Consumer DRAM Lost Money | Generated by AI
Question: But HBM jumped high too, right? So why would he say memory lost money?
Answer:
You’re right that HBM has been screaming upward — but he’s almost certainly not talking about HBM. Different markets.
The key distinction:
- HBM (HBM3/HBM3e) — soldered onto AI accelerators (H100, MI300X, etc.), sold to hyperscalers under long-term contracts. SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron sold-out through 2025–2026. A retail consumer can’t go buy HBM sticks. It’s not a thing he’d be flipping.
- Consumer DRAM (DDR5 DIMMs) — the RAM you put in a desktop/server. This is what someone reselling RTX 5090s would also be trading. And consumer DDR5 spot pricing went through a rough deflationary stretch — oversupply, weak PC demand — even while AI memory boomed.
So his mental model is the consumer hardware reseller’s basket: GPUs (5090), and DIMMs. In that basket, GPUs mooned and DDR5 RAM was the laggard / the thing that fell. He’s not pricing HBM because he never touched HBM.
There’s an irony here worth noting: the same supply chain that drove HBM up is now reversing the consumer DRAM picture. The big three memory makers reallocated wafer capacity toward HBM (much higher margin per wafer), which is now constraining DDR5 supply and pushing consumer RAM prices back up into late 2025 / 2026. So his “只有内存亏了” may already be stale — if he was burned holding RAM during the dip, that dip is the part that’s now recovering hard.
If you want, I can pull current DDR5 vs HBM spot/contract pricing to check whether his statement still holds as of now.