Sony halts memory card shipments due to NAND shortage (techzine.eu)

by methuselah_in 32 comments 82 points
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32 comments

[−] HerbManic 46d ago
A moments silence for Memory stick... Yeah that should do it.
[−] tomalaci 46d ago
I feel like all these hardware shortages will supercharge 2nd hand electronics and their refurbishing from repair specialists.
[−] HerbManic 46d ago
For many years I had been advocating for Linux distros to optimize for lower spec machines as their life times got extended. Best case, you head off potential hardware end of life, worst case you allow newer hardware to run more effciebtly. The latest shortage I didnt see coming, but it would have helped out regardless. Keeping old hardware going is vital nowadays, need to end the mind set of disposable goods.
[−] iszomer 46d ago
Might even bring back some value to those _westerners_ who are still hooked into the nostalgic scene -- have you made a trip to Akihabara district lately?
[−] Havoc 46d ago
2nd hand is up massively already. Built a ssd nas with eBay parts in mid 2025 and everything is up 100ish percent
[−] 20after4 45d ago
Only 100%? I'm seeing SSDs going for about 400% what I paid in 2024.
[−] Havoc 44d ago
Old 2nd hand enterprise drives on ebay have seen pretty modest increases.

Actually just went through my purchase history and its even lower than I thought. 37% inc versus May '25.

Pretty niche crowd that is down for building a NAS out of drives that have had long lives already. Basically only people with grasp on zfs redundancy & willingness to accept the risk of SSDs with heavy use but enterprise endurance.

[−] noobermin 46d ago
Didn't OpenAI cancel a bunch of memory orders? Seems premature to announce this as there soon will be a glut of memory in the market.
[−] pulse7 46d ago
Source?
[−] pjc50 46d ago
I've seen this going around on social media but not on reputable news sites.

Coincidentally, the SK Hynix US IPO has been announced: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sk-hynix-files-co...

[−] baq 46d ago
top signal if I've seen one
[−] zvqcMMV6Zcr 46d ago
I think that is misinformation caused by circular logic. DDR prices stopped risking, simply because supply reached equilibrium vs demand and willingness of customers to overpay. The Micron stock price also had minor correction. Suddenly internet is full of articles how it is all caused by TurboQuant release or OpenAI giving up on its huge wafer orders.

Looks very similar like attempts to explain random crypto price changes with any (un)related news.

[−] torginus 46d ago
Am I wrong that essentially what OpenAI tried to do is to short squeeze the memory market?

What happens if they decide to dump all the stock they don't actually need anymore?

Will half the memory industry run into the ground because of the oversupply means their current production is unsellable?

[−] pjc50 46d ago
The term I would use is "corner", as in "silver" and "onions". But there's a couple of distinctions:

- supposedly buying for their own use, rather than reselling

- bought as forward, rather than spot: much of what they've ""bought"" is a commitment to buy memory that has not yet been manufactured

> Will half the memory industry run into the ground because of the oversupply means their current production is unsellable?

They've seen that coming, this is why there isn't a massive expansion to meet the demand rise and instead they're letting "demand destruction" happen. A decision vindicated by the war, as well.

[−] torginus 46d ago

> supposedly buying for their own use, rather than reselling?

Do we know what they're using it for? I mean not reselling would imply the chips go on some OpenAI specific proprietary hardware directly, rather than it being sold back to OEMs to buy more GPUs or other off the shelf accelerators.

> They've seen that coming, this is why there isn't a massive expansion to meet the demand rise and instead they're letting "demand destruction" happen. A decision vindicated by the war, as well.

If you're a memory company, this sounds like making the best of a bad situation. not making more stuff despite demand far outstripping supply, just to prepare for the potential oversupply your customer can cause because they can walk back on their massive order.

[−] HWR_14 45d ago
I thought they were buying it more to keep it out of the hands of their competitors than any other reason.
[−] dist-epoch 46d ago
OpenAI is not the only buyer. If they canceled, Google/Microsoft/Apple will pick it up.

And there is another incoming tidal-wave of compute demand from all the vibe-coded apps that everybody is making now.

This will create a CPU shortage too.

[−] bit1993 46d ago
Is this how globalization ends?
[−] shiroiuma 45d ago
No big loss here: Sony memory cards have always been massively overpriced.
[−] globular-toast 46d ago
[flagged]
[−] prerok 46d ago
We can remember it for you, wholesale.
[−] noobermin 46d ago
Are heavily ironic posts still considered non-kosher for HN? It does seem times are changing.
[−] t0rt01se 46d ago
The word you seek is 'sarcastic'. The ever so slightly neuro-divergent don't do sarcarsm. Nor do linkedinlunatics.
[−] clarionbell 46d ago
Please don't buy into that stereotype. People with aspergers are capable of getting sarcasm. Especially if it's over the top like this.
[−] skrebbel 46d ago
Only if they're not funny
[−] fpoling 46d ago
It is more funny if one watched the original Total Recall.
[−] paganel 46d ago
They're a good way of verifying that they're not AI-slop, or not pro-AI slop, which I view as the same think, so I think that they should be embraced.
[−] globular-toast 45d ago
This is why "sort by controversial" is such a good feature of Reddit. If you're not offending half the people, is it really worth saying anything at all?
[−] ares623 46d ago
Who needs terabyte hard drives when all your photos can stored as plaintext prompts instead. Finally, the perfect storage format!
[−] pjc50 46d ago
There is actually some work on doing this; after all, an imagegen model is simply a very large number of images that have been compressed together. Given a stable model and a means of inferring a prompt for an image, you can then generate a base image and store compressed deltas on top of it.

(of course the limit case of this is Samsung moon replacement)

[−] shevy-java 46d ago
The AI corporations owe us money. I fail to see why we all have to pay more due to these greedy companies - they should pay us compensation money for driving up the prices here. In particular the US government is helping drive these prices up as well - not just due to AI situation, but also due to destroying part of the energy supply lines via its bombing of Iran as well as stock market manipulation. A mafia is pillaging all of us here.
[−] pllbnk 45d ago
How else will we be able to write these HN comments if data centers are not there to help us? By typing on our keyboards character by character? [1]

[1]: https://x.com/sama/status/2033935276079510011