Saw this at Best Buy yesterday.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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That has to be a joke
I just checked. It's not.
Because humanity is using that RAM for vital things like Becky videos and generating pictures of 1000KG people?
This is wrong. The truth is far worse.
Sam Altman / OpenAI recognized that they were losing their LLM market lead to rapid advances by Google Gemini and others, so they took the most anti-competitive step they could.
They determined that the key inputs for AI advances and market leadership now were access to high speed storage and graphics processing - whether directly or via contract to datacenters as-yet unbuilt.
They already had significant contracts and share-trade arrangements with Nvidia - whom is happily gouging the AI Bros for all they can. What everyone in that market needs though, is high speed memory chips for SSDs, RAM, and graphics card memory. So, they secretly negotiated two contracts simultaneously with the two largest memory chip manufacturers to aquire ~40% of the memory market supply.
They have agreed to buy memory chips wholesale, unuseable until they go through further manufacturing to install them intp RAM/SSDs/GFX - but OpenAI has zero facilities or contracts to perform those steps, and as yet has made no public announcement (that I've seen) of their actual plans for what to do with the chips they've entered contracts to buy.
It is a strategy called 'market denial', and we are all paying for it with much higher prices for anything that needs these chips or is tangential to those markets.
And lets not forget, by buying it from NVIDIA, they enable higher profits, which generates money that NVIDIA can invest into OpenAI to buy more stuff from NVIDIA.
And also, if you're going to soon have more stuff, you can take a loan on those assets that you will soon own to buy more assets that you will soon own!
That's kind of like the practice of hiring someone and putting them on the bench just so that they don't go work for a competitor. It's just sad.
So, do they just keep buying 40% of the production in perpetuity? What if production of those chips gets scaled up, do they just buy more?
It is a four year contract. OpenAI is hoping they'll be able to suppress their competitors long enough to regain their lead and firmly established a dominant position in the market.
I'm not too worried though for two reasons. First, I'm confident they'll eventually be in breech of their memory contracts for being unable to pay - as the whole AI market is a house of cards, and has no real path to profitability beyond hopes and dreams. Banks and angel investors will eventually start asking 'where are the profits' and begin pulling out the rug. Second, the chip suppliers began ramping up production (as you suggest) some time back, so the current crazy price increase should only be temporary once they have increased supply output in a year or so. They would have to sign new contracts to get their '40% deal' again, and the memory giants will have much higher price demands for any such deals in future, and I don't think OpenAI will have the money.
It's very hard, takes a lot of time, and is kinda pointless to scale it up, because everyone knows the demand won't last.
It's an oligopoly of mostly 3 companies who together have 90% market share. The third one not involved in this deal just announced they are closing their direct to consumer brand Crucial, and are focusing on AI as much as they can.
So this is only this year, but they can keep throwing nonexistent money at it in perpetuity as long as the bubble lasts.
This is a really long wind way to say the futures market can drive up today's prices.
Right? And that's one of the best features of the market!
I'd change it to say expectations on the future of the matket, though. It has nothing to do with futures, per se.
If the bubble pops before they use the ram maybe prices will go back d...
clown makeup meme here
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.
The goal isn't to make profit.
The goal is to get money from investors.
And the market isn't rational.
Investors are trying to keep the thing going to offload to the next chump, and then US retirement funds will end up holding the bag at the very end when it pops.
Homo economicus is such a last century idea.
We need to start speculative betting on guillotine production
Taking from the phrase "pork belly futures" to predict pork in the economy...
And taking the name of small laptop ram...
(ಠ_ಠ)>⌐■-■ i guess we're going to have...
(⌐■-■) "SO DIM" FUTURES.
I'm hungry for dim sum now...
You mean it gets even more dim? I dunno how much more dim I can take.
Once the shit finally hits the fan, my machines will all get maxed out for the price of just one module today.
That is never happening.
Firstly, because the ram is primarily being used in systems that use ram that is completely incompatible with your systems.
Even if you are a homelaber, the ram used on GPUs is literally just the dies, and of a different type, GDDR, or HBM, which is even more impossible to use.
The servers themselves are requiring crazier and crazier power setups such that you could not power it at home.
The days of just getting a crap ton of hyperscaler stuff for home fun are nearing their end.
Like, even without AI, you're not getting a serviceable Graviton rack in your home.
The other reason this is not happening, is because even if shit hits the fan, companies will not give you the same prices they had before, no matter what.
That's just how companies now operate. The shareholders never want them to lower prices, and so they don't.
The only time consumers see new prices are with blitz business strategies to monopolize whole markets, and those have very obvious monkeys paws clauses.
The mid-tier gaming machine I built in 2024 has doubled in value.
Seriously. I was thinking about throwing an additional 32GB into my gaming PC, upping it to 64GB.
I've recently realized that I am perfectly happy with 32GB. Even if it is DDR4.
Like second hand cars during covid
Finally - a tangible altcoin!
It's because the furries in IT finally made real protogens and RAM is the only thing they can eat.
WHO THE FUCK TOLD YOU‽ Fucking damnit, it was fucking Larry wasn't it‽
Uh, hello? Furry? I was informed by the newsletter, of course.
Ellison is too smart to let that slip. Must've been Donald... ...yeah, that one!
Reposting the same text than a post weeks ago, but in whatsapp, fuck yeah
Pork futures warehouse is finally real
Onion futures has entered the chat
POPCORN AND TULIP FUTURES are probably going to be the mainstays.
That's Great