J. Keynes

He was specifically criticising this "the market will regulate itself after a while" attitude. Nice for you to have a big enough safety net, bot not everybody does.

In fact, Microsoft and Intel made a cutthroat monopoly of the PC market by their long-term WinTel nexus (MS Windows optimized to run better on Intel CPUs, Intel CPU PCs being sold with MS WINDOW by default), until AMD upped the ante and stole the race by being first on the block with releasing x64/x32 bit processor so Microsoft chose to ditch Intel for AMD to usher in the new era of 54-bit Windows OSes.

AMD still dominates in server market and GPU market (where it has been innovating harder and giving better VFM than nVidia and Intel), so still struggling to dominate the PC market (PC assemblers/stores get better lucrative deals from Intel to sell Intel-based PCs, that's why we find fewer AMD-based PCs for sale in shops/stores.

And that doesn't bode well for PC users/customers. Because that WinTel+nVidia nexus will choose MS Windows over Linux any day.

As for why more RAM is needed, you must be again surprised to know that most people play video games on PCs and mobiles rather than expensive consoles.

But even casual gaming needs adequate RAM and some vRAM. Even heavy duty office work (e.g., opening/editing big Excel files or complex PDFs) is a problem in low-end PC. Engineering students and workers need to do complex CAD/CAM work on their PCs. Artists (including musicians) need to use powerful software tools to do design and art work. All these needs mandate more RAM (16GB at the minimum) because most of these tools need MS Windows (or alternatively, expensive Mac PCs, assuming MacOS has alternative apps to suit such needs).

After failing to beat AMDs versatility and VFM performance in the CPU & GPU market, nVidia and Intel have insteaf pivoted to AI to regain their stranglehold on the market. Their AI NPUs are dominating the PC market this year, but those new PCs are bad for the types of specific needs listed above.

This is also why Microsoft and its allies ensured that most video games are not ported to Linux (and Mac), until Valve finally started to change that status quo by focusing on Linux gaming (but out of self interest, as its money-maker Steam store became too heavily dependent on Microsoft for gaming).

So yeah, more RAM and better CPUs & GPUs please!

So now for these AI companies, they got tons of money to burn so they are willing to pay a lot more, so now crucial only have a limited supply of ram and the thing is there isn't much difference between AI chip and consumer chip but the margins of AI chip are super higher compared to consumer chip

So earlier they would sell consumer chips and AI chips as well but then the AI companies still demanded even more and they would get insane profits selling them so what they did (atleast crucial) is that they stopped selling consumer chips just to sell AI chips for profit.

> I suppose they do not intend to bring a new AI focused unit because it is not worth it or they believe the hype might be gone before it they are done. But what intrigues me is why they would allow other competitors to step up in a segment they dominate? They could raise the prices for the consumers if they are not worried about competition...

Well as a consumer, I certainly hope so but I think that these companies did this case because their have been times they were -55% in stock prices and its just cash making money device at this point and there is a monopoly of fabs with just three key players.

So the answer to your question is "money" and "more money" short term. Their stock prices are already up I think and a company really loves short term rising stock prices

> They could raise the prices for the consumers if they are not worried about competition

Well, would you increase the prices 3-4x? Because supposedly thats how much the AI chips from what I've heard are... And due to this, the second hand market itself is selling these at a close-enough mark.

I don't know but I hope that new players come in the market, I didn't know that this ram industry was such monopolistic with there being only 3 key players and how that became a chokehold for the whole world economy in a way

2028 is another story depending on whether this frenzy continues / fabs being built (don’t know whether they are as hard as cpu)

So lets see if they might "save us"

Even if they might sell their inference and everything, they still wouldn't be that much profitable.

So like, the key point is that a ram company can supply openAI ram and get some really high quick bucks which would be even more than if they were to create thier own datacenters,run open source models in them, provide inference in say open router.

Now you might ask: Is openAI or these AI companies mad for burning so much money?

And I think you might know the answer to that.

E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop.

If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies, making use on desktops less viable.

Who will realistically be optimising build times for usecases that don't have sub-ms access to build caches, and when those build caches are available, what will stop the median program from having even larger dependency graphs.

A dad comes home and tells his kid, “Hey, vodka’s more expensive now.” “So you’re gonna drink less?” “Nope. You’re gonna eat less.”

Also, even if no Micron RAM ever ended up in consumer hands, it would still reduce prices for consumers by increasing the supply to other segments of the market.