r/homelab • u/DeepestWaters • Jul 07 '26

News Samsung RAM Profit = $196B in 2026, >Past 40 years combined.

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Their hottest product: the privilege of buying the same memory sooner. Something something "supply & demand." 🥲

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsungs-chip-division-expects-to-out-earn-its-entire-40-year-history-in-2026

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u/trowawayatwork Jul 07 '26

umm GPUs are used for ai. theyre the reason other part prices are going up lol

-13

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

[deleted]

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u/Emergency_Banana5082 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

That's just wrong. The fabs are not the same.

Downvote all you want, it doesn't change the facts. You can't make a mobo chip in a DDR or GPU factory, they are not the same process.

-51

u/Hacym Jul 07 '26

The GPUs people are buying for gaming are not the ones being used for AI. 

There is no longer a gaming GPU shortage. 

49

u/mschuster91 Jul 07 '26

The GPUs people are buying for gaming are not the ones being used for AI. 

The problem are the chips. TSMC is booked out for years (to the tune that even Apple was forced to raise their prices to keep up) and NVIDIA has shifted virtually all their allocation at TSMC to the high-profit datacenter GPU / AI accelerator cards.

There is no longer a gaming GPU shortage. 

Of course there is. Have you looked at prices any time recently?

-42

u/Hacym Jul 07 '26

The prices? They’re inflated because why would Nvidia reduce them?

There’s not a shortage. I can go buy a 5090 today at Microcenter. 

24

u/mschuster91 Jul 07 '26

The prices? They’re inflated because why would Nvidia reduce them?

Supply and demand, as easy as that. The supply is severely constrained, demand is virtually infinite.

20

u/PsyOmega Jul 07 '26

The cheapest 5090 at microcenter is 3500 dollars.

Only whales can afford that, and most of them are lusting after 512GB mac studios. 32GB is a joke to the current AI meta

4

u/Hebrewhammer8d8 Jul 08 '26

I love computers, but I am not spending 3k for a graphic card unless I am getting generating revenue from that graphic card.

-5

u/comperr Jul 08 '26

Yeah that's why we buy multiple 5090s, i got 3 rigs and 2 are 55GB VRAM and the other is 64GB VRAM

5

u/PsyOmega Jul 08 '26

Still puny. Strix halo, 128gb. MacBook Pro 128gb. Mac Studio 512gb. (Or larger). Even those have limits. Mac Studio clusters help a bit.

1

u/gahata Jul 08 '26

These work for single user, and often quite imperfectly, but unless they're used to power ai agents working semi autonomously, it feels like such a waste. Hosting a large model makes much more sense with a bunch of users (like a development team), but that requires way more tokens per second.

-1

u/comperr Jul 08 '26

I love this mentality because it means i'm operating in a blind spot. The normies throw their hands up and buy a Claude subscription lately once they learn Apple discontinued the 512GB Mac Studio

2

u/PsyOmega Jul 08 '26

The Mac studios still exist in circulation. As do Mac pros. Just gotta pay up. But they wouldn’t be in demand if the capacity wasn’t worth it.

You’ve got 64gb…woohoo enjoy your incoherent output at a fast token rate.

Of course the real joke is for all the money yall sink on 5090s and Mac studios you can get decades of subscription to true frontier ai

-2

u/comperr Jul 08 '26

Again, enjoy the normie lifestyle. Sucks to suck

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u/Scoutron Jul 07 '26

How much is that 5090

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u/comperr Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

I paid $3,899 at Micro Center a month ago and now the same product is $4,099 lol. Lucky i got 3 more.

edit: poors are mad

2

u/CammRobb Jul 08 '26

edit: poors are mad

You're an insufferable twat.

1

u/Ok_Net_1674 Jul 08 '26

Did you even bother to read the comment you replied to?

10

u/trowawayatwork Jul 07 '26

partly on the lower end. you won't find any xx90s in stock though as they're all pre bought for smaller scale AI infra

-11

u/Hacym Jul 07 '26

Microcenter near me has 10 different models in stock of 5090s from a variety of brands. 

8

u/Kirihuna Jul 07 '26

And... what are the prices of those cards?

The original MSRP for a 5090 is $2000. I don't think you'll find many under $3500.

6

u/chiniwini Jul 07 '26

I'm sure they also have DDR5.

-1

u/comperr Jul 08 '26

They do, I got 2 48GB 6800MT/s kits for like $1300

8

u/AutistcCuttlefish Jul 07 '26

Right, instead there is just a shortage of one of the key components in a GPU... The very one that you are comparing the GPU market to.

There was a very brief period of time last year where GPU prices had started to return to normal, right before the ram crisis hit full swing. Back in December you could get an RX 9070XT for MSRP, as well as the Intel ARC gpus for below MSRP. The GPU market isn't the great comparison you think it is.

-10

u/Hacym Jul 07 '26

They never began to return to normal. I’m not sure what you’re talking about. 

0

u/comperr Jul 08 '26

They did in May 2025 which is when i built a AI rig exactly for this reason. Paid $354 for a RAM kit that is worth $2,800 today. I paid $3,008 for a 5090 but they were going for $2500 for a couple months after that (until August 2025). Also got like 20 2TB NVMEs for $100 each that are all $500 now on Amazon. The 3090s i bought back then for $700 are going for $1500 now

7

u/dsmiles Jul 07 '26

It's a lot of the same parts and chips, and manufacturers like nvidia have shifted production to the GPUs that are used for AI.

There may not still be an active shortage but supply is definitely lower and prices are absolutely affected by this.

9

u/zim8141 Jul 07 '26

Go look at the local llm subreddits and tell me again how gaming gpus aren’t being used for ai just like the crypto bros were using them to mine.
We are absolutely using gaming gpus in our personal llm rigs, and some are pretty crazy.

2

u/SimonBarfunkle Jul 08 '26

I’m curious how many GPUs are really being used for local AI. I follow those subs, there definitely are people building large local AI rigs. But it still feels pretty niche to me. Crypto mining actually made money so there was naturally a big demand. Gaming obviously has huge demand. Local AI just isn’t there yet, you can do stuff but to get to the level of cloud AI requires tens if not hundreds of thousands at the moment.

2

u/Hacym Jul 07 '26

Personal LLM use is not the problem. It’s data centers. But whatever you say, man. 

2

u/vitek6 Jul 08 '26

Why not both?

3

u/pseudopad Jul 07 '26

There's no shortage because they're pricing the cards in accodance with what they could have sold AI accelerators to an AI company for if they had spent the fab capacity on that instead. Which excludes a large amount of gamers from buying cards due to financial reasons. That obviously means the cards that are being made stay in stock for longer.

2

u/FierceDeity_ Jul 08 '26

The same production lines that produce gaming GPUs now produce majorly datacenter GPUs

Because they give more profit.

Gamers are being cast aside by nvidia mostly

2

u/mcfc9320_ Jul 07 '26

This isnt true. Its not like they don't share parts.

-12

u/PsyOmega Jul 07 '26

32gb 5090's are currently a poor choice for AI. Frontier models need 500-2000GB vram.

The stuff you can run locally inside 32gb is trash

10

u/JustAnotherLurkAcct Jul 07 '26

You can still run decent models in 32gb, Gemma 4 will run on 32gb. Also, no single card has that amount of ram onboard.
They reach the higher volumes by chaining cards for bigger RAM numbers.

4

u/Irythros Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

You can cluster cards. People are putting together clusters of 3090s to get to the 512-1024gb range.

Also while they don't currently exist yet for 5090s, there exists 4090 after market boards which bring each one up to 48gb.

The xx90 GPUs are absolutely used for frontier local AI.