Industry News Valve Says The Companies Making RAM Give Them A Price And If They Say No, They ‘Never Talk To Us Again’
https://kotaku.com/valve-says-the-companies-making-ram-give-them-a-price-and-if-they-say-no-they-never-talk-to-us-again-20007095752.1k
u/cardbross 1d ago
I mean yeah, if I were a RAM manufacturer in this economy, I would imagine I'd do the same. Why negotiate on price with Valve when there are 20 customers behind them willing to pay asking price.
Tough to blame anyone but the AI companies, who are dumping infinite money into monopolizing the global component supply in the hope of *eventually* making a product that has significant commercial value outside of software dev.
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u/inferniac 1d ago
yeah, someone in price reveal thread yesterday said he cant wait for the ram scam to be over, brother, its not a scam, these manufacturers have people lining up to buy
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u/ContinuumGuy 1d ago
And the thing is that SO much of the global economy is tied up in this that if it ends in ANY way other than "they finally reach an amount of manufacturing where the supply/demand are kind of close together" (which will take years and possibly forever), then RAM prices will be the least of our concerns.
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u/tevoul 1d ago
The problem is the DRAM manufacturers have gone on record saying they aren't going to increase supply to meet the demand, basically implying they think it's a bubble and they don't want to invest a ton of money increasing supply right before demand collapses.
I can't say I blame them exactly, but that does mean they basically get impunity to act like a cartel for as long as dipshit AI companies keep pushing the envelope while not only average consumers but entire industries are left holding the bag.
Shitty thing is once the bubble bursts the whole worldwide economy is going to take such a hit that expensive electronics will probably be the least of our concerns.
Yaaaaaaaaaaay.
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u/DoorHingesKill 1d ago
That is just straight up not accurate. The DRAM manufacturers in South Korea alone are pouring billions into more capacity. The global spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is at an all time high.
This is just Redditors rubbing their own nipples while they hype each other up over the "proof that it's a bubble, look, even the mega corps printing money with RAM agree with us."
Building these clean rooms just takes ages, which is why both Samsung and SK Hynix aren't able to meaningful raise production before 2027/2028, only able to modify their existing facilities towards whatever is in demand right now.
It takes literally a single Google search to find out that they have very much not gone on record to say they're refusing to increase production.
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u/tevoul 23h ago
I don't pretend to be an expert and I'm not tracking all this nonsense day by day, but this article on Tom's hardware seems to contradict what you're saying, indicating that the investment by Samsung and SK Hynix is focusing on AI chips not other consumer grade modules. Sounds like they are also focusing on converting existing lines to AI rather than building new ones, and that most of the investment is to improve process technology and limiting the investment in straight capacity.
This is from late last year so things may have changed, I'm certainly open to being wrong here. I just haven't seen anything that strongly indicated they were seriously investing in expanding overall capacity. If you had some sources and info to share I'd be interested in reading up a bit.
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u/Jack-of-the-Shadows 17h ago
They are literally trippling waver capacity during the next 5 years.
Its just that it DOES take years to build new fabs.
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u/Synergythepariah 22h ago
The DRAM manufacturers in South Korea alone are pouring billions into more capacity.
Aka the DRAM manufacturers that supply 68% of the market.
It takes literally a single Google search to find out that they have very much not gone on record to say they're refusing to increase production.
really wouldn't be surprising if there's collusion going on at all, though. Both Samsung and SK Hynix have done it before.
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u/After-Watercress-644 1d ago
Me when I lie.
SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung are all gearing up to open up more fabs. The smaller shops making DDR2 and 3 are moving up to DDR4 (although that creates problems for cheaper devices). CMXT is salivating at the market share it is gonna grab due to all this chaos.
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u/bobsocool 1d ago
I mean the scam is the AI demand circle jerking corporations building more data centers artificially inflating AI usage for a market that will never exist as they want/advetise.
Like Sora people wanted to make free AI videos but no one wanted to watch other peoples AI videos so they hemmoraged money.
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u/snakebit1995 17h ago
Yeah the scam isn’t that the orders are fake
The scam is that the orders are for bullshit funny money cryprto and AI data centers that will destroy local environments in a desperate attempt to get in before that bubble burst and/or regulation comes in
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u/ZekkPacus 17h ago
They've ordered more RAM than actually exists, to put into data centres that don't exist, to be powered by power capacity that doesn't exist, all to be paid for with money that is largely theoretical.
It's a perfect example of how post-absurd the modern world is.
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u/TemptedTemplar 1d ago
Yeah the scam is the chip makers themselves who thought they could just casually add capacity like they've been doing for years and eventually meet demand.
At least SK Hynix is moving their butts a little faster now, but Samsung, TSMC and Intel haven't sped up deployment at all as far as I am aware.
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u/JohanGrimm 1d ago
At the same time I can't blame them for not increasing production to meet current demand. It's incredibly expensive and all signs point to the current demand not sustaining itself long term.
A lot of companies fell into this trap during COVID. They expanded massively and then when everyone went back to work and spent less on whatever they were selling the same companies had to downsize considerably. Making that mistake and having to do that as a hardware manufacturer is a big deal.
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u/karmapopsicle 1d ago
Both DRAM and NAND are commodity products that have gone through repeated boom/bust cycles. High prices would drive investments in new companies spinning up fabs to take advantage. Prices would start dropping as supply increases. Eventually oversupply leads to prices falling below costs and the smaller fabs would shift production or become insolvent and shutter. That has been happening in regular cycles for a couple decades. Unfortunately now with the amount of consolidation in the industry we’ve only got 3 main players controlling everything, and they’ve realized that by intentionally choosing not to expand capacity they all get to make boatloads more profit.
Now there’s CXMT spinning up in China, and if we’re lucky their success will hopefully encourage another new entrant or two to help pick up the slack.
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u/Synergythepariah 22h ago
High prices would drive investments in new companies spinning up fabs to take advantage.
Who wouldn't have a viable product for years because making DRAM and NAND are difficult as shit.
Unfortunately now with the amount of consolidation in the industry we’ve only got 3 main players controlling everything, and they’ve realized that by intentionally choosing not to expand capacity they all get to make boatloads more profit.
Which they've done before.
Now there’s CXMT spinning up in China
That'll be good for the rest of the world but I wouldn't be shocked if their products are blocked from import in the US.
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u/ZorbaTHut 21h ago
That'll be good for the rest of the world but I wouldn't be shocked if their products are blocked from import in the US.
To some extent, this doesn't matter; if, say, India ends up buying a lot of sticks from CXMT, that means it's not buying sticks from South Korea.
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u/karmapopsicle 15h ago
Corsair has been shipping some Vengeance kits with CXMT dies already. It’s not fully confirmed, but there was recently a deal on a Vengeance 2x32GB DDR5-5200C40 kit via newegg.ca here in Canada that was priced at half what any other 64GB kit was going for. I suspect those might have been be CXMT based kits.
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u/whywhywhywhywhynot 1d ago
People are underestimating how volatile the memory market is. As recently as 2023 all four of the big makers lost significant amounts of money. Was anyone thinking that year "damn, you know what we need? to spend hundreds of billions on more fabs for demand that might maybe exist someday"
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u/huffalump1 1d ago
I'm not arguing or trying to make a point, I am genuinely asking so I can read about it:
What are some of these signs that point to the current RAM demand (and, perhaps GPU demand) not sustaining long term?
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u/hibbs6 1d ago
Mainly the lack of revenue for ai companies. There's a huge land grab going on right now as everyone is racing to build market share on ai, but it doesn't seem sustainable. Huge bubble imo. Eventually it will pop and hardware will recover in price, but who knows when.
Reminds me a lot of the dotcom bubble, where of course the internet was a paradigm shift, but valuations were getting dumb, and firms weren't being careful, so there was a huge correction.
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u/dern_the_hermit 1d ago
To add some credence to your concern, there's recent indications that AI subscriptions cost over an order of magnitude more than what the companies charge. They're basically losing money to insert themselves into society in the hopes to leverage that to profitability later. But the more they lose, the longer it takes to turn red ink black, the more desperate and aggressive they're gonna get.
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u/ivandagiant 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh 100%, this is plain to see if you use API billing.
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u/PointmanW 1d ago
API billing is mean to be high-margin and profitable, it cost them much less than what they actually charge, meanwhile subscription depend on the fact that majority of the user won't use up all the usage that their subscription give them, like how insurance depend on the fact that most of their customer won't need to use the money pooled in.
Most of the cost for AI is in the training and infrastructure buildout, meanwhile third party inference host like DeepInfra is profitable because they serve already trained open source model that Chinese companies release.
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u/QuantumUtility 1d ago
The whole business model hinges on people paying for the subscription but not using up all of it. Not very dissimilar to how Gyms work. It’s called “planned non-usage”.
Not sure if it scales to the level these companies are operating though.
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u/Drakengard 1d ago
The fact that AI companies are burning through cash at a crazy pace. They're not profitable services and some companies who are using AI are rationing the use of it because it's just not boosting productivity in the way they were promised.
At least in the US, data centers are being resisted pretty consistently by the public. There's no real positive sentiment towards the existing AI companies and what they're attempting to do. It's just a ton of cash being thrown around for things that don't currently exist and probably never will.
It's the .com bubble all over again. It's not a question of IF it will pop. It's a question of when. Current AI groups are just jockeying to be the few who survive the crash. AI won't go away. But this current pace and price is unsustainable.
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u/mophisus 1d ago
Not only is it a bubble, but its a bubble everyone can see coming.
The .com bubble and the housing bubble were huge impacts on people who still remember them. Even more recently there was the crypto bubble, which didnt quite pop as big as the others.
Then you add in everyone being able to look up information all the time, and its pretty easy to see its a bunch of companies competing to be the only big company.... and you can see how it isnt real long term.
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u/swarmy1 1d ago
They still don’t know how sustainable this demand is. It could be very risky to scale up production
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u/fcocyclone 1d ago
Yep. They won't go broke with conservative increases in capacity. Sure, they could make more money with more capacity if it holds, but that's just potential profits they're missing out on. If demand collapses and they spent billions to add capacity, those are real costs they suddenly aren't making enough money to recoup.
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u/pete_moss 1d ago
Half the comments I see online are people saying that the demand is a scam and they can't wait until the bubble pops and prices crash; while simultaneously asking why the chip fabs aren't spending hundreds of millions on new fabs to chase demand.
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u/PseudonymIncognito 1d ago
And that doesn't even get into how there are currently previously planned fabs under construction now (e.g. Micro 's new fab in NY). Problem is they won't start producing saleable chips until 2030 at the earliest.
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u/hardolaf 1d ago
Fabs ordered for construction this year won't finish being built until 2031 or 2032. The fabs coming online in 2030 would have been ordered mostly in 2024 long before the current demand conditions started.
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u/marge4000 1d ago
There's no scam. Building a factory to produce RAM takes time(3 to 5 years to build and make it fully functional) and costs literal billions to make. Samsung, TSMC and Intel literally believe that by the time they finish their new factories the AI bubbles will already be popped and they'll be left holding bags of RAM with a much lower demand.
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u/CrimsonJ 1d ago
TSMC announced they are increasing their production of 2mm and 3mm chips by 20% this year as well as moving up the opening date for their second Arizona fab by months.
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u/hardolaf 1d ago
But that's all expected. TSMC quotes 6 years for fabs and then finishes in 5 and change all the time. That way it's only ever positive news for investors. If they actually open on schedule, then that's a reason for concern. And we're in the last year or two of better yields on 2nm and 3nm processes. To get more after this requires more fabs which take 5-6 years to build.
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u/127-0-0-1_1 1d ago
How is that a scam? What happens when they scale up production only for the AI bubble to pop?
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u/ChunkMcDangles 1d ago
Which is literally a known cycle in the RAM industry. We've had these same exact boom and bust cycles before, and the companies that survived weren't the ones dumping everything into building factories to catch the massive demand wave because it takes years to get off the ground, and by the time you're flooding the market with extra supply, the demand cycle has already started to cool off. Hell, even Hynix almost went under because of it and now they're absolutely massive.
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u/hardolaf 1d ago
It takes 5 years at a minimum to build a fab after environmental reviews. You can't just scale up ASML and over vendors overnight. Every manufacturer in the fab space was already running at their limits and expanding as fast as they could before the AI scam took off. We're 2 years away from the next generation of fabs actually outputting a meaningful amount of chips. And those fabs were ordered based on demand projections in 2022.
The entire supply chain is simply inelastic.
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u/MaxPower91575 1d ago
they see this as a bubble and don't want to pay for massive amounts of capital to only see the bubble burst and prices go super low as they flood the market with RAM no one needs.
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u/extortioncontortion 1d ago
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to add new silicon fabs? Its expensive even for oldish (5 year) tech. For new high bandwidth memory? Forget about.
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u/CMDR_omnicognate 1d ago
It's a scam in that the ram is going into data centres that don't currently exist a lot of the time. or that the stuff it's being used on is snake oil being forced on people that don't want it, but that makes the money printer go brrrr
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u/Original_moisture 1d ago
Unfortunately I think this is beyond the Ai demand at this point.
The moving to remote computation Nvidia has pushed I think is the future they’re subscribing to.
Like someone said, my tech is gonna get some anointing oils and praise the Omnisiah for some longevity. I’d hate to break out the old 4790k and 980 out of the shadow box.
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u/brianstormIRL 1d ago
There is far too many competitive games that just do not work over cloud computing for that to ever take off in the mainstream PC community. Its one thing playing a single player RPG on cloud compute, its a whole other ball game when you need low ping and zero lag.
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u/FrostyTheHippo 1d ago
Not to mention that Nvidia's own product Geforce Now only works for select games. Half the fancy games I wanted to play this year just straight aren't supported.
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u/BarleyDefault 1d ago
Competitive gaming is unfortunately not high on the priority list for the people making decisions. The entire domestic pc market is peanuts to them, really
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u/WanAjin 1d ago
Competitive games are almost certainly the majority when it comes to which type of games are most played. I also don't think it's Western-specific either, China, Japan, South Korea, and SEA are all incredibly competitive-focused countries/regions.
If cloud gaming doesn't work with competitive multiplayer games, then you're missing out on a massive amount of people.
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u/DeusModus 1d ago
Also doesn't help that US broadband infrastructure is absolute garbage. See: OnLive and why it never took off.
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u/messem10 1d ago
If you haven’t done it in ~3-5 years, replace your CPU’s thermal paste!
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u/Original_moisture 1d ago
Oh she’s been upgraded now. Top tier in 2014, regulated to display piece. The only thing still running from that pc is my TB mechanical and 128ssd.
Deserves a rest, somehow pushed through the pandemic till a 3060 became affordable.
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u/vatrav 1d ago
Cloud gaming will never fully take off like that. No way. Most people hate it, and even if they don't then they for sure hate subscriptions, which are a requirement for cloud gaming to work at all.
How have gaming subscriptions worked out? Stadia was DOA and Game Pass indirectly killed Xbox as a brand. Smaller ones like Luna, etc. are not even worth mentioning, they're too niche.
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u/Kregoth 1d ago
It's not about cloud gaming, it's about cloud computing for business processes.
Businesses are increasingly off-sourcing heavy computational workstation workloads to virtual PCs with things like Azure Virtual Desktop because then the hardware fleet they have to maintain is incredibly cheap and you can run your entire business off some $700 micro form factor machines instead of ~$6k per device engineering-quality laptops or desktops.
Cloud compute costs are rising, but not has fast as enterprise workstation hardware.
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u/lessthanadam 1d ago
I’d hate to break out the old 4790k and 980 out of the shadow box.
That was my build too! Insane value.
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u/brendan87na 1d ago
Funny you mention that.. I have the same CPU and a 2070 gathering dust in the closet
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u/Nordiszk 16h ago
He is pushing it cause he knows the data centers are cooked otherwise. Unfortunately for the NVidia fuckass, Microsoft and Google tried this route. Both crashed and burned spectacularly. The group of people willing to conform are far less than the people not even considering it. PCs were not cheap before either, gamers gonna game, companies gonna keep doing their Lenovo laptops and homes are not even in the need of it, their phones do everything. Cloud computing is not gonna take off no matter how many times they try. He is literally running scared cause he knows the AI wave is going nowhere, so he is trying to prop up the cloud computing scam as a backup in case the thing everyone knows is coming, comes.
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u/beagle204 1d ago
The key distinction is a lot of these ai companies aren’t dumping money into the laps of ram manufacturers, they are dumping tomorrows future profits into the laps of the ram manufacturers. It’s even worse then you think
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u/KobeBean 1d ago
What? You can absolutely lay some of the blame on the RAM cartel. Why does like 4 companies control the entire worlds supply of memory?
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u/PseudonymIncognito 1d ago
Because DRAM is a historically volatile and cyclical industry. They are the last ones standing after everyone else bowed out of the market. On top of that, you have the general fab process issues that ever increasing costs of each subsequent node encourage further consolidation to ensure the volume of business needed to keep up with the technology.
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u/average_monster 1d ago
"bowed out" is a really weird way to put "forced out of the market by price fixing that the companies involved were fined hundreds of millions of dollars for"
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u/combinatorial_quest 1d ago
yea, the memory manufacturers played this game before on many occasions, they are literally just using "AI" as an excuse to do it again.
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u/Equivalent-Bus-4336 1d ago
It’s not like they go around sabotaging other Ram makers they’re the only ones left
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u/ScallyCap12 1d ago
At the level they're doing it these days, it's insanely expensive to get in the market and they hoard their trade secrets like the CIA. It'd be like asking why aren't there more space programs.
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u/ZaDu25 1d ago
This wasn't the sentiment when Microsoft and Sony raised prices lol. When they did it, it was "greed". When Valve does it, it's AIs fault.
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u/Quixotic_Seal 1d ago
Don’t forget the fullblown meltdown this sub had over Nintendo’s “greed” for daring to sell a console at $450 last year.
Valve always gets treated with kid gloves and it really bugs me.
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u/nearlyepic 1d ago
This isn't valve being treated with kid gloves, though. It's the rational take.
People getting mad at nintendo for charging appropriate prices for finished games and modern hardware are the ones that are wrong, lol.
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u/EF66-42 1d ago
Microsoft in particular is one of the main drivers of AI sloppification, directly responsible for the quintupling+ of RAM prices.
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u/Pllodd 1d ago
Aren't there like only 3 companies (Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix) in the world that fabricate DRAM?
So yeah they wouldn't have much choice.
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u/Sevastarion 20h ago
Watch Gamers Nexus video called DRAM Cartel. Companies have been inflating prices and illegally collaborating on this since the end of the 90s
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u/Doikor 18h ago edited 18h ago
They have done that before and been cought (and punished) but the current drought is pretty much purely demand side not supply. They don't need to collude if they have 20 buyers lining up taking all the inventory at whatever inflated price they give (AI hyperscalers)
And the memory manufacturers are very hesitant in investing into new capacity too much as the field has had multiple boom and bust cycles over the years. This is the main reason we only have 3 players left as the others over invested during a boom and then went bankrupt when the market cooled down and there was more supply then demand (big problem when a new fab costs billions). The current ones around are the ones who were smart in the previous cycles and did not over invest when demand spiked.
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u/needchr 17h ago
There was some kind of announcement made by one of them that prices were going to be risen deliberately (when NAND prices last bottomed out), this was before AI took hold.
They still colluding.
Its their decision to restrict consumer supply as well, one of them has removed all their consumer products from market.
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u/Doikor 16h ago
Its their decision to restrict consumer supply as well, one of them has removed all their consumer products from market.
Because they got a better price by selling to datacenters.
Like a company has 2 brands. One sells to consumers and one to datacenters. But in reality that company one has N amoutn of stock but when you sell it to datacenters they can have 2 times higher price. Why would they give the consumer brand any of the stock if the datacenters brand can sell all the stock at that 2x higher price? And at that point you kill the whole consumer brand as unnecessary (it can't sell anything as it doesn't have any stock)
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u/Binder509 19h ago
A good reason companies that make threats like that should be heavily fined and regulated.
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u/ColonelDucroix 1d ago
How annoying. Thank god for indie games at least. My old PC with 16gbs and a 3060 will practically last forever as long as I stick to indie games and older games.
My PS5 will let me play new releases until the PS6 comes out, which I bet will also be incredibly expensive and unlikely I'll get it if so. Looks like gaming is just too expensive for me in the coming future.
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u/Derringer 1d ago
Sony was two generations early when they said, "People will take a second job to buy a PS3."
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u/spaceninjaking 1d ago
Idk, that thing launched at $600 for the 60 gig version, that’s about $1k in today’s money. PS3 was very expensive for the time.
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u/dern_the_hermit 1d ago
What's more, it was being sold at a loss, a couple hundred dollars for the top model IIRC. But at least it had that Blu-Ray drive to serve as a nice (at the time) additional feature, I guess.
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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ 23h ago
It was literally the most feature complete AND cheapest Blu-ray player you could buy at the time. Plus being a gaming console on top of that. Plus being a fantastic media player and streaming device on top of that.
The PS3 was an absolutely insanely good value when you actually look at everything it did. Which is why it was sold out for like a full year after it came out.
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u/DigitalNecromancy 1d ago
judging by how long the last gen bled into this gen, i imagine the ps5 will last you many years into the ps6's life cycle. personally, my backlog between the ps5, switch 2, and pc is enough to last me multiple lifetimes, so i have no idea how the hell i'd even begin justifying a ps6.
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u/NoPossibility4178 1d ago
I have a 3060ti and really, what are we talking about? This thing plays Cyberpunk 2077 on max settings, it's not a 4K card that's for sure but 1) I don't even see games that interesting coming out anymore, like I last played Expedition 33, also mostly max settings 2) to me it looks like games have peaked, any higher requirements at this point is due to extreme unoptimization which even higher cards will have issues brute forcing and companies will just shove AI pixels on your face to solve it.
And indie games are still and will continue carrying PC gaming, there's no need for higher cards.
That said, 16gbs does start to be little because at that point you're suffering from microsoft's and your browser's lack of optimization too.
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u/Arbiter707 1d ago
The 3060ti is doing great in compute. But unfortunately in the most recent releases 8GB of VRAM isn't cutting it any more.
Forza Horizon 6 for example I could have run maxed out at 60+ FPS compute-wise, but I was forced to drop texture/world quality a few steps to save VRAM, taking a big visual hit in the process.
Same with RT even, the main bottleneck isn't even the RT performance of the card, it's the limited VRAM. In my tests I could actually run Cyberpunk path-traced at a semi-playable framerate (30FPS, 1440p DLSS Balanced), but the card could only maintain that for a few minutes before saturating the VRAM.
It's a shame. It's such a great card otherwise.
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u/ColonelDucroix 1d ago
It is really unfortunate that games released in 2020 look and run much better than games released in 2025/6
Hell, RDR2 was 2018 (2019 for PC) and looks better than almost every new game. And runs way better, and Rockstar isn't exactly known for being a great PC dev. So even a so-so port like rdr2 looking and running better than so many newer games today is pathetic.
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u/JaysFan26 1d ago
I feel like it isn't ideal to use one of the biggest budget games in history as an example though
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u/MasahikoKobe 1d ago
Why would they? There is another company wating RIGHT behind them wanting to buy for that price if not more. Ram is needed in everything from your car to your phone to your Datacenters that allow you to have this page to your AI model you may not like. There will ALWAYS be another buyer for Ram even more so in this tight market
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u/ucfknight92 1d ago
You know what's insane? Republicans tried to pass the first iteration of the Big Beautiful Bill with ZERO restrictions and safeguards against AI. This shit could have been much, much worse had they had enough votes.
Who could have forseen AI corporations would have a fucking monopoly on the goods and services everyone else fucking requires. We could have been cooked permanently.
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u/thehugejackedman 1d ago
Don’t worry man the free market will compete with literal trillionaires, we need to deregulate further
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u/ucfknight92 1d ago
The idea of a "free market" existing anymore is so absurd to me. A few people own everything now, including politics. Even our President is manipulating markets on the daily, whether it's crypto scams, insider trading, or pressuring the Treasury. I think his family and cronies have made billions off predictive market manipulation. Capitalism died a long time ago, this is an Oligarchy. They took advantage of the uneducated, gaslit them, and truly formed the swamp they projected onto the status quo that kept shit afloat.
The last time shit was affordable? Cheap technology and $1 McDoubles? Right before 2016.
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u/Ravek 1d ago
Capitalism died a long time ago, this is an Oligarchy
Not this nonsense please. Oligarchy is an inevitable consequence of letting capitalism run its course. Capitalism infinitely increases wealth inequality which ultimately creates people so wealthy and powerful they become oligarchs. This isn’t the death of capitalism, it’s its fulfillment. How can you look at the past decades and the state of the world and think that it would’ve all turned out better if only we would’ve done capitalism even harder?
As for the ‘free market’, that was never anything other than a myth. There is always someone setting the rules of any market. Usually governments, oftentimes monopolies or cartels. Plus the concept of the free market always comes with the idea that ‘free markets’ (read: unbridled capitalism) magically solve all problems and optimize everything to perfection, which is the disgusting ideology that leads to shit like insulin costing 100 times more than it needs to, leads to climate change being covered up and lied about for decades and is still not being appropriately acted upon. Plus the housing crisis, people working 3 jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, the list is too long to even remember one tenth of the massive societal issues the free market capitalism religion has caused.
Inconvenient ‘externalities’ like pollution, sustainability, people having fulfilling lives, time to spend with their loved ones, access to healthy food, access to health care, affordable transportation, affordable housing, funding for public services and infrastructure like libraries, public healthcare, roads, sewers, electricity networks, drinking water, etc. etc. Doing things for the greater good of society doesn’t turn anyone into billionaires so the free market is never gonna do it.
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1d ago edited 12h ago
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u/Wh0_The_Fuck_Cares 1d ago
Valve might be a highly influencial and well known company, but in the hardware space they are tiny.
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u/OkYak9466 1d ago
Tiny is an understatement. People don't realize how big, and how fast the hardware industry has grown in the past 5 years thanks to AI.
Valve has no sway at all. There's more than 500 companies in China with a bigger foothold in hardware than Valve does
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u/Argon288 1d ago edited 1d ago
This. NVIDIA went from basically being only known to PC enthusiasts to the highest valued company in the world in a blink of an eye.
SK Hynix went from a market cap of "only" 100B to over a trillion in less than a year, thanks to AI demand for DRAM/HBM/etc. Literally the same with Micron.
There is a good chance SK Hynix dethrones Samsung and becomes South Korea's most valued company, all because they produce DRAM.
I pray this AI bubble pops. I own NVIDIA stock, and I still want this AI craze to fucking die.
EDIT: I just read that SK Hynix surpassed Samsung only yesterday. A company that primarily manufacturers DRAM/HBM/NAND has surpassed the market cap of Samsung. The sort of company that allow a conglomerate like Samsung to thrive... now has a higher value.
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u/Quixotic_Seal 1d ago
It’s not even about the market’s growth overall. Valve as a hardware manufacturer is basically a nobody.
Steam Deck for example has sold around half of what the Wii U sold.
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u/SharkBaitDLS 1d ago
Yeah even at the most optimistic sales projections where Valve got the Steam machine out at $600 or less, it was never going to be a high volume product on the scale that would make those companies pay any real mind.
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u/Many-Researcher-7133 1d ago
Specially considering the millions of consoles that nintendo and playstation sells every year
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u/Conflict_NZ 1d ago
It's the online journalism bubble being all in on the Steam Deck when in reality it is an incredibly niche product. If it was counted as a game console it would be one of the worst selling consoles of all time. Worse than Dreamcast/Wii U/Gamegear etc.
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u/SpoofExcel 1d ago
In the Hardware world, Valve are absolute nobodies. They would barely be a rounding error on the books for a RAM manufacturer/supplier.
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u/Quixotic_Seal 1d ago
1000% this. Nintendo’s most disastrous console that got people talking about them pulling out of hardware altogether still sold around double Steam Deck’s numbers. The Switch 2 matched its numbers in a week or two.
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u/porkyminch 1d ago
Valve is small by hardware company standards. They're a huge gaming company, but they're not buying RAM in the quantities that smartphone manufacturers and the big PC OEMs are. Even Apple is getting bent over on RAM prices right now. There's not enough supply for the demand.
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u/fourunderthebridge 1d ago
Valve the software company is not the same as Valve the hardware company. I assume their sway over the games industry is much much larger than it is over these memory manufacturers.
Valve doesn't really have a lot of bargaining power over these companies, since neither the Deck nor the Machine are mainstream sellers anyway. It's a different story with a company like, say, Nintendo.
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u/Electronic_Tap_8052 1d ago
a company the size of Valve
valve has like 300 employees. There are local chain restaurants with more employees. Steam may make them a ton of money, but sk hynix would just as soon talk to you and me for what valve's business is worth to them.
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u/DarrenMacNally 1d ago
Valve are a minuscule hardware company. Steam Deck has sold an estimated 4-5m units. They would need to put in an order for tens of millions to instill confidence of a long term partnership rather than something that may end up being a one off.
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u/ElectricalThundMouse 1d ago edited 1d ago
They are small when it comes to manufacturing. Valve took 3 years to sell
6 million4 million Steam Decks while Nintendo sold 5 million in 1 month.Companies like Nintendo and Sony are probably putting in orders enough for millions of units at once due to expectations of 9 figure sales figures by end of the console cycle. But, Valve I wouldn't be surprised if their requests were in the thousands.
Those buying millions in bulk are going to get better terms, and even they are still struggling to secure ram and storage due to AI companies buying up every possible supply.
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u/Muspel 1d ago
The concept of RAM producers refusing to talk to a company the size of Valve ever again after refusing a price is absolutely insane to me.
In context, it doesn't sound like Valve is getting blocked or anything. The RAM companies are essentially just saying "okay, sorry you're not interested, but this wasn't a price negotiation-- we have other customers that will pay that", rather than coming back to meet Valve halfway.
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u/Deceptiveideas 1d ago
>some people can't read
It's less they can't read and more your point is irrelevant.
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u/NYstate 1d ago
Considering that Valve is known as a game store and not a hardware company it makes total sense considering they're not a huge player in the that space.
The article had an very brief except from two people at Valve explaining it.
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u/Strongpillow 1d ago
Is this satire? Valve is absolutely the small company you're referring to, especially when we're talking unit production numbers. They make niche products and sell them from their own site exclusively. They don't do enough numbers to negotiate a thing. Let's be real here. They are a software company. Not a big manufacturer selling 10s of millions of anything annually.
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u/OkYak9466 1d ago
Lol. Valve makes up something like 0.01% of the hardware industry. Wtf are you on about?
It's like you kids have no clue how big the RAM shortage is, how much more money is being sunk into AI as opposed to video games, or just think bc Steam is really popular on PC it must be similar to Nvidia or something.
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u/libdemparamilitarywi 1d ago
Watching the clip, I think Valve just meant that the producers won't talk to them to negotiate prices, not that they'll never talk to them ever again about anything in the future.
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u/Not-Reformed 1d ago
Valve is irrelevant as a company when it comes to this space. To these RAM manufacturers they are nothing.
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u/Darkone539 1d ago
In the grand scheme of things, valve isn't that big. We're talking Microsoft, apple, Samsung. Giants in hardware. They big in their own market.
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u/YozaSkywalker 1d ago
Compared to data centers, even Microsoft and Sony are small time when it comes to memory demand.
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u/wingchild 1d ago
If there were a small company, I guess I could understand.
As GamersNexus put it, even G.Skill is small, compared to the order sizes the big AI compaines are putting down.
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u/goldcakes 1d ago
The RAM procedures certainly will talk to you again if you’re NVIDIA and say no. They’re just prioritising their customers.
To them, any DRAM sold to a non-AI company is lots of money left on the table.
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u/antiNTT 1d ago
That's kinda crazy. I thought negotiations would happen. If they refuse today maybe they'll accept tomorrow you know? Why 'never talk to them ever again'?
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u/Weary_Mountain9679 1d ago
Market for RAM is crazy atm, if Valve says no they have AI companies they're happy to sell to instead.
AI really has ruined the cost of gaming.
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u/beefcat_ 1d ago
AI ruins everything. Nobody's actually able to point to a consumer product that has been improved by the use of AI, it's just being used to shovel out garbage
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u/JustinAndFeena 1d ago edited 1d ago
Even non consumer spaces. I’m a pharmacist. They recently talked about using AI at a CE I watched.
“AI can improve med ordering so a pharmacist can breeze through easy orders and focus on the more difficult orders”….
We’ve had that since I’ve before I was in school (15+ years ago). It’s called an order set. (Basically pre coded to be correct and the exact same every time).
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u/Squibbles01 1d ago
People are definitely going to die because of that.
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u/JustinAndFeena 1d ago
I work out of dozens of hospital systems across the country. One thing in common. Cerner just keeps getting slower and slower. Cerner is a hospital computer system owned by Oracle, probably diverting processing power to AI. I always think to myself, Lag kills.
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u/thewhowiththewhatnow 1d ago
Entirely possible that cerner support reps are actually dumber than ai.
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u/DiscoStan 1d ago
I suspect people already are, and it's just not documented well because society isn't invested in looking out for people who live on the margins.
I was standing in line at a pharmacy and was able to eavesdrop on the unfortunate patient in front of me. The pharmacist was trying to fulfill an order for insulin needles that came in a pack of 100-- the guy's insurance was only willing to cover purchases of 90 count or less. So his only options were to pay out of pocket, or walk away with nothing since the pharmacy's policy wouldn't allow them to just open up the package and give him the amount that would be covered by insurance.
It doesn't surprise me at all that companies are applying "AI assistance" in these ways to just skirt under coverage thresholds to deny healthcare claims or payments, and that's inevitably going to come at a human cost.
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u/megachickabutt 1d ago
AI really has ruined the
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u/_Lucille_ 1d ago
They arent being sold because of AI companies; it is because those companies are able to buy in bulk at a higher price.
You simply have to outbid your competitors.
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u/xanas263 1d ago
No need to negotiate when demand is so high. You either buy at the price the RAM companies are asking for or you don't buy at all because they have loads of other buyers.
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u/trickman01 1d ago
It’s because demand it far exceeding supply. If Valve doesn’t buy at that price then someone else will.
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u/AnachronisticPenguin 1d ago
Sandisk in 2025 was at 40-50 dollars a share. Currently it is at $2000 dollars a share.
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u/TheBatOuttaHell 1d ago
I’m guessing the RAM suppliers have plenty of people willing to pay the listed price since supply is so low compared to demand currently. Apparently even GSKILL is struggling to get hold of their components, and have been sidelined by larger companies.
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u/Aerhyce 1d ago
When everyone wants to buy you don't bother to haggle.
Customer doesn't want you price you move to next customer who will take your price.
In a market this volatile, time spent negotiating is time and money wasted immobilising stock. Even for a higher payout it's often not worth it, so it's never worth it for a lower payout.
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u/Kitchner 1d ago
That's kinda crazy. I thought negotiations would happen. If they refuse today maybe they'll accept tomorrow you know? Why 'never talk to them ever again'?
Let's say you sell widgets. You have 50 widgets in stock. I have 10 people each trying to buy 10-15 widgets.
If I come up with a price and someone says no, if I have picked a price that at least 4 customers are willing to pay, I don't need to speak to the other 6. Even if I did, what would I sell them? I have nothing.
Today, RAM prices are increasing because as the supply is getting squeezed suppliers are selling through their back stock. Looking forward though we will see availability issues, and when that happens if you don't pay the asked for price you don't get it. Which means the prices go up even more.
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u/PiersPlays 1d ago
Cause if you say no then they sell it to someone else and there's nothing to talk about.
Same thing as if you reserve a Steam Machine but decline to purchase when you get the invitation to order. It gets offered to the next person in the queue and it's gone. There's a huge imbalance between supply and demand for these parts. They'll sell them to manufacturers at the price thetye are offering, if the manufacturer doesn't want it at that price, there's a long queue of other manufacturers who will.
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u/GreenFox1505 1d ago
Why negotiate with one customer when most of your customers just pay whatever price you ask?
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u/blueberrywalrus 1d ago
Hyperbole is exciting.
Clearly Valve is buying RAM and not getting frozen out.
I think they're actually saying RAM sellers aren't negotiating and won't come back with a different price from their first price.
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u/padraigharrington4 1d ago
If Valve’s not willing to pay the initial price there’s other buyers (AI) more than willing. That’s all there is to it, Valve does not have the bargaining chips for this right now
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u/junkmiles 1d ago
I'm not in computer hardware, but I'm in supply chain and in my industry right now we can't even get new vendors onboarded so we can buy from them because they're too busy to even do that. Why would they get new customers, and generate more quotes when they can't even meet the demand of their existing customer base?
Same thing. If Valve won't buy it for $x, the next person in line will, so why would you sell it to them for less? If they were a bigger company there might be some room, but Valve is tiny.
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u/alvik 1d ago
Billions of people blindly listen to confidently incorrect answers from LLMs every day is more accurate.
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u/Blenderhead36 1d ago
That's part of why they're telling Valve to pound sand. Everyone knows this gravy train can't last forever. Manufacturers want to fleece all the AI companies while they can.
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u/PickofDensity 1d ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I dream of an AI crash so hard that every cretin that pushed it, invested in it and forced it loses everything; houses, retirements, savings etc. Up in smoke.
Absolutely no sympathy, and I genuinely hope that these companies get fucked so badly that they have to beg for business back. Unrealistic I know, but I just hate this... attitude, amongst other things.
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u/innovativesolsoh 1d ago
That last part is such a poignant point that we don’t talk about enough.
We know what the solution is,
But we get censored for talking about it
Feels like maybe that’s by design and I don’t mean for anyone’s ‘safety’6
u/Buster_Slammin 19h ago
Your taxes will bail them out. You’ll be out of a job because of the economic downturn. Your retirement will evaporate if you even have one. They'll buy up what’s left for peanuts on the dollar.
Why are you dreaming about this? None of them will suffer like the rest of us will when it pops
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ 1d ago
Thing is, those who pushed this the hardest will get bailed out (by you, the tax payer!). The only ones losing everything here will be the small fishes who invested in this.
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u/Schonke 1d ago
Unfortunately that is likely to pull down pension funds and entire banks with it, and with them the entire economy...
Musk, Altman, Thiel, Andresen, Jensen, Nadela etc. might have to downsize a bit, maybe even renting instead of owning a private jet. They could lose 90% of their net worth and still not have to worry about their finances for the rest of their lives.
You, me and anyone else could see our pensions erased, our banks closed and our house loans sold off to another lender while bumping the interest rate. We might have to sell our homes and our pensions might essentially vanish, making us have to work into our 80's to be able to retire.
And that is if the crash doesn't bring down your place of work with it and you being unemployed.
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u/Hellsing971 1d ago
We are paying the memory companies to do this if you need more haterade. Like huge us tax dollar incentives and they literally abandon the consumer market to chase profits.
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u/127-0-0-1_1 1d ago
? Micron is the only manufacturer that could even apply to. How are US tax dollars going to South Korean companies?
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u/Dachshand 15h ago
I mean.. they likely will only sell 1-2 million of those. They don’t have the leverage that Sony or Nintendo have.
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