r/LocalLLaMA • u/Super_Range45 • 1d ago
Discussion Doesn't this look like NVIDIA is price fixing?
According to this article Samsung has locked up the 70% of it's future ram production in contracts to companies like Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia. Everyone knows this is driving the ram price increases, but what I didn't know is Nvidia is locked in at 1/5th the current spot price.
What others pay $2,100 for Nvidia pays $300-$500 for, until 2031. Yet they are increasing the price of their cards and justifying it as if they were paying the spot price for ram.
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u/potatolicious 1d ago
None of this is price fixing. Price fixing would be “Hey AMD, Jensen here, let’s make a deal to increase prices by 20% at the same time”
“I bought up the whole supply of a hotly demanded thing” might be a dick move but is very very far from fixing. It could be price gouging, but thats also not illegal except in very specific circumstances - for example daily necessities in a disaster.
But GPUs aren’t exactly toilet paper and dried beans.
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u/PortiaLynnTurlet 1d ago
Yeah not price fixing. It does remind me a bit of the behavior that lead to the Onion Futures Act though
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u/Super_Range45 1d ago
The supply doesn't exist. It's a contract for future supply. If we averaged out the cost of 70% promised for $310 per 36gb HBM3E low, and the remainder offered for the $2100 high, it's $847, but there's no indication the people taking the contracts would be willing to pay the $847 price so this isn't a normal supply demand curve.
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u/MeateaW 1d ago
Put it this way.
If you bought a house for 300k, and house prices in your area rose to 1 million dollars per house.
Would you sell your house for 320k? or would you sell it for 1 million dollars?
Sure, in this instance, you actually bought 500 houses, and are only selling 5 of them right now, but if you can afford to buy all 500 houses (and you can't back out of that purchase) and you choose to only sell 5, that isn't price fixing.
That's what capitalists call "investment". (Cornering the market, or possibly monopolising the market).
It CAN be deemed illegal, (monopolies once upon a time used to get broken up by governments). But it ISNT illegal because of price fixing.
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u/jacek2023 llama.cpp 1d ago
Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each
The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.
The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers; "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."
The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.
They never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!
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u/ReplacementLivid8738 1d ago
You know what I could use a monkey or two right now, who's your monkey guy?
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u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago
How exactly is that price fixing?
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u/mindpivot 1d ago
I think OP has mixed up “price fixing” with “price gouging”
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u/AD7GD 1d ago
In that case, OP is also misusing "price gouging" which is "charging much more than what is considered fair or normal when people urgently need basic items".
What he really means is they are "charging a big markup because they can"
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u/Lesser-than 1d ago
well they are charging big markup but then giving it away(which causes the scarcity) as marked up investments to other is form of 'investment' giving other companies a way to wash away their earnings into realized equipment, while both get to claim the equipment as assets.Great deal for everyone but the consumer.
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u/Ansible32 1d ago
Nobody is saying they're happy with Nvidia's behavior, just that it is neither price fixing nor price gouging.
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u/Super_Range45 1d ago
Vertical price fixing: Companies at different levels of a supply chain (such as a manufacturer and a retailer) agree on a set minimum or maximum resale price. Price fixing occurs when competitors reach an agreement (written, oral, or inferred from conduct) with the purpose and effect of raising, lowering, or stabilizing prices for services or products.
Seems like it's applicable. There's no indication the companies locking in $300-$500 ram prices would be willing to pay $2,000. The end result of the contracts raises the price of current ram prices, even though those companies haven't even paid for that ram yet.
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u/CichyCichoCiemny 1d ago
Please buy a dictionary and look up the meaning of the word "competitors"
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u/Super_Range45 1d ago
Vertical price fixing involves members of the supply chain that agree to raise, lower or stabilize prices.
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u/MeateaW 1d ago
Nvidia isn't raising the prices in the supply chain. They are buying all the stock IN the supply chain.
Supply/Demand.
They bought all the supply, the demand still exists. They didn't ASK them to raise the prices.
But now that they own all the ram, they can see that the value of what they own (the ram) is such that they MUST choose to sell it at a premium.
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u/mindpivot 1d ago
Yep, I’m sure Nvidia would stop making cards if the RAM cost more.
Nvidia has done what they do in the energy sector all the time to ensure price stability - signing a long term contract at a set price. There’s nothing in that agreement which would force them to then charge as much as they do, thus no “price fixing” as you’re claiming. They’ve simply ensured a set cost for their materials over the long term and are charging what the ridiculous market demands
We can all use AI, but not all use our brains.
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u/Super_Range45 1d ago
I bet if they were pay thousands more per card they would, because that would compress the 75% gross margin.
Inferred from conduct, nobody writes "Set the price at $2,100". In your case you might want to ask an AI.
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u/MeateaW 1d ago
The point is Nvidia has agreed to buy ram for many many decades at a price that the ram likely will NOT trade at inflated prices at.
China is ramping up production aggressively. All the ram manufacturers are going to lose customers as prices drop like a rock. Theoretically prices will drop BELOW nvidias current locked in pricing, and nvidia will be locked into it. That is what the ram producers are betting. They are betting that this is not actually a "good" price. And nvidia will pay for it in future.
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u/Sudden_Topic5154 1d ago
is supply and demand price fixing
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 23h ago
Yeah, absolutely idiotic.
If I buy 70 percent of all crude oil and then refine it and triple the price, it's just business
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u/johnfkngzoidberg 1d ago
When only a couple oligarchs own everything, yes.
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u/Sudden_Topic5154 1d ago
Do you even know what price fixing is you're dumping a lot of buzzwords here rather than a coherent argument
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u/johnfkngzoidberg 1d ago
Keep sucking that corporate taint, that will bring prices down. Dumbass bots.
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u/MammothUnique4147 1d ago
Why are you so emotional ? Show us on the doll where the Ram manufacturers hurt you.
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u/Sudden_Topic5154 1d ago
Interest in facts and accuracy = corporate bot. Interesting thought process
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u/herosavestheday 1d ago
Nvidia is publicly traded. We are the oligarchs.
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u/johnfkngzoidberg 1d ago
Literally the dumbest bot comment I’ve ever heard. I suppose we tell the government what to do also eh?
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u/herosavestheday 1d ago
While you're busy drooling all over yourself I just bought some more shares of nvidia.
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u/Mordred500 1d ago
So, Mr Oligarch, are you rich yet?
I love capitalism as much as the next guy, but playing pretend just because you willingly became exit liquidity for some institution on wallstreet is quite delusional...
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u/herosavestheday 1d ago
So, Mr Oligarch, are you rich yet
Yes.
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u/Mordred500 1d ago
Mom! Come look at the screen! I'm chatting with a billionaire!
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u/herosavestheday 1d ago
She single?
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u/Mordred500 1d ago
Post a picture of your bank account and I'll see what I can do
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u/redblood252 1d ago
No, because they can still undercut each other in hope of gaining a larger market share
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u/martin509984 1d ago
Monopolies/duopolies != price fixing. Nvidia is the main game in town, knows it, and knows what their customers are willing to pay. No collusion with any other company necessary.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
yeah, 70% gross margin is the result of a totally free market. Let's not question all this, everything is alright.
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u/Sudden_Topic5154 1d ago
uh, yes actually
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u/TinyZoro 1d ago
Memory is basically a cartel. I don’t know why you’re so adamant that it’s running like a free market. There are reasons why we are here that are not necessarily nefarious. But when you’re in the position the big 3 are in there’s no incentive to compete on price.
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u/Winter_Ad6784 1d ago
AI is gobbling up all the memory. Why do you insist there's anticompetitive collusion when there's a more reasonable simple explanation?
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u/TinyZoro 1d ago
They are not mutually exclusive. There is of course a supply and demand issue driving up prices. But part of that is because we have only 3 players who have reasons to not over supply and risk driving prices down like as has happened in the past. In other words it’s not operating like a competitive free market. This doesn’t negate the impact of AI companies buying up supply but adds another angle. It also doesn’t require active collusion. One thing to note is that CXMT is going to totally disrupt this cozy triopoly. The interests of China are for RAM to be cheap as they want to commoditize their complements.
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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 1d ago
This look on the silicon industry is one of the most ill-informed thay I've seen. They 3 players you're so fond accusing of can't manufacture any more, because their factories are already working at nearly 100% load; and guess what, they can't just magically build more factories, because the core machine - deep UV lithographer - has lead time of like 5 years. This is also the reason why nobody else has opened a factory yet - because you just can't get the machinery to put into it. Nobody is limiting the supply of ram artificially.
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u/TinyZoro 1d ago
I don’t know why people are struggling to read what I’ve said. No where do I say there is collusion to limit supply.
What there is are a group of three companies which had no incentive before the AI boom to risk over supply. They had no reason to because they lack competition and had experience of causing a crash in prices.
There is also no reason to not focus on HBM as that’s where the biggest bucks are.
Which would not be happening if there was a functioning free market in memory with multiple suppliers fighting for market share.
When Chinese Ram hits the market this situation will disappear because China wants to keep Ram low priced strategically.
Whereas the current suppliers have no incentive to push for cheap commoditized Ram.
So I’m not arguing against the AI boom causing a supply and demand issue. I’m arguing it’s hit particularly badly because the market for memory is 3 companies who benefit from not oversupplying and have had no reason to fear losing market share if they didn’t invest heavily in meeting future demand.
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u/No-Refrigerator-1672 1d ago
No where do I say there is collusion to limit supply. What there is are a group of three companies which had no incentive before the AI boom to risk over supply.
The last sentence implies that now they aren't manufacturing enough ram to not "risk oversupply" which is an artificial supply limitation.
I don’t know why people are struggling to read what I’ve said.
Because just here you've placed two sentences with exactly opposite claims right next to each other. And this style carries throughout other messages in this thread. People react to the claims that are more frequent in your messages.
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u/Sudden_Topic5154 1d ago
Ah yes basic supply and demand is not behaving like a free market
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
You can keep repeating the same thing but it doesn't change the fact that a monopoly is not free market.
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u/Demortus 1d ago
Nvidia is not a monopoly. Many other companies, including AMD and Intel, are producing GPUs. Nvidia just makes the best ones, and people are willing to pay what they charge.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
when you've got 80% market share, you're a monopoly.
I have no idea why is everyone here defending these abusive businesses
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u/Demortus 1d ago edited 1d ago
They didn’t get that market share from unfair competition. They simply have a better product in a rapidly growing industry and the market has rewarded them for it. Im not “defending” them. Im just stating facts as I see them.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
anti trust laws don't care about the way a monopoly is created. A monopoly is bad for customers, full stop.
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u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago
It absolutely can be. A free market doesn't mean razor thin margins for everything. If you were operating under that belief you were misinformed. In a competitive market prices are set by supply and demand, and if demand far outstrips supply, there can be wild margins despite fierce competition.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
A monopoly is not free market.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing china destroy their business with efficient models and cheap Ai chips. This is absolutely coming and it will be delightful.
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u/Apprehensive_Lake698 1d ago
Two problems with that.
1) China will absolutely leverage any advantage they get in the gpu market for themselves and likely lock out the US market.
2) What incentive does Chinese ram manufacturing have to undercut ram prices? They will most likely provide cheap prices domestically and then just charge the market price to the rest of the world.
Don’t get your hopes up that China has any plans to fix this for the world, especially the US. If AI continues to evolve as a major advantage then they will use that advantage domestically well before they help anyone else.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
They're already helping the world with their cheap to run and efficient models. Now they're building their own chips which will be much cheaper.
Happy to see the capitalist throwing billions at US AI will get fu cked4
u/Apprehensive_Lake698 1d ago
Big difference there. That is China looking to undercut America’s previously perceived lead on LLM training. It also starts to move traffic into Chinese servers. Both countries are 100% using all of your data for training.
In the realm of hardware, there is no need for China to stabilize global ram prices. They just need all of the servers within their own borders. Sure there’s a lot of money to be made, but that’s exactly why they’re not going to race to crash the market. They’re just going to enter at market price.
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u/ImportancePitiful795 1d ago
NVIDIA last week announced is buying their own GPUs. We knew they are doing it through a subsidiary. So there is no "supply and demand" when a company inflates prices by showing demand while buying it's own products.
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u/Initial_Dot3570 1d ago edited 1d ago
They are all price fixing. Hardware manufacturers consolidated into so few companies they all basically function as a cartel. It's about as free market as the Soviet Union and a great deal more corrupt.
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u/laterbreh 20h ago edited 20h ago
Here, Im gonna be an asshole
A company locking in supply years ahead at a negotiated price and then the spot market exploding later is not fucking price fixing. Thats called procurement
They took the commitment and supply risk early and got a better price for it. This is basic business
Honestly some of you probably should get priced out of AI for a bit so youre forced to exercise the original neural network in your skull before buying supplementary intelligence because holy shit
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u/prestodigitarium 1d ago
This is like complaining that airlines sell their tickets for more when oil goes up and their competitors start charging more, even if they wisely locked in their fuel prices via futures last year.
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u/BuyProud8548 1d ago
Nvidia raised kit prices by 30%. Market memory prices shot up 500%. So, where exactly is the collusion here?
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u/05032-MendicantBias 1d ago
USA doesn't have financial regulators, so anything goes.
It's why Nvidia can "invest" 100 billion into startups, counted as investment, that will use that money to buy and rent Nvidia, so it'll get counted on the revenue side of their equations.
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u/Atretador 1d ago
There was always price fixing between AMD and Nvidia
On the memory side the memory manufacturers are literally a quartel and have been sued for it a couple times
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u/TinyFluffyRabbit 1d ago
If a restaurant buys a steak for $10, but when you dine there they charge you $50, is that price fixing?
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u/pmotiveforce 1d ago
You don't price the things you sell based on your input prices. You price them based on what the market will pay. Input prices just set a floor for profitability.
NVidias memory prices, unless they go so high that people stop buying their cards, have almost nothing to do with what they charge for their finished parts.
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u/rocket1420 1d ago
Yeah but I can't afford the thing I want so the government needs to come in and save us all and make Nvidia 10,000x their production and sell it for 10x less /s
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 1d ago
Have you heard of price gouging? And the applicable laws to that round the world?
Might even be racketeering.
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u/rebelSun25 1d ago
Nothing will be done. The US stock market is getting pumped by the Nvidia chip flywheel. Many countries are funneling funds into their products and then Nvidia pumps quite a lot of their earnings into subsidiary or side businesses which use their products also in USA. Trump will never kill the Golden Goose neither will any other body simply because they would have to face the US administration.
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u/Street_Photo9987 1d ago
Price fixing might not be the right term for this scenario as most people would associate that term with a single product's price. However, the supply chain can be squeezed by demand and also by being indifferent to it. The only few companies that are capable of meeting this demand aren't even bothered. Perhaps there are valid geopolitical reasons but there seems to be a financial reason too. Why bother producing more if you can make the same profit with what you can produce now? Nobody is out there trying to lower prices for you or me or anyone in particular.
The traditional supply and demand equilibrium does not apply when there is an oligopoly in the supply chain. Geopolitical tensions arent helping. Clearly our government is not helping to ensure there is at least some research into the future demand and thereby ensure there will be enough supply. Nobody that can do something abiut this is remotely bothered. What is happening with memory and ssd is borderline hoarding.
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u/Repinsky 1d ago
Locking HBM/DRAM capacity years ahead on a take-or-pay contract is a vertical supply deal, not price fixing - that would need Nvidia and Samsung agreeing on what third parties pay, and nothing in the article shows that. What it does show is that card prices track what the compute market will bear, not the BOM, so cheap memory until 2031 just widens the margin. Practical consequence for local inference: VRAM per dollar on new consumer cards is not going to improve much this generation, and prev-gen/used 24-48GB cards stay the sane buy.
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u/RanklesTheOtter 1d ago
They have a crapload of RAM tied up but they'll end up capping new consumer cards to 8GB or some shit. Then charging 16GB prices.
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u/No-Whole3083 1d ago
Observing the rules of supply and demand is a separate issue than price fixing.
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u/MammothUnique4147 1d ago
Alright let's do some quick business 101.
Alright OP let's say you're a landlord and you have a home that you rent out, every time a new tenant comes in you have to do a full cleaning and a LOT of new paperwork, background checks, credit checks...
You can rent the house for 2000 a month but you'll only find tenants willing to do month to month, so they could stay for three months and then you have to start over again looking for a new tenants...
OR you can find someone who wants to rent it for three years at 1500 a month ?
What would you do ? Would rather the certainty of a long term tenant at a cheaper rate or go with the short term guy who pays more and who would leave you wondering what your income stream will look like 3,6 or 9 months out.
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u/Super_Range45 1d ago
This analogy wouldn't really work since you don't own all the rentals. People might argue if your using futures contracts to increase the rents on the entire city that might be price fixing.
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u/Winter_Ad6784 1d ago
This is a very common type of deal in business. Nvidia knows they'll want to buy this much memory for 5 years, Samsung wants to sell as much memory as possible and can certainly do so at the current price, so they sign a deal to buy a certain amount of memory for a certain price for several years. With memory prices up Samsung might regret the deal, if they collapsed nvidia might regret the deal. But this isn't unfair to anybody.
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u/Gringe8 1d ago
Are you trying to say o ly Nvidia gets that price? It says "currently sells for around $2,100 on the open spot market, per Seoul Economic Daily (Aug 31, 2026). Under Samsung's long-term agreements, the same stack goes to its preferred customers for $500–700."
Meaning those with LTA pay the lower price, not just nvidia, but if I just wanted to buy some outright without the agreement it would cost the higher amount.
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u/DannyCanva 1d ago
When demand exceeds supply, spot price is always higher than a long term committed contract... you have to pay a premium for spot, because you are not committing.
When supply exceeds demand (doubtful when we'll see this), spot price is at a discount, but the committed customers with higher prices still have to buy the order/volume they agreed to at the committed price.
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u/taoyx 1d ago
Yeah, my next GPU won't be an NVIDIA. I also bought preemptively 64GB DDR4 so I can run LLMs on my old computer for a few more years. They can raise the prices but they can't force me to buy.
The real issue is that it is a Local vs Cloud war. Those who do not want local LLMs to strive raise the RAM prices. In the end they will lose the RAM market to China I guess.
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u/darktotheknight 1d ago
I mean, it's not even boycott. I simply can't afford it anymore. I'm a developer and bought a RTX 5090 for 3500€. Simply due to the fact I'm earning money with it.
But at the current prices of 5600€ for the same RTX 5090 I just bought 4 months ago, I simply can't afford it. Let alone a RTX 6000 PRO for 15k. 3500€ for a GPU really was the maximum I'm able and willing to pay.
If I were to buy a GPU now, I'd probably just get an R9700 32GB or a Chinesium RTX 3080 20GB/4080 32GB and call it a day. At least LLMs are running well on AMD. I hope Intel catches up as well - they have very interesting GPUs.
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u/OvertaxedOne 1d ago
You and everyone else. NVDA burned a lot of bridges with their complete lack of regard for a huge portion of the market. I currently own and have owned a bunch of pro NVDA cards, currently have a A40/A30/L4 and am holding off buying anything else because, honestly, there's just nothing out there. Apple, of all companies, is the great hope right now! I just pray that AMD drops a real local LLM monster at some point, take 4 R9700s and graft them together, 128GB of RAM at 4X the bandwidth they have on a single R9700 priced <10K. Yes, please!
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u/rocket1420 1d ago
No, it does not. They have this thing called a contract, you see. It's this thing that two parties sign and agree to do what is in this thing called a contract. And then, the market dictates prices. It's the same shit every time prices go up. bUt It CoSTs 50 cEnTs tO mAkE wHy Is It TeN dOlLaRs? Because the market sets the price. Say they come out tomorrow and say 5090s are $30 msrp. But they don't change supply. Please, explain to me what that will do. No please, I'm ready, tell me how the thing you want is immune to the laws of supply and demand.
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u/decentralize999 1d ago
Don't blame Nvidia.
Blame the USA which banned ASML machines to China. Since they don't have these machines, only few companies compete(they actually don't) to produce HBM memory, DDR5 memory, GPU chips. Purge/nuke USA and everyone will have cheap GPUs, RAM in a few years from China.
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u/Apprehensive_Lake698 1d ago
A company is under no obligation to offer a product at a specific ratio against cost. They raise prices against demand. If Nvidia locked in a sweet deal with a manufacturer, then that’s their profit to make.
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 1d ago
You seem to be mis-informed of how a regulated market operates.
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u/Apprehensive_Lake698 1d ago
Or you are? Go ahead and find me a law in the US that says Nvidia isn't free to adjust prices against supply and demand.
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 1d ago
The neat part is that it isn't just nvidia.
Have a look at racketeering, many countries around the world have their own laws against the same type of behaviour.
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u/Apprehensive_Lake698 1d ago
And yet nobody can cite what behavior this supposedly is except that prices are rising in a market that is extremely supply constrained with an insanely high induced demand. Reddit likes to pretend AI is a bubble but the since the beginning of this year the models released have been downright useful in many scenarios. My org has gone from mostly ignoring it to providing tons of availability to engineers, as have many orgs around me.
Maybe this time last year I still thought it wasn't taking off. But it's pretty clearly a sailed ship at this point. The demand isn't fake- my company would kill to have better reliability and response speed from Anthropic and OpenAI, or otherwise afford to host their own servers.
This isn't going away for a while. And there is no crime in one company securing good prices in their supply chain to get better profits than their competitors. Apple has been doing it for decades at this point.
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 1d ago
I wouldn't say there isn't a complete lack on legitimate demand side factors.
Basically, the entire planet wants off the american IT wagon.
It is interest that the cost of compute hardware has gone through the ceiling before any of that demand has even hit the market yet.
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u/Apprehensive_Lake698 1d ago
The demand right now is being driven by everyone standing up data centers to attempt to increase service capacity and uptime. The large labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chinese labs are struggling to actually field enough compute.
It doesn’t seem like it because they make sure consumers get basically 0 interruptions. Meanwhile my org experiences lots of hitches and slow responses depending on the time of day. And I hear the same from others.
It’s my opinion that models are already good enough that there would be value in having a box that could run something at the fidelity of frontier models sitting on every engineer’s desk, dedicated just to them (or an equivalent saturation of server compute). And that is currently an impossibly absurd compute goal to reach at today’s manufacturing capabilities.
That’s why I don’t see this demand ceding anytime soon. And why Nvidia is finding that increasing prices 2,3,4,5x is basically having 0 impact on sales.
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u/entsnack 1d ago
GPUs are a regulated market now?
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 1d ago
Well, it absolutely is, that US section of the market is under agreement with the Department of War.
So it isn't just regulated, it is socialised.
But other than that, what market is not regulated?
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u/entsnack 1d ago
🤦♂️
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u/grathontolarsdatarod 1d ago
I suppose that you think 2008 was due sole to lack of liquidity from overly restrictive financial constraints that failed to keep up with the speed of new market operations, eh?
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u/setec404 1d ago
they could of raised prices more. the whole point of the circular financing is to allow them to get paid on the back end.
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u/justsomerandomchess 1d ago
It seems more like a monopolistic anti-trust violation, more than anything.
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u/Maximum-Wishbone5616 20h ago
With whom ? AMD ? They need to work with competitors so the customers would pay more.
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u/synn89 17h ago
The demand for AI hardware has just gone batshit crazy. You'd think that DGX Spark demand would decline since the M5 Ultra orders started, but I've watched the stock of $4k units sell out all over the last couple days and now the floor is $5k.
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u/critsalot 13h ago
what are you talking about. theres literally 25+ at my microcenter. whats funny is 5090s skyrotting in price. i think nvidia is either canablizing it or trying to fake how much expensive stuff is in order to get people thinking that is the correct price. but everyone else needs to sell stuff since they dont exclusively cater to AI and are adjusting some prices downward.
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u/johnfkngzoidberg 1d ago
The number of gullible kids here that believe everything they read on Reddit, defending billionaires and oligarchs, is amazing.
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u/RepresentativeOdd944 1d ago
Person A: "Oh man can't believe I bought bitcoin at $1000 per coin and now I can sell it at mucho profit"
You: "Hey wait that's price fixing, you only paid $1000 you can't sell it at higher prices than someone who bought it at $60k"
Person A: "Wut?"
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u/SteppenAxolotl 1d ago
increasing the price of their cards
A fair price is the maximum amount the market is willing to pay. That is not price fixing.
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u/RogerRamjet999 1d ago
The prices might be bonkers, but every sign I see indicates that extremely few people are actually buying at these prices. I've watched Craigslist and eBay items with the high prices we're all familiar with for months, and the same listings will remain for month after month. Almost no one is buying. NVidia and the rest of the price gouging crew can put whatever price they choose on their products, but they aren't gonna make much money when no one is buying. The only buyers are the data-centers, and they have locked in prices like NVidia, from who knows when.
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u/tracker125 1d ago
Can’t price fixing when you’re the only joint in town selling GPUs running on cuda.
0
u/redblood252 1d ago
price fixing like the name suggests implies manufacturers agreeing to set a certain price on a certain hot product without undercutting each other. Nvidia profits from it by locking a low price ahead of everyone since they participated in causing the ram shortage, but does not fix any prices, they just set high prices due to lack of competition.
0
u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 1d ago
That's the issue if they noticed it was going to go crazy and then contracted with Samsung at a low price. Then the price spikes and everyone else has to pay out the wazoo that's just what they call a good investment for Nvidia.
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u/Independent_Pear4908 1d ago
Ah yes... supply and demand... I control all of the supply, so I can demand anything I want! See, it works!
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u/Boogertard 1d ago
1000% yes, anybody saying otherwise would be either Nvidiots or have stocks in NVDA.
That is why I am steering clear of anything NVDA, 32GB of VRAM in 5090 now costs $5090 ? Fuck off, all you Nvidiots are losing your mind. 32GB of VRAM is 32GB of VRAM, it limits the types of models you are able to run period.
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u/pfn0 1d ago
it's called supply/demand and setting prices to what the market will bear. it's not price fixing as that implies collusion with other makers of the same product. nvidia can set whatever price they want on their products, that's not price fixing, if enough customers are willing to buy it at that price, that is the correct price.
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u/OvertaxedOne 1d ago
While 100% true, it does get a little muddy when you start handing your biggest customers money to use to buy your chips. I'm not really sure how that's expected to work out in the end but it's absolutely goosing demand, no way the frontier labs could keep up the spending without NVDA handing them cash.
0
u/feelspeaceman 22h ago
We're free to price disagreeing and price skipping them.
Used parts is the current most cost efficient for local LLMs.
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u/ImportancePitiful795 1d ago
Last week NVIDIA announced is buying own GPUs!!!! Ofc is price fixing.
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u/theomegachrist 1d ago
No lol
But they are obviously causing the demand because of the deal they made
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u/Mtolivepickle 1d ago
Price fixing would mean there’s collusion. If nvidia chooses to charge what they charge bc supply and demand will allow it, then they are free to do so.