RAM up 7x to $429 in 18 months as Sam Altman says the invisible hand is failing
aakashgupta · x · 2026-11-01
The same 32GB of memory that cost $59 a year and a half ago now costs $429. On John Collison's podcast Cheeky Pint, Sam Altman was asked why no new players rush in to bring prices down:
- His one-word answer was "bad," and he said "the invisible hand is failing right now."
- His explanation was candid: for decades, making memory chips meant spending $20 billion on factories to earn back $19 billion — a brutal boom-and-bust business that nearly bankrupted incumbents multiple times, deterring new capital.
- The author argues the market-failure remark deserves more attention than Altman's viral "quite terrible" line about PCs having memory at all.
The comments tie directly to AI's hunger for memory supply and are a rare admission from a market-oriented founder that price signals aren't working.
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