No one is hoarding RAM (or DRAM aka what we call as RAM)

Instead it has mostly been a supply side crunch, and none of the individual steps are "illegal"

1. AI servers use a special memory called HBM
2. HBM is good at what it does but it has a very 'high wafer area per server' (it is stacked, and each level is lower density than normal DRAM)
3. OpenAI (and apparently others) skipped middlemen of supply chain and directly negotiated with the fab to get priority for their HBM fabrication.
4. This crunched supply on the open market for HBM
5. Other people followed up
6. Fab companies pivoted other manufacturing lines to HBM because of so many orders (and because it is really profitable to manufacture)
7. That caused crunch on DRAM
8. Other memory manufacturers pivoted to more expensive segment of their expertise (eg Flash memory fab)
9. This caused crunch on other common memory segments
10. Expensive memory means you try to move to higher segment for your own products (eg: laptop, mobile) else you don't have any slack in your BOM. This is causing the consumer good crunch
11. Once stuff becomes expensive, people hedge and buyout inventories. This is causing the Covid era style supply chain shock. The impact radius is expected to increase in coming months even if RAM situation resolves.
12. "Special mission" against Iran is blocking critical supply chain for chips (speciality chemicals, helium, etc.)

Venture Capital.

The purpose of US financial policy is to increase asset market inflation to keep foreign capital locked in petrodollar system & ensure all high-end investment requires Wall St firms & coordination of their many monopolies not just on significant credit. The RAM price hike is just another cycle of fake sales for these companies looped around Nvidia ASML TSMC it doesn't even really accompany a true shortage

It is not 'LLM companies'. It is OpenAI. And not from buying memory either. Last year they made two deals with two major memory manufacturers, which together meant they were purchasing a significant percentage of the world's memory production. And they negotiated these two deals in secret, each company not knowing that the other was in discussions, and announced the two deals on the same day. They weren't even buying memory chips you can put in a server, but finished wafers with memory chips printed on them. These wafers then have to be cut up into chips, those chips have to be put in packages, themselves tested, and then soldered down to memory modules. As far as I know, OpenAI has no ability to do this. So it seems likely they purchased a significant portion of the world's memory production just to drive up prices and keep their competitors from having it.

Making it illegal would be a regulation and you can't have those unless they're regulating sex or gender.

They also used copyrighted material without the consent of the authors to train their models.

They polluted the air and stole clean water from communities who lived close to their data centers.

Hoarding RAM is only the tip of the iceberg.

Capitalism baby

It's just how free market works against free market, leading to capital concentration, basic and unavoidable capitalist contradiction.

It's legal because capitalists have captured the levers of power nearly everywhere.

Imagine this: You're a dirty rotten billionaire. Look what you can do with your miniscule billions if you had just 10 of them.

With $10 billion, if you invested it to generate a conservative 5% annual return, you could spend roughly $1.37 million per day ($500 million a year) without ever touching the principal. If you didn't invest it, you could spend over $100,000 daily for roughly 274 years.

These assholes just love hoarding the wealth and anything else they can so long as you peasants don't get any of it. Instead, think of wealth this way in that it is like fertilizer, if you spread it around evenly everything grows nicely and beautiful. If you hoard that shit, it stinks something awful.

Fuck tech bros, fuck billionaires, fuck the elite; they're destroying this world and the 99% of us' way of life because of their greed.

Capitalism > Law

Money. Lots of money.

Greed, I guess? The answer to most issues in capitalism. They want to make as much money as possible before the bubble bursts.

ITT: answers explaining why they’re doing it rather than the actual question of how it’s legal.

I guess the short answer is, when you’re rich and powerful, who’s going to stop you? We don’t have a functioning government and haven’t since the 70s at the latest; it’s been captured and only serves wealth and Wall StreetStreet now.

Anything is legal if you have enough money.

There is no law regulating who someone can sell something, assuming it's not regulated goods aka drugs, guns.

AI companies just outbid everyone else by a big enough margin and there are less than a handful of companies producing RAM as it's rather complicated and specific production process.

New producers cant easily enter the market due to the complexity and completely insane initial investment cost in setting up the production and they would have to design their own RAM chips as well, which would take years if not decades.

Current chip producers don't want to increase production either due to liking high price and being afraid of the bubble popping.

Even if there is some legal grounds for government stepping in and regulating supply to avoid collapse of smaller companies who can't outbid AI companies. They are dining and getting funded by the same AI companies.

Because in the us if you bribe the president anything is legal. Here, legal just means you bribed the president. If you didn't bribe him it's not legal.

Money.

The answer to any "Why is company X fucking everyone?" is always because it makes some asshole somewhere an obscene amount of profit.

They never bought the RAM, they put out a letter of intent to buy up to 40% of the global supply. Because business leaders are equal parts malicious and stupid, this lead to a run on RAM before prices spiked due to low supply, causing a price spike due to low supply.

A letter of intent is not a contact and is not binding. It's the equivalent of a New Year's Resolution blog post.

The fabs themselves work on multi-year contracts where the buyer commits to purchasing a certain capacity of the total production. If they expect to produce 100 million sticks in a year and someone offers to buy 40 million of them, it's still in their interest to have many buyers in case that customer can't follow through or backs out.

A lot of it probably isn’t legal, but who’s gonna prosecute them?

The reality is, it isn't so much about legality, it's about how one company has more money than you and therefore, can buy so much.

You mind as well re-write "how is it legal" to "IT'S NOT FAIR! WAH!".

Capitalism! Fuck yeah!

As I understand it, all OpenAI did was promise to buy. They have already backed off some of those orders, and prices are dropping some.

It's only one company that hoarded all the RAM: OpenAI. They're the ones that intentionally created scarcity in the market in order to maintain what they thought was a dominant position.

Don't lump all the other AI companies in with them. They're they ones that claimed to be all about improving humanity and registered themselves as a non-profit, then turned around and went for-profit with shady deals left and right (like the DRAM thing).

Anthropic lost their contract with the government because they refused to use their AI to snoop on innocent people and possibly make automatic determinations as to who and what to bomb. OpenAI leapt right on that opportunity, "we're happy to do that! Give us the contract!"

I'm not saying the other AI companies are pinnacles of ethics but there's one player—who is so closely aligned with Microsoft they have employees sitting on each other's campuses—that is vastly worse than the others when it comes to underhand shit that's bad for everyone.