Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market

Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market gamersnexus.net

News Features Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market September 29, 2026 Last Updated: 2026-09-29 The cyclical nature of memory manufacturing may finally be broken -- and not in a good way for consumers The…

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#memory #market #consumer #destroyed #memory companies #consumer market #cyclical #september

95 comments

glimshe1 day ago

Should we blame this on memory companies or the AI companies bidding for memory? How should the memory companies have acted differently?

swdev2816341 day ago

I think the epic mistake was made by investors and executives who bought tales about imminent super-intelligence about to displace millions of knowledge workers from entire industries replacing them with AI datacentres.

These people are the main reason why AI companies have unlimited funding, and can afford to buy global RAM supply for years in the future despite their expenses exceed revenue by billions.

amelius1 day ago

The main tool to fix this is to forbid companies to sell below cost price. It is part of antitrust law.

benced1 day ago

You can short them and make a lot of money (to buy RAM with?) if you feel this way and are correct.

dist-epoch1 day ago

The same thing was said 4 years ago about NVIDIA on HN, that it's stock it's outrageously overpriced, given it's $20 bln revenue, that it should have at least 10 times more revenue to justify that stock price, which is fantasy, that there is no plausible way for such demand no matter what you think about GPT-2.

CBLT1 day ago

I'd come at this from a different angle: we still want this to be market system, so we need to make this priced into the market. How can we price this in?

I would try to solve this by making the market structure reflect the underlying difficulty: we have to decide what capacity to produce years in advance, to construct the memory fabs. So this should be a futures market, and a capacity crunch would affect short-term-futures, but leave full term futures at the same price. Because the companies supplying the memory can just construct more capacity to fill those futures at the same cost regardless of the AI demand.

em-beeabout 22 hours ago

the market can't fix this. the problem here is that the consumer market is dwarfed by big buyers. the consumer market is simply less profitable. traditionally when a market is no longer profitable enough for big businesses, it opens the room for new small businesses to step in. but that won't work here unless someone finds a way to make small fabs profitable.

marcosdumay1 day ago

Well, the best way to solve this problem keeping it a market system is if consumers band together and create a fab that will supply them.

Since almost everybody is a consumer of those companies, I do suggest we reuse the governance system we have that solves other "everybody problems".

paimapi1 day ago

ah yes, adding a futures market to a sector heavily invested in AI certainly won't lead to catastrophic over-speculation that will collapse the industry entire

VCFundedGenYerabout 12 hours ago

Both are to blame.

SlightlyLeftPad1 day ago

For one, they could have could have not massively scaled back consumer memory manufacturing as a matter of duty to customers. But money and greed must prevail.

Cyan4881 day ago

Isn't it the case that public companies owe a primary legal/fiduciary duty to shareholders over customers?

The question of choice between a profitable vs unprofitable venture is easy. But yeah, to what extent is choosing profitable instead of VERY profitable a breach of duty to shareholders?

izacus1 day ago

> How should the memory companies have acted differently?

Same way nVidia did through the crypto insanity - make sure they're supplying enough to the consumer market so it doesn't get completely destroyed and pulls down the other parts of the consumer market they're reliant for long term success.

> Should we blame this on memory companies or the AI companies bidding for memory?

Blame doesn't change the outcomes, neither does it improve the negative consequences. Think in terms of "what does destruction of our consumer market mean for my prosperity?" not "oh, how do defend poor companies again?"

VCFundedGenYerabout 12 hours ago

AI needs to die so we can buy electronics again. This is one of the top reasons why nobody likes it (among many other reasons)

1shooner1 day ago

An aside, this is a poorly-structured article. It's mostly screenshots of citations from other articles with no alt or any other way to actually search through what they're citing.

Seattle35031 day ago

I gave up on the article and watched the video

eagerpace1 day ago

People have the option of just not buying stuff. I sold my Tesla in 2021 for a stupid price, drove a beater for two years, and bought another new car a couple years later. Now, certainly not everyone has that luxury, but this is computers, not real estate. Prices will crash.

PorciiVorbesc1 day ago

>People have the option of just not buying stuff.

Unless you know, your main and only PC/notebook just died and need a replacement ASAP, they you don't really have an option to not buy. And no, the used market (where I live) is just as fucked, proportionally reflecting the retail gouging, with people wanting quite a lot of cash for tower PCs and notebooks from the Pentium 4 - Core 2 Duo era.

> Prices will crash.

Does your crystal ball also say when exactly? If my laptop broke, then I need a replacement now in the overpriced market, not in X years when prices will crash.

NooneAtAll3about 17 hours ago

> Does your crystal ball also say when exactly?

last news I heard was end of 2027, when several new production lines from existing producers start operations

twochillin1 day ago

If there were such a crystal ball, the same market doing the gouging would be pricing it in already ;) does suck that "wait and see" is the optimal answer to the average consumer but I guess that's the capitalist hellscape we have wrought

EvanAnderson1 day ago

If this goes on long enough the prices crashing won't matter because the manufacturers of all the other PC hardware will be gone.

I think we're seeing the end of the PC as we know it, personally.

Henchman211 day ago

I think this is the goal. They too powerful for the plebs, enable too many things. Like thinking and learning. Can’t have that.

/s if you need it

Varelion1 day ago

I hope so. I feel so, so, so terribly guilty for not building my wife a computer for her in 2023. She is rocking a 1080ti, and I really wish I had at least upgraded her system, but now I just straight cannot afford to even consider it, given the price of rent, food, gas, energy, all on top of the actual hardware prices.

And I am a SWE.I am not making bad money. I can't imagine what others are going through.

ASalazarMX1 day ago

I was so lucky to buy a high-end miniPC to replace my home PC for about $1,500 USD in 2025. The same model now sells for more than $8,000 USD, without disk or RAM. Triple that if you match my original disk and RAM buy. Everything got incredibly expensive, not only storage and RAM.

izacus1 day ago

Way to miss the whole point of the article and fail to understand the point. Do you think if significant part of US industry goes bankrupt because they can't source parts for their products, work machines and consumers disappear... you'll still have luxury of running around in a Tesla?

jck861 day ago

The AI companies must be regulated. They are already destroying the world and the economy before they can even make an attempt at destroying humanity.

Either AI will get cheap enough and blow up and destroy the economy by eating everyone's lunch and killing off sectors left and right. Or it will become an uncontrolable weapon destroying the internet and killing off people on the battlefield. Or it will tank the economy because there may not be a way to monopolize it making the billions of investments moot leading them to their only leverage of hoarding up all the resources pricing out the competition but also destroying the industry. And maybe all of those at once.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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