Better Offline - AI Made Everything Expensive (ft. GamersNexus)

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about how demand for AI GPUs helped the RAM cartel make every single consumer electronic more expensive, and how bad it’ll be when things unwind.Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! GamersNexus on the RAM cartel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY Support GamersNexus’ AI Surveillance Dystopia Series: https://store.gamersnexus.net/ai-dystopia https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus https://gamersnexus.net/ https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Better Offline. Subscribe to the newsletter, join the subreddit, buy a t-shirt. All the links are in the night. and here's a joke to kick us off. What do you call the CEO of a French RAM company? That's right. Emmanuel Micron.

And that's what we're here to talk to Steve Burke of Gamers Nex is about today. Steve, welcome back to the Octagon. Emmanuel Micron. Yeah. You didn't tell me that one before we started. Yeah, because you would have killed me before I read it on the... But look, we're here to talk about RAM. So we'll start with a simple question.

Why is RAM so expensive right now? What is doing this? I mean, the reason it's so expensive is not grounded in reality, I think. The surface of it is that all the data center build out is consuming all the memory, and therefore, you know, price higher because everyone wants it. But I do think there's a little bit more to it than that. Right. So when you build chips, we're going to really simplify this one for the audience,

because it's pain in the ass to explain otherwise. But when you build chips, you have something called a wafer. You have the silicon out, and then you etch it using an orthography machine. But you can make less high, so there's the high bandwidth memory that they use inside GPUs, and then there's the regular DRAM that they use and everything else, right? Is that a simplification, but is that fairly accurate? I think, like, the most base level stuff to know is that memory, some form of RAM or memory, is in almost everything.

A common misconception, I'm not sure. I think your audience is like fairly technical, but a common layperson misconception is that storage is the same as memory. They'll use it interchangeably. Storage is like your drive that you, you know, you put data on like photos or whatever. And that memory is,

is a temporary form of storage, volatile storage. Like it's wiped when it's not actively being used when you restart or something. And when they put stuff in memory, that's where, that's like RAM and such where that's where you put the stuff that you're going to need quickly. Right. Yeah. So yeah, memory is much faster than storage, permanent storage. And so it acts as this sort of transactional buffer to help get things to you quickly. So memories and phones, refrigerators

these days, cars, there's all kinds of different grades of memory. And it's used in pretty much everything to do some kind of quick, like in a car, maybe you need to reach. tree of something related to like if there's a built-in map on the screen or something like that or in a refrigerator who the fuck knows honestly but i think this i think so that you can have a giant horrible screen on your samsung fridge that displays you ads occasionally yes exactly yeah and so so yeah to go to your wafer count yeah there's different types of sort of production for memory and uh you'll find dram is used in all of it in some capacity for the most part so you'll find DRAM dies in HBM, like inside of an HBM package.

But data center high-end GPUs will use high bandwidth memory. And basically every consumer device uses something called GDDR, which is just a lower bandwidth, kind of more normal solution that's not as overboard on the performance for a consumer application. But they all kind of come from the same place, which is a wafer. They're all cut from the next. So right now, they're taking up more, they are using more of the, how much of their capacity are they actually using to build high bandwidth memory, so the stuff that's going to the GPUs? It appears to be an awful lot.

I mean, so I know that the recent class action lawsuit or complaint, I should say that was filed notes that the profitability, the plaintiff's attorneys claim that the profitability of, traditional conventional DRAM is greater than the profitability of HBM. That was one of their claims. And yet they sort of argue that, and it seems like their evidence is good, but they argue that why would you shift more and more capacity to producing this lower margin thing, HBM, right, if like the easier thing to make is potentially higher margin? And so it does seem like more of it's shifting over there.

Open AI caused that sort of big kerfuffle previously when they claimed 40% of just all DRAM supply globally. But that didn't happen though. Yeah, it didn't happen. It was all like basically. One of the most insane just an insane story by the way just last year, for those of you don't remember,

a story came out that Open AI was buying 35 to 40% of all the world's DRAM waferes. It never happened. Yeah. But we just talked about it like we did, like it did. But it did affect the price. It did. But here's the question. So why is everything so expensive that like is it is it the because are they just jacking the price up? I think so. I mean, so yeah, there's a couple things here. I'll lay out like some of the highlights and we can you can figure out how you want to go through them. But sure. One of them is the memory industry has convictions actually in its past of price fixing collusion and as the DOD.

j-duved it cartel-like behavior. So this goes, the early 2000s, there was a bust. 2016, 2018, there was an attempt at a similar lawsuit. In the early 90s, the memory manufacturers were talking about how they thought their competitors were price-fixing and colluding. And so this is a long-in-storied history where they, and now there's an active lawsuit, punitive class action for price fixing. So there's that antitrust aspect, which that obviously, you know, prices would be higher. if you're just doing illegal things to make the prices higher.

There's also the sort of physical manufacturing side, which is that to make memory, it's not quick to get another fab online, and the companies seem to sort of signal to each other through earnings reports, whether they're going to expand capacity or maintain capacity of their fabs, which are factories for memory. So there's that aspect, which is if there's, a real or not a sudden increase in demand, there's going to be a long latency to react to

that with more supply if they even want to. So the current projections are 2028 or 2030 if we're getting like more fabs online. The other reason it goes up though is really simple, which is that in a server that goes in a data center, some of NVDA's newer solutions will use one and a half terabytes of system memory. So that's DRAM. They'll use... Well, they use this. Go ahead. Don't they also use the same RAM as we find in smartphones as well. Yeah, LPDDR typically, yeah. Yeah, so Grace will use, I think it's 5X, I think is what they're on. Yeah, I pulled the numbers and it's something like 20 terabytes for an NVL 72, which is a 72 GPU rack.

Yeah, so they do, the single blade for the big boy is one and a half terabytes of system memory alone. And, you know, for perspective, a consumer desktop computer might have 16 gigabytes with Windows these days. You probably want like 32. And they're taking one and a half terabytes for one, you know, server solution. But that's just the system memory. They also have other processors on there, like the BluPoint or Bluefield, I think it's called DPU. It takes 128 gigabytes. If I remember correctly, the GPUs take hundreds of gigabytes to like close to half a terabyte per GPU of 8.

of HBM. And the HBM has a, there's kind of a yield factor at play where, you know, you can, when you're talking about manufacturing, that means you're also talking yields. How many good products do you get for every bad? And HBM is more difficult to make. If you have a failure in manufacturing, then you're also potentially losing more silicon dyes that could have gone to be more consumer devices. And you, and HBM is made by by stacking the memory, right? So it requires just physically more memory. Forgive me if that's kind of an apes description.

No, no, it's fine. Yeah, so HBM, high bandwidth memory is literally just really high bandwidth. It's kind of like if you were to, if you were a city and you wanted to solve a public transit problem and you just built a shitload of, I don't know, let's take it. Just a massive tunnel. You build like a bunch of trains. You build a ton of trains for passengers, but you don't have enough tracks to put those trains on. They can't actually get on the track without blocking each other. You haven't really solved your problem.

And so high bandwidth is trying to solve that by saying, okay, we've got all this capacity for passengers, which is the memory itself. Now we need something like a bigger road system to actually feed that capacity through to access it. And so HPM tries to solve that, especially because you look at GPUs that might have like, 12 plus times the amount of capacity that a consumer GPU would have. And so you don't want to starve the GPU core of the data that sits in the memory by not being able to get it fast enough. And so HPM tries to solve that problem. So yeah, to go back to your point of stacking, high bandwidth memory is physically vertically stacked, as in they take silicon dyes for memory and they stack them atop each other.

and then they connect them all together as opposed to consumer memory where it's closer to, there's still layers, but it's closer to a flat plane. Right. But it just means that by virtue of that, it takes up more space in the place where they built the chips.

Yeah, yeah. If you're on a consumer device, then the consumer memory, you'll need more physical area to put the same amount of capacity, whereas with the high-end server stuff, you just stack that capacity vertically. And then it's also,

HBM's really significant advantage is that it's very low power, comparatively. Right. Yeah. But just to be clear, it takes up more space on the fabricator itself. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, if you're talking about the fab space, then yes, HBM requires a lot more space for a few reasons in terms of manufacturing area. In terms of like footprint on a product, it's less, but in a fab,

it's more. Why is that? In the fab, one of the reasons, so there's a few, but one is that HBM requires additional silicon pieces

to be able to function. So with GDDDR, consumer GPU memory, you pretty much have the memory module. It looks like a black rectangle. And then if you were to use, like, acid or something to etch away

the black plastic part, you'd be left with pretty much a singular silicon die underneath. That's all it is for consumer. For HBM, you also need a logic die. So there's another piece of silicon that interfaces with the memory and the stack of memory. Because you need something to command and control and understand the vertical tower you've got of memory. And then you also need an interposer die, which sits underneath everything. So this is a solution that will sit under your GPU core, which is a very large piece of silicon, and is shared with the HBM stacks.

So all of your core and all your HBM is stacked on top of the same. It's called an interposer. It looks like a PCB, and they all communicate through that. So that's another piece of silicon. And so for these reasons alone, there's also others. But these alone, now you're involving more fabs. there's more logistics shipping things around and there's more

fab or fabrication plant area allocated even if you're just talking about making someone's got to make the logic dies TSM makes the interposers right. There's just more moving parts and it kind of takes up more space. Exactly, yep. So why, so

to my early question, so this stuff is obviously lower margin but they seem to be able to sell an absolute shit ton of it. So is that potentially why they're doing this? that just they know there is insane demand on a level that for a high, well, I guess they can charge what they want for it as well. I'm just having trouble trying to work out what it is they're doing

other than just filling their boots. Have you tried asking the chat GPT? No. I could ask my can't and get an answer at respect more. But it's genuinely because it seems that unless I'm misunderstanding here, that these Micron S.K. Hinex and Samsung, they're just kind of cranking up the price of regular RAM because they can?

I mean, to some extent, yes. I think this is where the price fixing allegations come into. I don't know if you try to take their side, which I really don't want to do. I'm trying. I'm trying. Yeah, if you try to, I think their argument, whether it's her truthful or not, but would be, we've got this crazy high demand for HBM.

These are guaranteed customers. I can sell terabytes of it to Jensen, and it's one point of contact. It all moves quickly and easily. And there's this data center demand right now, and we don't know if it's going to be here forever, but consumers, you know, they're always going to have to buy electronics or whatever. So I'm not exactly sure if that's, to me, it seems like maybe you make some

sort of you assign some value to the B2B relationship over B2C or something. Maybe, but also I guess if they, yeah, I'm not sure if you make less. Why would that mean that they charge more for regular RAM? Oh, as far as why more for regular, that part's easy. That's just because the HBM itself takes the same, a lot of the same machines as consumer memory. And so if you're making more HBM, you're naturally making less consumer, which I think is where you start seeing the supply squeeze and the price go up. Likewise, a single piece of HBM can use up to something. I think it's like, it might be like 32 dies max or something of DRAM.

You'll commonly see like four referenced. But a single piece of HBM will take more DRAM dies to build. And so one of the problems is if, let's just say four, if you have a piece of HP on that's got four DRAM dyes in it, and you have one failure somewhere in that stack or in packaging and assembly, now you've destroyed four individual pieces rather than if you have a yield failure with a consumer device, you destroy one piece. Sorry to ask a stupid question.

What is a dye exactly? Is that just what we would think of as a stick of RAM? Uh, no, a dye is, so, so a wafer, we'll start the wafer level, a wafer is just a disc, right? It looks like a CD that typically eight or 12 inches. Uh, and they, they process it and they pattern it, or they literally project like a pattern or they lithographically etch a pattern onto the surface of this disc. Uh, once that's done, you know, these, these patterns, they're, called patterns because it's a repeating sort of set of shapes that ultimately form the logic that makes the silicon

and the word dye comes from the process dicing so with a wafer when they're done producing it and patterning it and it's basically ready to become a product they need to cut that disc into a bunch of small squares

right so it's like a big slab that they cut up yeah it's I mean It's like making a pizza with a pizza cutter, you know, except they're doing a pattern that only psychopaths would do on a pizza, which is making a bunch of squares. And so they cut it into the squares. That's called dicing. And then each of those pieces, the squares that yield from that, those are the dyes. And so if you were to pull up an image of any GPU, typically you'll see one large, it's called a monolithic die, which means one singular sort of piece of. shiny, reflective silicon mirror-like finish.

That's your dye. And then from memory, same exact concept, just a lot smaller. Right. So, right. Okay, so there's less space to make regular RAMs, so they just crank up the price. That's really, that really is it. I think that's their entire thing. Right.

But I saw Microons earnings, and they had 84.9% margin. So it just kind of feels like they're setting the price to whatever they wanted to be. You don't think they're, you don't think that is, is that not enough? I think they need more, don't you? They should get 95%. Well, it's just kind of. 95. Why are you setting the,

why are you setting it so low? They should get 110% margins. Yeah. No, it's just, it's very frustrating as well because I've read now arguments in favor and against Micron where it's like, oh, Micron got screwed by Apple and consumer electronics companies during the last, during the last supply chain crisis because they kind of made a bunch more RAM

than they needed to, from what I understand. Like, Prime me a river, you know, like. No, it really, it really is. But what, and it seems to be there's this boom and bus cycle in memory where they get a bunch of demand and then what? So do they build more capacity?

Is it that they just order too much RAM and then people cancel their orders? Like, what happened? What happened last time? It is cyclical. Yeah. So it's cyclical, I will say right now is nothing like I've ever seen. And we spoke to a bunch of companies purchasers of memory like G-skill and Corsair who sell the sticks of RAM that you put in a computer.

And those guys are telling us on record that likewise, this is not like part of the cycle. This is special. And as for typically, the difference is how much? The difference is the percentage increase it is this time. So, you know, you're looking at like 700% increase in price in some situations in a very short period of time. Normally, cyclically, you'll see some ebbs and flows, but it might be like back in the day, a $50 kit of DDR4 became $85 or $90, maybe even $120 if it's a really bad year, you know, but you're still at like a little worse than double. whereas now a $200 kit of memory is suddenly $1,200 to $1,200. And so it's just the amount of the price increase is what's different.

And then also, this time the sort of contest for the supply is, it's coming from within the own industry where the very companies that would be the cause for an increase in sales of consumer supply are now the cause of these like insane, unprecedented volume of sales for AI. Component. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

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This is Sweet 305. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lelepon's as part of my Coulthura podcast network on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But it isn't based like so. The 2021 supply chain crisis, chip crisis, was because there was a flood of consumer spending after COVID. Yeah. And that led to a bunch of consumer demand for products and overall spending across the board, but like consumer demand drove it. This one seems different because it's not demand outside of the, outside of whatever psychosis, the various hyperscad cells. They're not spending a trillion dollars in CAPEX,

really for like, it's not like consumers can't access whatever micros, co-pilot. You know, what's interesting is the big three memory makers decided not, I think it was 20, 22 or 3, to bring on more capacity in some of these situations, because they were talking about how they got burned by oversupplying sort of following COVID, right? But what's interesting is if you go and look at some of the small suppliers, not many of them,

but there's a couple of small memory makers that make up like less than 5% of the market. Winbond, Nanya are two of them. Nanya is in, well, headquartered at least in Taiwan. I don't know where their fab is. But they, like these two comedies, as far as I'm aware, I was just looking at this morning, they increased their production capabilities at the time when the big three were saying that they weren't going to do it because they got burned. Right. It's interesting to me because if you're, this is the argument the lawsuit makes too.

If you're a small company, I would think you're at the biggest disadvantage, the biggest risk to increase your production capabilities with this massive amount of spend. if your biggest competitors are saying, like this, it looks like bad times ahead, you know, we don't want to spend into this. But if you're a small guy, like,

you're at the greatest risk of going under if you fuck up your, your cap act, right? Why didn't that, this, maybe this is a dumb question, why didn't them increasing supply

allow them to kind of undercut the microns of the world? Yeah, that one is just because the, there's a, Micron does have a technology advantage. So they can, make memory that these other guys can't. HBO is one of them.

Maybe this is, I didn't think about this till now, but maybe there is a very, a small part, I think, but possibly part of an answer to your question of why HBM, that is something that other companies are struggling to make successfully in current generations. Yeah, I know only like SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron are the ones who can make HBM. Yeah, and the CXMT has also struggled with HV. HBM, and they're a new Chinese memory maker that's actually done really well with DDR5. And so there may be a little bit of a pulling the ladder up, you know, after them factor. Well, here's a question as well when it comes to high bandwidth memory.

Surely this is going to lead to an oversupply situation regardless, because HBM is used in what video cards, God, that's such an anachronistic term in the AI bubble. But like it's used in video cards and AIGPUs, basically, right? Yeah, it's very limited. There's effectively zero consumer use case. So when the AI bubble bursts, where does the high bandwidth memory go? Oh. Yeah, I don't.

Oh, okay. Yeah. We don't talk about the bubble burst in it. Well, that's the thing. I saw Samsung is talking about increasing their high bandwidth. They're spending like $50-something billion, $500 billion. across an interderminate period, but also building an entire new high bandwidth memory, like factory.

Yeah. And that, but I was looking, I think I sent you the graph for coming on. There was, I saw this chart where it's like, they were making, what, a couple hundred million gigabytes of HBM in 2022. And they're now selling like seven or eight trillion a year. Yeah, so what's crazy is, um, the, HBM bit demand. I think I first saw this on semi-analysis,

if I remember correctly, when I'm at the sort of site, but the HBM bit demand from Nvidia was recently projected to exceed all HBM bit demand of all other companies combined from 2025. Good. And that's just Nvidia.

And again, you have more wafer area per bit than with DRAM consumed. That counts yield losses, right? And so, like, increasingly as they make more and more of this, presumably for NVIDIA's devices, you will continue to see consumers really get shafted if there's not new supply online soon. And likewise, if they're focusing all their efforts and resources on HBM,

for whatever reason, who's to say that the new fabs will even make consumer memory anyway, right? Like, there's, they might just be more HBO. But the thing is, if they're all built

to make, maybe I'm missing something, they're building this fact, these, these fabs specifically for high band with memory, but high band with memory is only used really for the thing in the AI bubble.

Right. What they're going to do with all this capacity when it's gone? They would switch it over. They'd switch the line. I mean, they would, but it's like, I guess they'll just have,

aren't they just creating a future nightmare? I mean, it's always good to have more capacity for them, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's good to have more capacity. There's a lot of government money floating around too, right? Like, Micron got a $5 billion tax break in New York as part of the, I guess, big, beautiful bill. But $5 billion, like, Micron said they're going to spend $250 billion. Right. Samsung and SK Hinex have made $2.1 trillion worth of commitments.

This just feels like it's almost like they saw what happened in 2021 and 2023, which ended with all of them doing at least a billion dollars of write-offs. And when they were like, fuck that, we can go bigger. Yeah, well, I mean, I do think personally, I think that they are colluding again. I think they are price fixing. It might be through like a parallelism rather than a literal behind closed doors, meaning like, we're just going to announce our changes in earnings reports, and then our friendly competitors will kind of mirror us.

Yeah. Like, it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. Like, if they don't raise prices, the other guy will, and if they don't build capacity, the other guy will, they won't get the long-term deals and all that. Yeah. And also, you know, the, the wafers themselves, I have some interesting. numbers I wrote down, but I was looking up

when you were asking about HBM, I went and pulled up some of the original coverage I did of HBM, which started to come online or at least was being actively developed somewhere around, I don't know, 2013 plus or minus a bit for AMD GPUs.

So yeah, when AMD was working on Fiji and its Fury GPUs, they debuted HBM actually for consumer devices. They had HBM on Vega and on a couple of their architectures in like the 2015 to maybe 2018 area plus or minus a year or two. And massively expensive just like it is today. The power efficiency was great, which is really why they used it, although they were banned with Starved too. But I pulled up, I had done some reporting at the time

where I spoke to a bunch of the people in the know in the industry. And at the time, 2017 or so, 2016 area, the HBM2 memory for one of the devices should have cost around $150 cost

for them to buy. And the interposer in the packaging should have been another $25, 175. And this is, these are, you know, this is old technology now. It's, I'm sure, a lot different.

But the point of bringing it up is that if you compare sort of time for time and at the same capacity at the time it would cost AMD 175 bucks or so to put HBM on its device whereas with GDDR memory

the non-HBM stuff they would have been at somewhere around like $68 So they would be just so I guess the thing is they absolutely would make more money selling DRAM or or DDR, like regular people, RAM.

It's just that right now they have the business to kind of, it's not just shitty, it's not these bullshit video cards for loser gamers. It's selling AIGPUs to big strong boys. Yeah, right. Yes, like Sam Altman. Yes, the big strong, hunky men like Dario Amadei. Right, right. Yes.

Yeah. He, I've never, by the way, I don't think I've ever seen someone spread so much. fear so anxiously as him. It's just, yeah, just pathetic. Yeah, you also, you ever know, here's a random thing as well. For this, a question to the listeners and to you as well, Steve, you ever see anyone on, you've seen this weird habit of Silicon Valley people of using AI now to add muscles to guys? Yes, I have seen that.

What's that about? One of the weirdest things I've seen in the tech industry's history, and there's a lot of weird shit. I don't know if it's just, well, there's, They're not used to working for intellectual property at this point. They just harvest it. So why work for the muscles either? Well, it's just, it's really strange. Like I think the TBPN, the technology, the Blowjob Brothers network.

Like they, um, they do it with like Dylan Patel, who's just like a regular-sized guy. And it's just, it's, sorry, I've just realized that's weird. But then I saw someone do it for Dario Amadee the other day. And this is like, your body's your body. I don't judge people for like how they look. But at the same time, Dario Amade. is not like a fifth course of

steroids guy. Like, it's just the weird, it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. Well, I saw, did you see the story just recently of the copper thieves stealing shit from data centers too? No. That was, I saw the

average better off line listener there, yep. Yeah, they'd probably wearing one of your t-shirts. It's just, oh God, no, I disavow them. Yeah, there's a title of thieves stealing copper from data centers. I was just like, oh, I mean, it's really, I guess there's no honor among thieves. You know, it's just thieves stealing from thieves at this point. It's also inevitable at this point because you make these giant things full of earth metals

and then you put them in neighborhoods usually with like disadvantaged farm neighborhoods or like distressed towns in Texas. You're like, oh, I wonder what will happen with the other business in the area. Yeah, I wonder what will happen when we screw over all these people and- and, like, mock them via the media constantly. Anyway, back to, back to RAM. So is this something that's going to start affecting, like, storage? So hard-tise and such.

Yeah. Yeah, so you mean, like actual storing media. Like solid-state drives and the like. Yes, so it's already affecting it. Storage is made at the same fabs for the most part as memory with basically the same tools. And mostly by the same companies, although there's like one or two differences. But for the most part, it's the same people and tools. And so definitely one affects the other anyway.

But storage in general has, it hasn't gone up as violently as memory, but it has gone up. Some of the SSDs we had bought previously, I was just checking this actually for like 90 bucks, maybe about a year ago, are now closer to like 180, 190. Jesus Christ. Yeah, let me pull up a chart here.

That's, this is genuinely like, I think, I don't know if I'd say I'd do anything that's activism, but like, I think people just need to know, this is AI's fault. Yes. And the worst part is,

it's not even AI's fault because they need these data centers because they're taking forever to build. It's like you can access Claude and chat GPT. You don't, there's no one, no one's like unable to log on because there's not enough data centers. Nothing's being stopped. They're just like, no,

we need to do, we need to buy the chips, need to build the data centers for some reason. Yeah, it's, I mean, there's not like a queue. I mean,

I guess they're, maybe they make the argument of like, we're trying to make it better and the models will be more complicated in that requirement. It's not going to happen. Yeah. The storage, though, so looking at an average price chart for 4 terabytes of solid state drive storage on VME on PC Part Picker, which averages it, they have the pricing at around, it looks like maybe about $270 in January last year. And now it's somewhere around, somewhere around $800,900.

And that's for what kind of storage? That is for four terabytes. So relatively large capacity, which is going to be affected the most. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And this is interesting, too, because one of the ways you'll see consumers getting shafted that's not as obvious is some of the modern devices that should be your next sort of improvement upgrade on past generations. They're actually coming down in capacity.

So I haven't looked at the exact device names for a while, but we ran a report a while ago talking about some of the phones and laptops that have shifted from, say, a prior model of 12 or 16 gigabytes down towards 8 for memory. There's decrease in storage capacity as well, yeah. That's fucking terrible. So everyone just suffers here. And it's pretty, like there's Microns, SK-Hinex, Samsung.

They could have not done this, just to be clear, They could have sat with like 70% margins. They're already colluding anyway, in my opinion. So yeah, they could collude in a different way. It's just, it's so fucking straight. Well, I mean, it's actually no. That's not fair. This isn't strange at all.

This is exactly, like, this is exactly what companies like this do. Yeah. Like this, it's this kind of vulgar kind of chanceurism. And their argument from what I understand is, well, memory is cyclical, so we need to fill our boots when we can. And if you're calling something vulgar, then it's pretty vulgar. Yes, just to be clear, as the vulgarest man in tech, and that is a word now. But the thing is, though, just to be clear, that's their argument, though.

Because things are good, now they can charge what they want so they can fill their coffers for the future. Yeah, I think so. And, I mean, you see it affecting, I think that's probably their argument. I think on the consumer side too, even a company like Lenovo, which is not a manufacturer of memory, but they buy it and they put it in stuff. I'm not sure if there may be this, I don't know for fact, but there may be a benefit for some of these companies as well for a few reasons. One is there's a lot fewer. It kind of reminds me a little bit of COVID when all the stores that were 24-7, all the grocery stores and whatever,

suddenly stopped being 24-7, and at least where I am, not one of them has gone back. And I think that the memory capacity kind of equivalent here is this offers a little bit of a reset. And so with Lenovo... Lower those expectations. Exactly. Yeah. And now your next upgrade is more exciting. And what I noticed with Lenovo when I was buying a laptop was they had quietly snapped out of existence their 64-gigabyte model memory, system memory. of the device I was looking at and they only had 32. And I think... Is the memory hard sold it onto it as well?

It is. Yeah, you can't upgrade it. Oh, so you just can't upgrade, you're just stuck. That's insane. Yeah. And so I think what happens for them, you know, in their favor, I might argue, well, they can't, they're having trouble getting supply, just like everyone else. That's probably true. But against them, if they've got 64 gigabytes of memory, because that's just one, part of the total bomb for a laptop they sell. They might rather sell two people, two laptops at 32 gigabytes,

right, where they can get the markup on the whole thing. Right. Rather than one guy, a 64 gigabyte laptop where they're only marking it up, whatever the, hopefully, whatever the difference in the memory is. So I think you see some of that here, too,

where there's... Well, they're just going to use it as a chance to reset what people expect and just... Also, prices are probably never coming down, right? Lenovo itself, funny enough that I was using them in this example, just like two weeks ago at ISC said that prices will probably, the word they used was never come back down to what they were last year. And so yeah, I think they're truly evil era.

Just like a disgusting era full of horrible perverts. Because it's just, it's so frustrating as well because America has price fixing laws. Yeah. Like we have price-couging laws. Like we have means of doing this. We just don't do it because obviously of capitalism. And they've been enacted, you know, like the DOJ itself busted these same companies in the early 2000s. Yeah, that was before we had social media for psychopaths to talk about stocks all day.

Now we need to get, now we need just borderline corruption or real corruption in everything. That's the only way to get things done these days. And I think also there's probably, incentive to if you're no administration of any party wants the economy to fail on their watch

and I think if you're worried about a bubble pop and especially if maybe spooking investors with the DOJ investigation or something might trigger part of that it just seems like you wouldn't be incentivized to not probe

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This is Sweet 305. Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Cultura podcast network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. But isn't this going to cause just, or it is causing hyperinflation within all electronics-related products? Because...

Yeah. It seems that these companies are fully dedicated to the graveyard smash of making everything more expensive forever. And at some point, that will start crushing all consumer electronics. Yeah, I think it will, you know, for some things that can migrate more to software as a service and hardware as a service, I think there's an end game there for some of these companies where, uh... Tell me more.

I think if it's, okay, we crushed demand for the gaming GPUs market because filthy poor casual gamers can't afford our big strong GPs that we need for data centers. I think if you crush that market, there is potentially an out in the form of cloud gaming or maybe a better example where you don't have latency as an issue would just be if you, as a company, if you're worried about consumers getting systems that are powerful in their hands and doing using LLMs at home or whatever, if that, is suddenly out of reach because the memory is too expensive and the GPs are too expensive. All right, I guess they come crawling back to Claude or chat GPT.

So I do think not everyone's going to be able to grab that parachute, but I think that moving services to cloud-oriented services that you pay for every month is a way that they can capture the people, which is going to be most of them at some point, who can't afford to actually own the full device. to do stuff. Cloud gaming sucks. Cloud gaming sucks, but I also I don't think that's the only place. You know, I think what of the real consider, if anyone here is genuine about LLMs and AI being a future, I would think at least companies like Open AI would be worried about that, about LLMs getting too good if they're locally hosted for like, let's just say the the vast majority of basic tasks someone might want.

And by all the prices of hardware remaining elevated, it does kind of keep that at bay a little longer. I just, because I understand that, and you've said this before, the idea that they want to push people towards not owning anything, you'll own nothing and you'll love it, I think is the phrase.

But at the same time, do you think that that's actually their plan? or do you think my version of this is much simpler, which is, do you think they have one? Or is this just incredible short-termist thinking? Yeah, I don't think it's the plan. I think it's like the fallback for the few times. Google Stadia, we all know, was a huge success.

I contributed to the failure of that one. Yeah, that one. There are 10 people who must be so angry at you, man. I'm sure. There are dozens of us. G-Force now, I had numbers at one point. I don't have them currently, but actually I think we talked about it on your show

because I pulled up their website. Yeah, yeah. However many millions of users and both of us were kind of surprised at it. But yeah, I think gaming is sort of the easy one to point to. I think for a lot of casual users, they might be okay with cloud-connected gaming. but I do think there's more services than just gaming that could be sucked into the cloud.

Even just stuff like QuickBooks has been the one I've been ranting about recently. I'm surprised that that isn't already obsessed. Well, it basically is because the desktop version, it used to be a buy-at-once for $300, then it went to $700, and then they went to $1,500 annually for the desktop version, and you have to log in when you launch it,

just like Adobe software. Oh, good. And now they're killing desktop entirely, and you have to go to cloud, which I just abandoned it and went to a free tool instead. But like the point being, yeah, I think a lot of these, you know, these services they do just increasingly go cloud-connected. Well, the problem is, is cloud-connected services still require RAM. I mean, just anyone who's ever used an AI tool that's still in your browser.

Well, I mean, Chrome itself is a whole. hog, as we all know. And so it's just kind of like, it feels that there's just going to be a point that this escalates to the point that it kills large parts of the consumer electronics industry. I mean, Sony's delaying the next PlayStation. Microsoft is increasing the cost of the next Xbox while firing all the people who know how it works. Just an evil company.

I mean, it's just, and every... The steam machine is a great example, too. I love that. I just got one I fucking love it. Oh, did you really? Wow. I really love it. It's just what I,

but the thing is, it's also insanely expensive. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's, because the steam machine, we had talked to them,

and the quote they gave us was amazing when, I'll paraphrase it to the best of my memory, but they were talking about how, I asked them, how did it work buying from the memory manufacturers? Like, did you get a contract price or how did, you know,

how did you guarantee your memory supply? and the answer was there are no contracts. And the Valve guy told us they're offered a price by the memory supplier. In this case, the one we got was Hynix. And if they say no to that price, then the quote was, they never talk to us again. Which is why I feel like it is cartel-like behavior. I got some thoughts I don't think I want to share on the record on that one. that is just, you know what, I'm right back around to just, I hope these companies suffer.

I think the memory companies are evil. Like that's just an evil way of doing business. Yeah, I mean, it's coercion, right? Because it's like, if the play is, I offer you a price, you say no, fine, I'll take my supply and sell to someone else. I never even talk to you again. Like, you're now down to two companies you can buy from, right? And it's not like, and it's not, and if they'll never talk to you again, doesn't matter if they build more supply.

Right. Yeah. If you're on their blacklist. And they're doing that to Valve as well, who were like the, like royalty within the PC. It's just, this era is just about the company's chitting on the people that made them rich. And it's, you know, the crazy part to me is it's like, Valve is not a poor company. They're private. So we don't know how much they have, but they are definitely a multi-beats. billion dollar company and Valve is getting bullied

by the trillion dollar companies. Which are only the trillion dollar companies because of the stock speculation. Right. Yeah, not like actually, but yeah. It's just, it's insane to me because it's at a Courser, same thing. Courser has no real power in the purchasing

and they're almost a billion dollar market cap, not quite. I don't know how far they've fallen, but they were at one point a billion dollar market cap. And at a point being, like, these aren't nobodies who want the memory and they're struggling to get the memory suppliers to talk to them. They're like, they're serious players and they need a lot of it. You know, and the response is take it at this price or go fuck yourself, which is crazy to me. I was reading about the long-term agreements that SK Hinex is presenting. And apparently they're considering removing price caps because apparently they do the long-term agreements. And then they say, okay, We, like, they won't go above this bounds so that you don't just get rogered. They're just not doing that anymore, I guess. Roger is, I don't think I've seen Roger.

Classic British, British, British, beautiful British phrase. I was going to say, like, was when I took British literature and before I dropped out of college as the last time I read that. Yeah, um, I think the, the, in the memory supply, typically contracts, they do set a ceiling. And my understanding is the way the contract works if you're lucky enough to get one is that

you're offered the supply and you have to buy it or you have to pay a penalty basically. Yeah, take or pay, right? Yeah, yeah. That's, it just feels like the natural end of this is going to be horrifying. It'll be just going to

be, it's going to be, because they're going to be sitting on all this high mammoth memory. And I was having a conversation in front of the showcase he could go yesterday. And he was saying that like, well, they'll sell it to some one. And while I agree on that, in theory, we're talking about going from a few hundred million gigabytes of HBM to trillions of it. So someone is going to be left holding a bag.

Maybe it won't be the memory companies, but there's a situation where Nvidia or someone else is just sitting on the stack of this crap. Yeah. If they can't find devices to put it in and they oversupply, then it'll be the same type of apocalypse we've seen in the past. I mean, in 2016, like typically, though, this benefits consumers on the crashing side of the wave because it becomes commoditized, you can get it super cheap. I'm not sure what happens here because one, we've already reset the expectations like we're talking about. So there's already been a regression in the technology. That'll take a few years to kind of get back to where we were. But then also, whatever crash happens next seems like it's not going to be isolated to the memory industry, right?

It seems like I sent you a photo during CompuTech of NVIDIA's advertisement in Taipei that said, It all starts here. Do you remember what you replied with? No, I do not. You replied with it, parentheses, next global financial crisis. Yeah, yeah. It all starts here. It really is, though, because it's like,

Think about it. If we have just this glut of high bandwidth memory, how many graphics cards do they realistically make? Because when I was saying hundreds of millions of gigabytes, that was back in 2022. So this was the demand for these things for every games console manufacturer, every PC manufacturer, everyone. As of 2022, when the economy was doing a lot better. And they only needed a few hundred million. we could be sitting on arguably the largest supply glut in memory history. Oh, what's crazy? You can't unbuild that memory, right?

You can't pass it out. You can't really, there's no way to, you would need an HBM device to put it on. There's no real consumer HBM devices these days, and it's not something you'd spin up fast. So, yeah, if there's, like, too much HBM, You don't really have a lot you can do with it other than I guess sell it for cheaper or something. But like at the end of the day, you need something to attach it to. And I mean, one thing to think about is part of those numbers, although I don't think all of it.

But part of it is that the capacity per device has increased a lot for non-consumer devices since 2022. So some of it is accounted for there where you just put more on a device. But then you look at consumer. and somewhat notoriously it has remained stuck at like 8 gigabytes to maybe 16 gigabytes for a consumer GPU

which 8 is barely even enough to play modern games with any kind of reasonably high texture settings and so you don't have that multiplying effect in consumer it's just in data center which all that to say

if more supply capacity goes online if they're able to produce more, but the data center demand slows down or the data center GPU demand slows, then, and they switch back to just consumer DRAM, they're still going to have too much because the consumer devices are, they don't use that much memory. So I don't know, you finally spec them up, maybe, but. But you'll just have all of this insane amounts of high bandwidth memory to go. we're just going to get graphics cards with

128 gigabytes of high bandwidth RAM just just because they need to put it somewhere right? Yeah, we've got to do something with it. We're just going to have a laptop and you'll be able to open 17 or 18 Chrome tabs at once. It's going to be incredible. No, I think, I wonder

if there's also going to be a knock-on effect of all this on the used gaming market, like the used PC market. Well, that's a really common comment, I see people asking about like, oh, surely this is going to be good for secondhand in a few years when they retire all these devices or the bubble pops. I mean just like right now. I mean, just people won't be buying new devices. Yeah. Well, I mean on both of those, right now it means that if you go look up RTX 30 series cards from, I don't know, like shit I think might be four or five years ago now on eBay, some of them are like within 20% of what they sold for new. You know, and so it's It's wrecking the used market because it's just like you're paying close to new prices for something that's four years old. So that's not good. And then on the other side of it, none of the data center hardware is useful in consumer.

There is no secondhand use case. Yeah. Yeah, LPDDR5X is either on some form of server-specific cam card or is soldered to the board. So you can't use that. and maybe in China they'll desolde it, you know, and solder it onto new sticks and sell a Frankenstein thing. But, and then the GPU is it's HBM. So it's,

it's attached to the GPU. You can't just, you can't just like take it off. This is the thing as well. When it comes to like this post.com bubble recovery story, this is, I'm glad you brought that because it's like, people like,

oh yeah, they'll just use it for something else. It'll be useful infrastructure. It's like, what useful infrastructure? What are we going to do with all these Gp? It's not, you can't run a Blackwell, like a GB300 is, well, it's a Grace and two Blackwells. You've got over a terabyte of different kinds of fucking Rams on that. I love saying Rams.

And what are you going to do with that? It's not got, it's not got DisplayPort. Yeah. It's not going to do anything. It's built for one thing. Right. Maybe a local AI model or whatever, but anything reasonable. But you couldn't do that unless it.

it was in a consumer hardware shell. And I assume you need like a dishwasher plug for it or the washing machine plug even. Yeah, you probably need 240 volt. Jesus Christ. People really, people need to do some, do some actually like breeding about this because it's like, they need to realize that this can't go anywhere else. Like this is just, we're just going to have racks of these things. And it's not like in the future they'll be cheaper to use.

I think that the that you know if the dot com era argument of infrastructure was dark fiber or something where the fiber's in the ground it's just it's not used

because all the companies went belly up eventually they used it maybe that's your argument there I really I agree with you I don't think it works for this one because the closest thing

we have to an infrastructure gain maybe is power except the problem of they're not really bringing more online fast enough and it's at least currently it's not helping the prices for the rest of us like almost everyone's had their power costs go up lately

so maybe that would be the advantage if you're like because of data centers we brought back nuclear and we have shitloads of solar and wind and whatever but that's not what we're doing we're playing gas turbines on the roof you know and i don't know it's also what if the power doesn't what if the power gets built and the demand isn't There's just there's so many things that could go wrong here. And I think people just kind of, I think the reason that this is all coming to a head is because we're finally facing the physical problems. Yeah. Like, there's only so much capacity. There's only so much money.

There's only so much power. There's only so much silicon. At some point, this all has to break. And it might break everything. Yeah. I think, I don't know. what the I don't know what the Enron

moment will be, you know, I'm not sure where it'll tip. But it does seem inevitable, but I don't know, it could be a year, it could be several years, right? Like, I have no idea. It could just, it feels like the moment,

the vibe shift, because the trigger I'm looking for is that Kappex pullback. But what scares me somewhat is the, Invidia is the, I think, what, 55, 65% of all high bandwidth memory demand, all for AI GPUs.

That just feels like a single point of failure. Yeah, I think Nvidia, I mean, Nvidia itself, Jensen Juan himself said of core weave that without

Nvidia, there is no core weave, you know, like, if I remember correctly, that was, I'll go dig that up. But they, you know, they create the circle. Envidia is part of the circle. And it's, yeah, if anything happens to them, then all of it falters. And they are a kinmaker. And yeah, but they're also going to be a king loser, I think, by the end of this.

Just it kind of, it's just so fucking. Yeah. It's so fucking frustrating as well, because I feel like if, if we'd have slowed this down in 2024, we could have avoided this. But everyone was like, no, we need to go further and harder and faster and spend even bigger and more amounts. But one final question,

surely, with the increase in high bandwidth, like, actually, maybe it's two questions in one. The memory companies are kind of have Nvidia over a barrel too, don't they? In the sense that Nvidia doesn't really have alternatives,

but Nvidia is also heavily involved. in the R&D for all this new memory. So, like, they were involved in the R&D for GDR7, G5X, and for the new HBM options. And so, like, over a barrel, I feel like,

I think you could make that argument, but I also think that NVIDIA is more likely pulling a lot of those strains despite being the customer to very few suppliers. Right. But at the same time,

Doesn't this just mean that Nvidia's prices are going to get linearly more expensive the longer this goes on? Yeah, I do think the prices go up. I mean, with Nvidia on the consumer side, too, you can look at that as a gauge. They were supposed to launch their refresh of consumer GPUs like a year ago or something almost, and not quite a year ago at close. And like rumors were end of 2025, then it was first quarter of 2026, and then the rumors were they were all canceled. And the reason for that is because this particular type of refresh, they call the Super Series, normally you see an increase in memory capacity at roughly the same price, or you see a decrease in price at the same capacity.

And right now, neither of those things is possible. And so, Nvidia hasn't shipped the card. It may come out at some point, but for now they've delayed that indefinitely. And so to your point, it does start to self-cannibalize, right? where like, they are the reason that their own refresh for a consumer can't come out. And also, but regular, the cost of the things they're already making, the current generation will go up. Yeah.

Well, the current generation has already gone up in terms of like real world pricing. And officially they haven't changed their MSRP from launch, you know, but it's, I mean, a lot of this stuff. The 5090s, I guess tech. Technically, sometimes you can get them at MSRP, but more often they're like two to... I mean like the AI GPUs. Oh, yeah. I mean, that I would...

Just like, yeah. All of them will go... It just feels at some point the money's going to run out, and it's the longer it goes, the worse it will get. Well, and then you get the weird leaseback stuff, right? Like with meta and the GPU capacity. Oh, yeah, and all the SPVs share. What a horrible era.

Truly awful. I think that's a great place to end it for us. Steve, where can people find you what you're working on at the moment? I know you have some sort of campaign, a dystopian campaign. Yeah, we do have our AI dystopia coverage we're doing it. We have a, we're trying something new. We do these documentaries that are like three hours long, and we're trying something new and doing a short one. So we're doing two 30-minute ones coming up.

And one of them is on the hard drive cartel, which is pretty interesting. Nice. And the other one is on this memory. class action lawsuit, we read through all 118 pages of the filing and did a bunch of history research. So those are coming up with them the next week on Gamer's Nexus. And we'll get the links in there. I don't know what I'm going to be doing next week on the show because I'm recording this a little early. I'll have them on log for you on Friday though.

I have been Ed Zutron. This is Better Offline. You know where to find all my stuff will be in the links. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I dot com.

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What's up, fam, it's sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines, the viral moments, and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. From game-changing performances to culture-shifting conversations, we'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few laughs along the way. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. It's on the IHeart Radio app.

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women,

then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. My first guest is Terence Hilton, Shakira, Luke, and Yerrin. You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to the Sweet 305 podcast where the group check comes to life.

What on? You're the only person I know that loves a yellow starburst. It's lemonade. This is Sweet 305. Here, oversharing is encouraged. Listen to Sweet 305. with Lily Pons on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Raiders of the Lost Podcast, we explore cinema like no one else, including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Jaws Shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of Obsession.

On set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together. Deep dives into classics like 2001 of Space Audities, or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost podcast and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.