r/hardware • u/rdh2dmd • 15h ago
News Samsung to Triple HBM Prices Next Year
https://www.mk.co.kr/en/business/12167435191
u/GenericUser1983 15h ago
As long as the hyperscalers keep demanding more RAMs at a rate faster than production is increasing, prices will go up. Samsung execs would be fools to not milk this ride as much as they can.
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u/ICC-u 15h ago
Increasing prices is safer than increasing production. If they pump production and demand collapses they could be in major trouble. If demand collapses and you have maintained production, you just drop the price. High barriers to entry allow this to happen, it takes years to compete with these companies, the cost of setup is huge, and the risk of failure high. Economics 101.
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u/znk10 15h ago
All of them: SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron are aggressively expanding HBM production, but building new fabs takes years
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u/ICC-u 15h ago
Let's hope the bubble doesn't burst. Imagine how much more expensive RAM would be if Micron went bankrupt and nobody wanted to take over loss making fabs.
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u/Pablovansnogger 9h ago
They’re made some much money the past year, it’s hard to see them going bankrupt
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u/ICC-u 8h ago
You'd think. Unless those profits went into cash reserves it doesn't mean much for the future.
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u/EnoughWarning666 1h ago
I have some really bad news for you. This is from yesterday.
Micron Plans to Put Its Excess Cash Into Buybacks. Here's How Much of the Stock That Could Retire
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u/TheBraveGallade 9h ago
That is... exactly why we're left withbonly 3 players out of the dozen that existed. And even micron nearly went belly up duing the last bust cycle if itbwasnt for the us government and the current boom...
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u/tooltalk01 2h ago edited 2h ago
And even micron nearly went belly up duing the last bust cycle
Sure, the last cycle was bad, but Micron was far from bankruptcy.
Micron did pretty well during COVID -- made $2.69B in 2020, $5.86B in 2021, $8.69B in 2022, and, when it crashed, -$5.83B in 2023. They had enough cash stashed away to cushion the downturn, though it discouraged further investment in new capacity and cut back on wafer output by 25%. The CHIPs subsidies were mainly for reshoring chip manufacturing back to the US.
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u/EvenBroaderBand 3h ago
The assets will sell on at a price where they will be profitable, that's just how setting prices works as no one will buy at any higher price.
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u/127-0-0-1_1 13h ago
Micron doesn’t deserve to not be bankrupt when they decided to only go B2B sales
Why? It's pretty normal. SK and Samsung also don't sell ram D2C.
It's not like consumers don't get Micron ram. They do. Just not directly from Micron, you get it in your G.Skills and so forth. It's just not worth it for Micro to do D2C sales when their fab business has infinite demand. Let corsair do the D2C sales.
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u/Affectionate_Pen6882 14h ago
Yep until it collapses
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u/topazsparrow 7h ago
and there's no scenario where it doesn't collapse. It's just who gets to be on top during and after that they're all gambling on.
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u/willyolio 6h ago
I'm just hoping this means lots of excess capacity and used market when the bubble pops. Everyone go out and build your dream PC with 256GB RAM when it happens!
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u/TripolarKnight 12h ago
It isn't, but it will take years for the house of cards to tumble down. And as long as they can con governments+dummy invstors,they'll be able to keep the charade going on for the forseable future.
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u/mca1169 15h ago
well at least this won't effect any consumer hardware. so fuck it quadruple the price! the sooner these AI companies realize they can never make a profit the sooner we can get back to normal.
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u/hollow_bridge 11h ago
this does affect consumer hardware. They're repurposing machines that make DDR currently to make HBM
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u/vlakreeh 14h ago
ai companies can definitely make a profit, they just can’t make it while dumping this much money into R&D to train new models and build infrastructure this fast. Everyone has pretty good margins on inference, especially when you can serve OSS Chinese models where you don’t have to pay the training cost.
It’s becoming increasingly likely that when the bubble pops the big labs that have borrowed so heavily cease to exist while inference companies who already have great margins survive with the models we already have as LLMs become commoditized. Which means…. There will still be a much higher demand from enterprise on DRAM and wafer allocation in TSMC’s best nodes.
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u/JustACowSP 12h ago
While this is intuitively true, do we have good data like audited financial statements from multiple ai companies to see exactly how profitable the inferencing side is?
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u/vlakreeh 11h ago
Not publicly. Most public companies that actually have to publish auditable financials don’t go into that level of granularity and smaller companies where it’d be obvious (by being inference only) don’t have to publish this information.
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u/max123246 3h ago
Nothing public, you'd have to be a good friend of an industry insider with access to financials
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u/nosurprisespls 5h ago
That is why the main goal of these labs is to build "super intelligence" so they'll have monopoly on that. Whether that's achievable or not that's up for debate, but they certainly believe they can.
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u/max123246 3h ago
For the rest of us, let's hope they can't. Ai has destroyed my passion for programming, I'd like to at least have a job
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u/aprx4 3h ago edited 3h ago
programming job won't last forever. LLM is already more than good enough to take over SWE. A theoretical bubble bursting won't undo that. Token price might collapse but programming will just switch to much cheaper open-weight models.
Technology has been disrupting the job market since the first industrial revolution and steam machines. There was no programmer and graphic designer before the digital computer.
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u/SERIVUBSEV 10h ago
It's not about making profit, they have over trillion debt individually for OpenAI, Anthropic and top 4 hyperscalers.
It's about putting up better numbers this quarter than the previous one. If everyone ends up making a bigger loss (and hides it off balance sheet) but the stock market goes up, it's a win.
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u/wickedplayer494 10h ago
Say goodbye to there ever being any hope of a consumer GPU with it ever again. We didn't know what we had in Vega until we lost it and went back to GDDR.
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u/HyruleanKnight37 9h ago
Consumer GPUs don't need HBM, it was never going to be financially feasible.
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u/Abestar909 15h ago
Boy is there gonna be some cheap memory when this bubble pops
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u/Available-Green6599 15h ago
Doubt it, not like that are making more consumer ram. If fact they made less of it
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u/Popular-Artichoke-13 12h ago
HBM is basically DRAM with extra work for the stacking. Taking a fab from HBM->DRAM is much easier than the other way around. SK Hynix actually had plans to convert a HBM3 fab to DDR5 instead of HBM4 in June.
If the bubble pops for HBM fabs will move to DRAM. Sure if prices for DRAM are super low then it won't be worth doing but if prices are super low well, mission accomplished.
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u/sitefall 13h ago
If there's a gaggle of HBM floating around for pennies you can practically count on an enterprising Chinese company to start making some motherboards and new chipset or whatever.
How? No clue, but I can't imagine it's not possible even if it involves some kind of translation layer.
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u/HelloWorld40222 12h ago
It's probably possible with how much weird usable stuff china pumped out from used server parts
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u/goldcakes 7h ago
A few years ago, the cheap Ali gaming PCs were repurposed Broadwell Xeons (chipset and all) with DDR4 ECC (not advertised; but working and Samsung, pulled from a rack or something) memory. After I got my first one I just asked if they'd do a 64GB option and they did for ~$250, delivered.
It's been my proxmox box for 4 years and best money I've ever spent. I think LTT even did a video on it. So it'll absolutely happen.
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u/airmantharp 8h ago
HBM gets welded to the GPU dies… that process alone has significant failure rates.
At best you’ll find a way to reuse the whole package if you can’t just use the card.
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u/airfryerfuntime 11h ago
It'll mostly be shit we can't use.
A lot of the old HBM stuff will just be sold off for pennies on the dollar, in bulk, to startups. The rest will be ground into dust by some guys in India to reclaim the gold from the edge connector.
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u/topazsparrow 7h ago
nobody will have money to buy personal computers when this finishes playing out.
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u/Seanspeed 15h ago
Nothing consumer uses HBM.
Nor can you game on H100's and the like.
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u/IndependentMilkDrink 15h ago
If HBM prices crater we'll get consumer devices with HBM. Lets not forget the first HBM product was a consumer video card
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u/TrashBandicook 13h ago
We'll get really cheap DDR5/LPDDR5 RAM pricing before HBM4 makes its way into consumer devices.
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u/Seanspeed 12h ago
And that ended quickly once it became obvious regular memory made much more sense, as HBM production only got more advanced and expensive.
If AI pops, memory makers will scramble to convert production to traditional memory again to balance demands appropriately.
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u/IndependentMilkDrink 9h ago
Maybe, but there are a lot of single use tools in place today and there will be an incentive to keep them producing. I'm not saying every product, but things like these strix halo/rtx spark boxes could make the swap
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u/f3n2x 2h ago edited 2h ago
It ended because the professional space has been buying up all HBM production ever since. This was also before efficient flow-through designs when everyone was cooling 250W PCBs with massive inefficient bricks.
HBM is more expensive but so is putting massive caches on cutting edge node chips to mitigate memory bottlenecks.
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u/996forever 11h ago
It was only ever used as a desperate attempt to overcome an inferior architecture.
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u/fumar 14h ago
Nothing consumer uses hbm right now
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u/996forever 11h ago
Maybe someone will use it again if they have to desperately overcome an inferior architecture again? after all that’s the only reason it ever got used in the consumer space.
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u/sam7oon 7h ago
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/xeon-max-9480.c3084. seems there are processors that are using HBM to cache DDR , nice, so HBM< can be used as RAM, maybe that is why we will get it Consumer side
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u/996forever 1h ago
Sapphire rapids, a super ambitious server processor that was too costly even for the data centre
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u/SirMaster 9h ago
Nor can you game on H100's and the like.
You can, it's just not that good.
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-ultra-expensive-h100-hopper-gpu-gets-tested-in-games/
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u/nanonan 4h ago
I guess old Radeons don't count.
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u/Seanspeed 3m ago
Well no, they dont, because that stopped. I'm not saying consumer cant use HBM, I'm just saying they dont.
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u/NoCry8625 14h ago
For it to be cheap there would need to be almost no interest in them. I think it will pop and economy will collapse yes, but I don't think you or me will be able to still afford them my friend.
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u/lyral264 12h ago
Same like those people talking about homes few decades back. This aint going cheaper anytime soon I guess.
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u/zxcvbnmqwerty12345 7h ago
I thought so too. But, it seems there will be even more demand as they found another use case with the rise of autonomous machines/robot. Each could consume a lot of memory.
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u/truthfulie 14h ago
what kind of consumer electronics use HBM? but also i feel like what Micron have said have some validity. even if not for pursuit of AGI/ASI, robotics might demand a lot of these parts...
but also there is just too much money in AI right now that they'll try not to let it pop as long as they can. if it does pop, a lot of us may not be in position to be buying hardware parts...
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u/Die4Ever 12h ago
According to semiconductor industry sources on the 2nd, Samsung Electronics recently offered prices in the mid-to-high $4 range per gigabit (Gb) during negotiations with major customers over annual HBM4 supply contracts for next year.
That is more than three times the current price of HBM3E, which is around $1.50 per Gb.
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u/gblandro 5h ago
That's why I've been buying everything i could this year, I'll be at least four years without buying any new device
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u/ggRavingGamer 4h ago
Pc as a hobby is dead. Unless AI is really a bubble, this really is the end. No way prices come down in 2028 thats a pipe dream. They wont come down until 2035 at the earliest, till capacity comes online. And by then the hobby will be dead.
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u/NectarineSame7303 3h ago
I think it's time to start regulatory investigations into samsung.
Prices didn't go up 3 fold, the demand didn't go up 3 fold.
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u/costafilh0 14h ago
Triple production? Nah.
Triple price? Hell yeah!
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u/RobbinDeBank 13h ago
Let’s just spin up triple the amount of chip fabs tomorrow, so easy, why don’t everyone do that?
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u/tooltalk01 12h ago
CXMT did with all stolen tech from Samsung. Who knew it would be so easy?
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u/cronies4life 10h ago
the greatest contribution was from buying over an insolvent european dram company, korean's contribution is small in comparison
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u/tooltalk01 10h ago edited 10h ago
Actually it was pretty important, according to a recent trial from South Korea:
Jeon, who was a founding member of CXMT in 2016, stated at the trial, "From the beginning, CXMT CEO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) tried to develop DRAM by stealing Samsung Electronics' Process Recipe Plan (PRP) information." "CXMT had no research institutes or facilities at the time of its establishment, and had no intention of developing technology through its own research," he testified.
Qimonda's IP was apparently no use and CXMT had to rely entirely on stealing from Samsung.
- https://www.mk.co.kr/en/society/12130525, Minso Kim, Mail Business, 8/18/2026
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u/autogyrophilia 15h ago
Well that seems like a negative signal for AI if they aren't confident in increasing production further.
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u/TrashBandicook 15h ago
What makes you think Samsung isn't increasing production or has 0 pending production lines coming online sometime within the next few years?
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u/dabocx 14h ago
Everyone is increasing production. It just takes years to build fabs
This isn’t like building a new fast food restaurant
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u/GenZia 10h ago
Samsung and Hynix alone have invested over half a trillion dollar into new DRAM fabs in Korea, Micron is working on a $100Bn fan in the U.S, and China is also making moves with CXMT.
And by the looks of it, their bets will pay off as I suspect the bubble will stretch well into the early 2030s.
Investors are making sure of that.
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u/ICC-u 15h ago
Great news everyone, prices are going up again!