beginning of the video:

Also from the video, we might hope that the AI companies will be more interested in the higher end hardware, but it's possible that manufacturers will shift away from the consumer stuff making it harder to find and more expensive.  

They also mention that some consoles may be less effected because they don't go for the highest end hardware.  However, see above paragraph.

I posted that video here because it's general interest for the flight sim community and it was time sensitive due to the Cyber Monday sales and more people would see it here.  I hope anyone looking to upgrade or buy new hardware did so by now.

Hook

I did

Thank you!

7 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-capacity-to-produce-ddr5-lpddr6-and-gddr-chips/

This is code for we can now make more of the cheaper stuff and charge a lot more and make bigger profits. 

Seems like sound business practice to me.  And this is good news.

They're doing us a favor.  It's better to have some product available at a higher price (which happens when supply falls) than to have no product available at any price.

If the manufacturers did not raise the price, then "scalpers" would buy all the product at the lower price and sell it at a higher price. The price will go up regardless.

Sometimes a price increase is just so retailers can keep a product on the shelves, making it available to everyone. The effect is similar to wartime rationing but letting the "invisible hand" adjust demand instead of regulating it by law.

Low supply + high demand = the price goes up.  
Constant supply + increasing demand = the price goes up.

You can study business/economics the old fashioned way in a classroom or learn it through any number of good business simulations.

The Sims taught me about raising prices to keep a product available.  One family in town set up a store to sell produce and fish to have all items easily available to my other player sims in the same town. One product kept disappearing from the shelves, so I raised the price solely to keep the NPC sims from buying it all.  It worked, and I learned something important that other business sims didn't cover.

Hook

Edited December 4, 2025Dec 4 by LHookins

 

I was going to post Gamer Nexus video link, but given the Political sensitivity at AVSIM, I didn't as I really have no clue what can be deemed "political" ... there are clearly some content in Steve's video that touch on politics.

It's all about the money.

5 hours ago, stans said:

It's all about the money.

Yep, and the video is very political (as it should be because the politics involved is a big part of the problem) … kinda wonder if anyone has actually watched the video?

1 hour ago, SayAgain said:

kinda wonder if anyone has actually watched the video?

I was able to watch maybe 5 minutes of it.  I don't need to deal with someone ranting like that, and I wasn't all that interested in what he was saying.  You can get the same information from more pleasant sources.

Hook

18 hours ago, SayAgain said:

Yep, and the video is very political (as it should be because the politics involved is a big part of the problem) … kinda wonder if anyone has actually watched the video?

I find it quite difficult to discuss economic issues without involving politics as politics is often an interfering force in economics.