Assertion Contradicted AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Computer memory costs drop 50 percent every eight months

Haoyuan 'H.Y.' Li · a16z Podcast | The Storage Renaissance · Jan 2, 2019 · at 11:25

Haoyuan 'H.Y.' Li, creator of Alluxio, discusses the economics of memory and enterprise storage architecture on the a16z Podcast.

0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.9s

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“The cost is decreasing very fast. It's about every eight months, the cost decreased by 50%.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

The cost of computer memory decreases by approximately 50 percent every eight months.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

The claim that the cost of computer memory decreases by approximately 50% every eight months (equivalent to a ~65% annual reduction) is inaccurate across all historical timeframes and particularly false around 2017. Historically (1957–2010), DRAM prices per gigabyte decreased by roughly 30% to 36% annually. After 2010, the rate slowed significantly to around 15% annually. Furthermore, around 2016–2018, memory prices experienced a major global supply shortage where retail and contract DRAM prices actually surged by over 100%, rather than decreasing.

Long-term memory price datasets show DRAM prices decreased by ~30%–36% per year between 1957 and 2010, well short of the ~65% annual decrease required for a 50% drop every 8 months.
Post-2010 memory cost reductions slowed to ~15% per year due to semiconductor scaling limits.
During 2016–2018, DRAM contract and retail prices experienced severe inflation (rising over 100%) due to global supply shortages, directly contradicting any cost decrease during the period of the claim.

Checked against

[1] explainx.ai [2] aiimpacts.org [3] thememoryguy.com [4] dramexchange.com [5] gamersnexus.net [6] techpowerup.com [7] accountancyage.com

DRAM price per GB 2016 2017 2018 TrendForce DRAMExchange DRAM cost per gigabyte history 2015 2016 2017 2018 historical DRAM price reduction annual percentage decrease 1990s 2000s 2010s

assessed as of 2026-07-31

This assessment is an AI reading of a public statement, made against the cited references with the confidence shown. It can be wrong. The quote, the tape and the references are all on this page; if something is off, use report an error below. full disclaimer →

Mentioned

memory

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