@RustyCrab @Inginsub @IAMAL_PHARIUS tl;dr: Deepseek use few GPUs, everyone cancel Nvidia order for many GPUs (speculators think).

VRAM modules themselves are fairly cheap, though there's definitely work involved in making sure your PCB layouts and scheduling and so on make effective use of them.

dramexchange.com

That said, there's no reason high-VRAM needs to mean high board cost. It's not a particularly power hungry or low-yield part and GDDR5 is more than fast enough for training and inference at present.

NVidia was just been raking in insane amounts of money on insane data center orders while gen-over-gen bumping the prices of the consumer cards that USED to be the backbone of their business so they could reserve the silicon for datacenter stuff. So now, people are on very slow GPU upgrade cycles on the PC side with the 50 series underperforming in early reviews at the same time as it turns out you DON'T need to match Meta or X or OpenAI's massive fleets of H100s (which is what the clueless megacorps were insisting you needed). You can actually do it on a tiny fraction of the compute if you're just not retarded.

There's going to be a lot of bad actor information trying to make it sound like DeepSeek cheated somehow, but they didn't They'll try to claim they "distilled" OAI's models, but they used them for synthetic datasets at most. Everyone does that even if it's against TOS. Google is using Anthropics models to make synthetic datasets for Gemini. It's all over.

Anyway, Nvidia tanked because the speculators are not convinced everyone is cancelling their $100M orders for more H100s and Hopper stuff and so there's not going to be an infinite money printer in Jensen's oven anymore.

Also, here's a related way-too-long post I made replying to another thing about DeepSeek:
poa.st/objects/282ef9bb-d6c0-4e8e-9e7a-d71cacbf73b7