The RAM price conspiracy

You've probably been wanting to get a new PC, or an upgrade, this season and you've reached the same question as many others before you: "By Neptune's left nipple, why is RAM so expensive? I thought DDR4 would get cheaper as time went on, it's more expensive now than it was on release." Well, then you've come to the right place, because I may be able to answer that question for you.

According tot he official line of reasoning DRAM, Dynamic Random Access Memory, is currently in short supply. Most of it is being gobbled up by the mobile market, therefore the PC sector has to be content with slim pickings and more demand than there is supply, and therefore they pay more for the chips of DRAM, and the price of the final products increase.

Now, that sounds all fine and dandy, but it doesn't account for two things. 

1: people like conspiracy theories
b) Samsung's CEO is in jail for doing all sorts of nasty shenanigans, so you bet your spetuty, if you had one, that they're doing something narfy with the RAM market.

Let's say that the second option is true. I'm not saying it is, for legal reasons, but let's say it is. Why? And more importantly, how? Well, the how is quite simple. There are currently three companies manufacturing DRAM in the market. There's Samsung, there's Micron and then SK Hynix. The last two, combined, make up about 49% of the market. Samsung alone has 45%, and the rest of it is occupied by some companies no one's ever heard of. So, it's not a matter of how, since Samsung owns so much of the market that it can dictate what the market is and what it can do. It then becomes a question of why.

Now, if you're an uber-conspiracy nut, it's to force people away from buying Ryzen parts, because those scale very well with high speed memory, and they're on the side of Intel, so that Intel will keep Optane on the down-low for a few more years.

But if you're a bit more reasonable, there's a better answer. China!

Next year we'll see a few Chinese companies entering the DRAM market with their own factory in the most productive nation on Earth. When that happens, there will be real competition, and real competition means that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron won't run the show anymore, they won't be the head honchos dictating prices at their own whim. So they're using this time, right before that happens, to squeeze the RAM market dry, and bleed every single dollar possible for as long as possible from the market. And they're also investing heavily in production, to be ready to beat the competition when it shows up, with Samsung alone having a record spending year, going over 20 billion. Sure, only 7 of those were for DRAM, but they're getting competition from the NAND market too, and that's already been through a price upheaval recently.

That sounds all fine and dandy, it makes sens when you think about it up to a point, but there's one tiny issue. Making RAM is hard. And I mean, hard. Not for Samsung , SK Hynix or Micron, but for anyone else trying to muscle into the market. They'll need to build the DRAM technology, and a lot of it is covered by patents owned by the companies above. They also need fabs. No one's going to rent them space on a production line. Making a fab is hard. Making a fab that uses a current process, like 14 nanometer at least, not even saying 10nm, is going to take lots and lots of time, research and money. So even though they may "enter" the market in 2018, they won't have product that can be a threat to the big 3 until 2020, at least. And that's being optimistic. And Samsung knows this. It doesn't need to worry about competition, yet.

So, then, why the price hike? Low supplies. Also, because this is the memory market. According to one of the architects of the personal computer as we know it now, Chuck Peddle, the memory market was at one post composed mostly of drug money being moved around. Reference: 

Much like in the HDD price hike of 2011-2014, caused by the fact that one third of the companies involved relied on Thailand for manufacturing, but the prices of all drivers increased as if it was all just one good excuse for a last wham bam thank you mam before SSDs really took off, we are seeing at least partially an increase in RAM price before competition rolls in, before standards have to be changed again, and just because they can. 

When will things return to normal? Probably at the start of 2019. Hope you don't need 32GB of RAM for editing 4K video until then, because it'll cost you more than an unlocked Intel 6 core CPU.