Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered.
The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of it started swirling in September. Take a look at the RAM price charts. Anyone who attributes this just to "AI growth" has no idea what they're talking about. AI has been growing rapidly for three years and yet this price increase just happened exactly when Altman signed this deal.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
It's also worth noting that IDC, who published this report, is wholly owned by Blackstone, who is also heavily invested in OpenAI. It would be prudent to be cautious about who you believe.
Right! Raw wafers, not even memory. I have seen no evidence that this move was anything but a means of taking product out of the global supply chain.
That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they can't even utilize what they bought!
It feels like abuse. They shouldn't be able to get away with such trickery.
With a functional government, antitrust enforcement would prevent a single company from driving economy-wide price inflation out of an attempt to starve its competition. Since we don't have a functional government, we'll ungracefully take this up the ass.
stockpiling solely in order to deprive your competitors of a commodity is anti-competitive and illegal
You do know that they can hire semiconductor packaging companies to put together memory modules the same way they bought the DRAM wafers, right?
Sure thing. Are they? And also, why would they do that? Do you think OpenAI wants to enter into the DRAM manufacturing business? Or were they looking for a way to take as much supply away as possible - paying for the wafers instead of finished DRAM?
My word, how lacking in imagination. Are you forgetting that there's something that OpenAI does that requires lots of RAM and that OpenAI are very much in bed with not one but two GPU makers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45521629) they could send the wafers to to build hardware for them?
I hadn't heard of this, so I searched the web (without any help from an LLM, btw) and found this:
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
After the dns entry, the stockpile of ram may be the most valuable asset that company has.
Doesn't Apple routinely do the same thing? Reserve chip production for the leading-edge nodes, and sometimes enter into similar deals for other tech such as displays? I'm not seeing any evidence that this was intentional "warfare" on OpenAI's part: they're just making a high-stakes bet that they can ultimately find a better and higher-margin use for that raw DRAM than HNers' gaming battlestations, or whatever the next-best use was when they made that deal.
No, apple does not buy production capacity to prevent others from using it. They buy it to use it themselves.
The wafers are not DRAM. This is more likely burning oil wells so your enemy can't use them. Wafers are to chips what steel blanks are to engines. You basically need clean rooms just to accept delivery and entire fabs to do anything. Someone who doesn't own a fab buying the wafers is essentially buying them to destroy them.
Not sure that OpenAI's move was a very good one, they've just created a lot of enemies for themselves. I see comments all over the internet about AI slop making RAM expensive. It's going to eat into the profits of a lot of companies. People will be willing for this insanity to end.
We can only hope you are right
So what? Intel has backstabbed many yet they cruised for a very long time. Mismanagement eventually stopped that train but it took 15+ years. There are no nice guys. This is business.