Crisi de la RAM el 2026: Valve alerta de més pujades, però no prova un càrtel

Hello there. Good news everybody. The memory price crisis is just going to get worse. Oh dear, we've got a bombshell here from Valve. Basically saying that the price of DRAM is going to massively increase going forward into Q3 of this year and even they cannot see an end to this ridiculous increase which is down to the AI data center buildup. Now we've got a lot to cover in in this video because how did we get here? We've also got the memory countness being sued. They've been sued before in the past. I'll show you details on that. But before we begin, we need to look at this because frankly, this, I think, sums up where we are. So this is over on Catacau and this is taking from a Bloomberg article, but we'll get it down in a second. The reason I want to put this up is because the title, I guess, makes the impact. So Valve say retail memory prices are lagging and are about to become even more expensive. It's still getting worse now. Let's jump over to Bloomberg, right? So this is an article from Jason Shreyer. It's on the 14 years to get to the launch of the steam machine. Which I'll be totally honest, did the steam machine was $800. I bought one, but it's not because that's not the world. We live in anymore. It's $1400 for the one with adequate RAM, which is the problem. and it's not valves full, you know, this is a full of high bat, it's basically the DRAM producers switching their production to HBM, which is high bandwidth memory, which is used in AI applications, because it's worth a shitload of money and they can just charge whatever they like for it, because all the hyper scale is need this stuff, that's what's going on, that's the simple story. But I want to just go through this right, so this is what Bloomberg and Jason Shreyer say. By some of the company was gearing up to release the hardware and pre-orders finally opened up

on June the 22nd, although the early supply was limited, remember you enter a raffle, basically, if you wanted to commit to buy. We're basically building everything we can get our hands on, a graphias set. We are limited by memory capacity for sure. And then goes to say, well, the author does valve won't share sales or production numbers, which goes without saying, but the company says that the success of the steam machine is not correlated to the number of of units they sell. So I think that's code for we know we're screwed. We can't help it. But we're just going to keep pushing ahead with this anyway because this is the reality we live in. Obviously this could be the new normal of hardware prices as I hope we're not pushing towards the future of hardware is so expensive. You just have to rent it and that's I think the world, the Amazon's and the Facebook's and the Google's want to be quite honest. Anyway, probably not the world Apple wants though, because Apple does make quite a lot of money off devices. Anyway, to them, this device is about continuing to address a problem, open source PC game in the living room, and they sell to solve them on the decade ago. And then all the higher it says, we suspect the steam machine is a really good way to solve a really real problem that people have. If that's born out to be true from our opinion, it's a success. Now this again is from the author. The price will eventually fix itself, he added, either prices will come down, or this kind of pricing will become normal if the memory crisis never abates. Now, we're getting out here, my camera focuses, hello camera. Well, I guess this, right? Honestly, it's still getting worse. Just in case people are not aware what people are seeing on retail shelves right now from our observations is lagging What we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months now this isn't a surprise I suppose because It's because that basically that the the

The capex spend from the hyper scale is what they're spending on building data centers and building AI infrastructure is increasing and increasing and increasing and the orders are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and old orders that are being fulfilled are now moving to even bigger orders but the memory manufacturers are saying like do you want the ram at this price if you don't want it will sell it to somebody else at this price it's getting more and more expensive the shock in the supply chain now and again A supposed apparel I would be the price of petrol diesel gasoline, whatever. You look at what's going on in the ran, you see the straight of how moves get closed. That doesn't immediately change the price at the pump. It takes a few weeks for it to kick in, a supply starts to change, and then you get issues that result from that. And it's similar to what I guess what's been going on with the ran where there was a certain level of supply, although the ram I suppose, where it's not similar, is it just went up immediately and pride straight away. like everywhere just the prices got pumped up. But that supply is being extinguished and as I said, a lot of these legacy producers like Mike Ron no longer make consumer DRAM. They just make high bandwidth memory for AI applications, right? So this is going to get worse, but this is we're getting this here from the mouth of valve. This isn't some bullshit I've made up or you know the article, the author Jason Shryers made up or whatever it isn't. This is accurate, this is from Valve, and this is just the reality of the situation. So what's going on with memory prices, right? I think before we carry on in the video, let's look at this. So this is from the UCCF tech, and this is, I think Jeffries is like a research firm.

I think it's Jeffries' equity's research or some such. And they're collating and producing financial research on the stock market and they're specifically targeting memory. And they warn memory prices will surge 50% in Q3 of 2026 and another 40% in Q4 with no retail relief until 2028. So if you just take that at face value and you look at the price of ram right now, you can increase that at least by 40% in the next three months, at least that is crazy. how is this even going to get resolved? I mean, there's only two ways this gets resolved. For some reason, a shit load of extra demand, not demand, extra produce hits the market, right? So other companies spin up maybe its Chinese, DRAM manufacturers who knows and there's suddenly loads of DRAM and their service in that and off they go. I think that's going to be hard to sort of see happening, very difficult actually to see happening because if you are in the the position to make the DRAM, you might be able to make high bandwidth memory. So just make that if you want profits, right? That is the sad reality of the situation. Now, the other thing which I think is a lot more likely to happen is the demand for this goes away. So high bandwidth memory is not as in demand as it previously was for AI, for a number of reasons it might be the AI models, become more efficient. It might be that things like LLMs are going down at that end. I mean, between me and you, which hopefully is more than one person watching this video,

where you get what I've said, that I think coding has saved the arse of AR, because AR's really good at coding. You know, in my Laman sort of breakdown of that, it's like, it's almost like what the AR can do that the LLMs that you've been trained on. And I know he's getting complex with agent harnesses and all of this and teams of sub agents or whatever. But I think basically what's happening is it performs a task, tries to run, can't run, so the bugs itself, the bugs, it keeps going, it keeps going, and then it can run and then it moves on and on and on. And I think that's why in an idiot's sort of explanation, that's really good for coding. Obviously it's got a value for coding, and that's where a lot of this is coming from. But if that's its only value, is that enough for the demand to keep accelerating? I don't know. I'm too stupid to even understand or guess. But what I'm trying to say is there's two scenarios here, and I think it's more likely that demand from hyperscaler

goes down because of either we reach max coding potential or and it's sort of platos or they do not need this kind of memory anymore in the capacity they need it in because they've worked out a different way to do things. I want to jump back to Kentucky because this is that thing, this is from Valve actually and they said this a few months ago and well last month and they said basically RAM companies say to them, do you want the RAM at this price and you either say yes or no and if you don't they just don't talk to you again because they've got like it must be it must be so insane for these companies right now obviously any company it's mission is to make money imagine if you've got something that you're making that everybody needs and everybody is willing to pay whatever you say this is like absolutely the epitome of a monopoly it's like yeah I'm just going to say it's this figure you even want it or you don't if you say no get out the line because I've got another 5,000 people behind you want to buy it. So it's insane but this I guess is the reality. Okay let's go on a history lesson here, right? So I'm almost enough to remember this. I was actually I first started second score in 1998 so there you go. But this, the Iran Prize in scandal, this is from 2002 and now I'll just sort of read the top line of this. I don't worry I'm not going to go through the whole Wikipedia article. Well okay I won't read it off. Basically what this says is these These companies can see listed at the bottom, which you might see a couple of them are relevant even now. So they've got a hynics in Phineon, micron technology, Samsung and LPDA.

They all pleaded guilty for their involvement in intentional price fixing. I think Dal and Gateway, which is an old PC company, they were like, these memory companies have colluded together to increase the price of RAM. is you know it's monopoly behavior, this is terrible and then there was a massive lawsuit and then they all got hammered because it proved to be true. Now with that in mind, think about this. So over on Tom's hardware, Samsung SK Heinix and Micron sued over alleged D-RAM price fixing amid record memory costs. Law suit claims coordinated high bandwidth memory shift was covered to curtail DDR3 and DDR4 production. California class action accuses the three memory makers of choking DDR3 and DDR4 supply. Now, this is, I mean, there's another breakdown I've got of this, I'll put this a link to this in the description below if you want to go over this, but this is a breakdown of basically the history of the the RAM issues, right? Now, I think this is probably the most, you know, the thing we need to focus on, It's this high bandwidth memory pivot and when you look at what you know these companies got together to try and collude to fix the price of D-RAM back in the day. Now they've got the ideal situation where everybody requires high bandwidth memory and if they can limit the production of their old stuff, we even increase the price of what they've got and then look to exit that and then collude even on high bandwidth memory and that you know how deep this goes, I don't know. But the fact that this is happening, I think it's quite shocking.

And again, just plays into this whole thing of right now, the market is destroyed because of AI. So I mean, look right, this is a shit situation to be in. I mean, months ago now, like six months ago, I think it was, it maybe it was a bit long now. I don't know, I made a video and I said, look, if you wanna build a PC, you should do it right now. Things have got way worse since then, And it looks like they're going to get even worse until 2028. Now I don't know why these analysts think 2028 is going to be this magical year of suddenly prices get cheaper. I mean, let's be realistic guys. When prices of things go up, very rarely do they come back down unless they're becomes well, no demand for the thing they're signing. You've probably seen this when you go and do your food shopping, you grow through shopping. I know in the UK, I mean, a lot of you guys would probably be aware of this shrink inflation, things cost him more but actually you get less. Now in the UK, the price of stuff will skyrocket and the amount goes down but then when the raw materials get cheaper, notably chocolate was quite expensive, chocolate doesn't actually get any cheaper. It just carries on

at its price because it's now become the established baseline price. Now you push that argument out, you extrapolate it out to the memory situation and why would they reduce the price if it's It's always going to be in demand. Now this goes back to things like the steam machine, $400 for the steam machine. If you want the one with the adequate RAM, right? You could buy the other one, but maybe you're going to have problems down the line. I don't know. But think, pay on that. Think beyond, think PS6, which I mean, I don't think they're going to do too well. Give them the massive blowback to the fact that they're going digitally. But then you look at Xbox Project Helix. That's probably also going to be digital only. I bet the guys at Xbox are shitting themselves on social media teams. to keep it going to tell everyone that we don't have a dish drive when we've just watched what happens to PlayStation and they're still trying to deal with that. And rightfully slow they're getting hammered because it's a scumbag move. But like the price, what's it gonna be? $1,500. Like we're starting to see people get priced out

heavily from gaming and I've never seen that happen before. What about a new version of the Switch comes out? But it's not even about new versions as it right. It's existing hardware just become massively more expansive. Look at the price of a PS5, launch, look at a price of a PS5 now. That tells you everything you need to know. It's a shit situation. So unfortunately, I've got no good news to you in this video. It is a video of RAM is getting more expensive, and it continues to get more expensive. Everything is going to get more expensive. So I suppose the moral of the story is probably, if you want that piece of hardware, do whatever you can to get it right now, because it's going to be way more expensive. Unless there is some massive market collapse, because the AI bubble has popped. But like I've said before, if that happens then we'll screw it anyway. So, all right guys, thanks for watching today's video and I hope you enjoyed that if you did. I've been Starlosing, following everything which is at Starlosing and I'll catch you a lot on the next video, see you soon.