Ridiculous But Legal Ways to Get RAM for AI

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Daniel wants a top 10 list: ridiculous but legal ways to get RAM for AI without spending insane money.

The R-apocalypse list.

And he's serious about the legal part.

He's got a point, actually. Memory prices have gone stupid. A 32 GB DDR5 6000 kit is $450 now. It was 400 in August. One kit went from $191 a year ago to 1,118, up 485%. TrendForce is forecasting conventional DRAM contract prices up 90 to 95% quarter over quarter into the first quarter of next year.

So the buying advice for the last two years has been, "Wait for it to settle."

It didn't settle.

It never settles.

JP Morgan's estimate is that DRAM prices will have risen more than 400% from the start of 2024 to the end of 2026, and the reason is simple, and it's not going away. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron moved factory capacity to high bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, and manufacturing one gigabyte of HBM is roughly three times the wafer area of standard DRAM. So every HBM wafer displaces several wafers of ordinary DDR4 and DDR5.

So the fabs aren't broken. They're busy.

They're busy with the profitable stuff. Cloud providers and server manufacturers sign multi-year agreements and pay premiums. The consumer gets whatever's left. Intel's chief executive reportedly said AI hardware will be short for another two to three years and that consumers are getting, quote, "shorter shrift than AI players."

Shorter shrift. That's the whole home user experience in two words.

And waiting isn't a plan because Micron's argument is that even if the AI bubble pops, humanoid robots will keep the demand up. Their chief executive reckons each one needs about 200 gigabytes of DRAM.

200 gigabytes of RAM per robot. My whole flat shares less than that, and we run a podcast out of it.

He calls memory the strategic infrastructure of the AI era.

He would.

Samsung expects supply tight through 2028, and Micron's first New York fab doesn't produce until 2030.

So the shortage outlasts the consoles.

The shortage outlasts the consoles. So Daniel's list, top 10 most ridiculous legal ways to get your hands on RAM for AI. 10 entries, countdown order, least to most.

10 to one. Number one gets the reaction it deserves.

Where do we start?

Number 10, because it's the one every article recommends, and it's boring. Buy the board, the processor, and the solid state drive and the RAM together as a bundle. Newegg can save you up to $358 when the memory is bought alongside the motherboard, the processor, and the drive.

That's a real number from this week, and prebuilts absorb price hikes more slowly than loose parts, so a prebuilt can undercut a DIY build on memory alone right now.

It's sensible. It's on the list only because Daniel asked for 10, and we needed a boring one at the bottom.

Every countdown needs a baseline, and