> The people complaining most loudly about RAM costs are the people who want to run local models

This is a tiny percentage of the population.

Samsung is cutting phone production because of RAM prices.[1] The consumer market is badly affected: budget phones, laptops, general electronics.

The budget segment of sub $100 devices in India has been almost wiped out. Manufacturers cannot afford to spend 50% BOM on RAM+storage. Unless employees are getting a 15-20% wage rise this year, I expect a similar situation in most places.

Between the engineered conflict in the ME triggering O&G price rises, and stratospheric RAM pricing, the situation is pretty bad.

[1] "There is no profit even if we sell"…Samsung to cut smartphone production by 30% (https://www.mt.co.kr/en/tech/2026/10/08/2026100709554237233)

This is all hypothetical and debating hypotheticals isn't productive so let's roll back to markets.

Let's say ram used to cost $100 and now that same unit costs $1000. You paid say $500x1,000 for that unit during the price increase or some price where you can currently flip for profit.

You have a very expensive data center and you're in debt financed on the premise that you have these special computers.

Now a new technique comes out and it turns out you only need 1 memory unit for something that used to require 8 or 4 or some meaningful multiplier.

This stuff happens all the time. It's why we don't use BMP files on websites or serve giant MOV files on YouTube. It's why postgres queries are faster now than they were 10 and 20 years ago.

You rent out your machines. You need to service your debt.. Demand may 8x overnight to accommodate but you have a monthly bill to pay and that's unlikely. It's likely going to drop.

Think about it. Your customers are paying maybe $10,000 a month and serving their customers. Now they can drop that to $1,250.

On market if you were to sell some of that ram you have 100% profit right now but not for long.

Jevons paradox assumes unlimited capitalization, zero debt servicing, infinite time horizons...

We live in the real world so what do you do?

Historically the answer has been "sell that shit"

There's an aphorism for this "stairs on the way up elevator on the way down"

If we had a healthy market with sane prices where you can't flip the thing you bought for 100% profit the answer would be "create more value."

> locally-hosted models can't parallelize runs from many users the way cloud-hosted ones can

Why not? Unlike many other workloads, LLM inference actually seems pretty suitable for decentralization (effectively stateless means no availability concerns; bandwidth and latency are relatively forgiving too).