Monologue: Blame AI For Making Everything More Expensive
7/10/20268 min
In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how AI is inflating the price of memory across the board by diverting fab capacity to building high bandwidth memory for GPUs, and how this situation may end in disaster for everyone involved.
GamersNexus: The DRAM Cartel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
HBM to increase 90% Year over Year - https://x.com/pequityresearch/status/2075035164833382909?s=46
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJake Brennan0:00
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Jake Brennan0:19
Call Zone Media Hello, and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.
Ed Zitron· Host0:28
I'm your host, Ed Zitron. [rock music] Better Offline. And today I'm talking about the great parasite of AI and how it's making everything more expensive. And to be clear, before we go any further, what you're seeing in these remarkable sales from Nvidia and all the RAM companies and Broadcom and all them isn't a measure of industry demand, but of speculative purchasing based on the vaguest of projections. Because the actual demand for AI, the actual revenue generated by this industry is kind of pathetic, and honestly, we don't really have any reason to build these data centers. Nobody has trouble accessing these services. I mean, it's just being done because they've got nothing else to do. And I know that sounds kind of flippant, but really is what's happening. To make matters worse, the more the bubble inflates, the more expensive everything gets. The more data centers that get funded, the more chips that are ordered, the more resources this takes, and the more the RAM companies can crank up the prices and fuck over the customer. You see, AI GPUs use a special kind of memory,