| VAMatt said: The AI bubble will burst eventually, and prices will come crashing down. In the big picture, prices (in constant currency) will likely go lower than they were before this big run-up, because of the increases in manufacturing capacity coming online now and in the near future. The same will probably be true of RAM and graphics cards, so long as the AI bubble bursting does not coincide with another big crypto boom. |
I doubt prices will end up lower than they were before... Because of several factors.
Firstly... The new capacity is mostly for HBM memory, not DDR4/DDR5 or the LPDDR variants.
HBM requires more wafer area for it's memory as you need to stack the chips plus account for the inter-poser, so it's a zero sum game... New capacity, but not increasing output in terms of capacities as it's invested in bandwidth gains.
Secondly companies like Micron has already shifted it's entire company to focus on data centers and servers... So that is already a blow to consumer prices due to less competition.
Thirdly... There is a backlog of orders that will need to be fulfilled for automotive, industrial and embedded designs... Think signage, gambling, ordering kiosks, satellites, smart devices and more.
Fourthly OEM's like Dell/Asus/Lenovo/Samsung/Apple/MSI and more will likely gobble up all excess supply if it even enters the consumer market.
Fithly, legacy production like DDR3 and DDR4 are slowing/stopping, but there is still a demand, so those markets will transition rapidly to DDR5 or newer in order to continue securing orders, which will take supply away from the DDR5 consumer market.
Sixthly... The new capacity will not be operational until around 2028.
The market is stuffed. It's going to stay stuffed for a long time.
Those who will win are the DRAM companies... But even Samsung is forecasting much of it's business (I.E. Phones, watches, tablets) to reduce in sales as consumer electronic prices soar due to DRAM, but that's offset by improved DRAM profits.
As for Crypto... Crypto booms tend to coincide with a corresponding increase to compute.. That has slowed.
We also had the Ethereum Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake merge, which completely decimated the profitability use-case for mining on GPU's.
Plus the data-center/A.I boom is having a corresponding impact to energy usage across the globe, which means energy prices are rising, which means that GPU mining is less viable.
Then we need to factor in nVidia reducing GPU production for consumers resulting in price rises, which also destroys the financial viability of crypto-mining on a GPU.
*****
My advice is, try and make your PC last as long as possible and jump on a new GPU now if prices haven't risen much. It's here to stay for awhile, might as well get comfortable.
On the bright side... Even low-end hardware is stupidly competitive with consoles, so you can get a very respectful gaming PC for very little coin if you play your cards right.
I.E. Ryzen 5000+DDR4+RX 9060XT.
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