alt Hacker News> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax.
DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market.
When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere.
> That's not normal market dynamics.
This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly.
I do find it interesting that so many people think “market rate” means the opposite of what economics teaches, and that prices should stay stable and not change much when the economic conditions change.
I also find it interesting to read all of the “we shouldn’t let them…” takes in response to this situation. The DRAM market is international. Trying to restrict it in one country would just see the data centers get built in another country.
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> It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere.
Curious on whether you will still hold your stance if OpenAI gets a taxpayer bailout. Even disregarding a bailout, they are already lobbying hard for tax credit expansion.
> Trying to restrict it in one country would just see the data centers get built in another country.
I'm surprised this isn't already what's being done. Inference doesn't require super low latency with the client, and the population's support of AI (and especially data centers for it) is waning quickly. This feels like another ideal use case for outsourcing the stuff Americans don't want to see to somewhere that it'll be someone else's problem.
Can't agree more. We can also predict with some confidence that in a year or two, supply would have adjusted and ram will be cheaper in the long run. We benefit from the expanded demand even if the fact that it first lands as a shock is disruptive to prices.
> When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere.
> This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly.
You act like it's a competitive market. It's not the case. It's an oligopoly with an extremely inelastic supply side.
The market is already completely broken and ineffective due to concentration and export controls. The actual response to a major demand shock should be investments to increase capacities but it's currently extremely limited because suppliers want to protect their margins and fear the market contracting again.
> This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly.
The problem is that demand is being propped up by speculative capital. The AI companies are a bubble that is suffocating productive parts of the market with the hording of capital which they're now using to also hoard hardware. All this without making money for data centres that aren't build yet, for a handwavy promise that an AGI will magically solve all the worlds problems.
This is not normal, and it is not good for the broader economy.
Most markets don't have three purchasers trying to corner the entire supply of one product.
In many countries, its illegal to manipulate prices in bulk.
> DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market.
Please don't explain it away like that - you are referring to the theoretical "ideal" market where a bunch of small companies compete with low margins to the benefit of the wider customer base. This is not what is happening. We have a couple of intrinsically worthless, LLM-whale companies, working literally to swallow and entshittify literally everything in their weird transhumanist/accelerationist/weirdo way. To add to the insult, the whole creation of artificial scarcity is almost a political construct, paid for with "monopoly-the-game-money" that these companies DO NOT EARN but instead BORROW based on vague and dishonest promises of achieving a "Country of PhDs in a datacenter"/"Pocket PhDs"/"AGI by 2025" (oops, now apparently by 2028 according to the OpenAI CEO). In their weird vision, as humans we should be merely cattle to be managed, not independent spirits with interest and aspirations. That ghoul Karpathy speaks about "ghost in the machine", overlooking the magnificence of the already existing "ghost in the machine" in the form of human beings. We should not have to swallow the increasingly crappier future these folks are insisting on pushing on all of us.
AI demand is subsidized by the bubble. Those operators buying the RAM are not paying using money that exists. Market economics are not working here.
The problem is that OpenAI has cornered the market. Maybe they haven't crossed the legal line or more to the point no one in this corrupt and incompetent administration is going to prosecute them, but buying up 40% of a market which hasn't got any additional capacity is cornering by any measure.
So yes, this is not a normal market. Your claim of a functioning market is the same as saying my laptop, having lit on fire, is a functioning computer after having 10,000 volts applied across it.
"it happened therefore it's normal"
Saying this is just the market...is like saying housing is a free market after hedge funds buy your entire neighborhood...