Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

I wonder if supply chain constraints currently represent an inherent scepticism of manufacturers that demand will last. It feels to me like a side effect of the self-dealing / incestuous financing that is going on is that manufacturers are not willing to bet on it all materialising and therefore are not scaling up capacity nearly as much as they would if they thought it was certain.

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more.

The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such).

Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.

There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.

Doesn't solve the present shortage, but perhaps this is a good opportunity for software developers to start caring about memory usage again, since consumers may be forced to keep their existing hardware for a few more years.

If you want even more bad news: display panel makers also want to raise prices

"Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own."

https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...

These unintended (or intended?) affects of the AI boom are yet another cause for hate among a key demographic (people who use/buy/build PCs) who might otherwise be pro-AI but because of this are quite anti-AI.

Is the end result of this is that anything that is useful to AI going to be permanently more expensive, as the value a human hobbyist can get out of a certain amount of RAM will always be far less than the value a frontier AI model can get out of it?

The weird part is that RAM used to be the component you barely thought about when budgeting a build

Boy am I feeling this. I had my eye on building a new Threadripper machine, which requires DDR5 RDIMMs. Much to my surprise while happily building out a parts list one fine evening I learned that these are going for between $500 and $1000 for one single 16GB module right now. I think I'll hold off and squeeze a few more years out of DDR4 and PCIe 4.0.

I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.

I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.

Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.

Just had an HDD in my array die. Thought I'd replace it and add another spare. The prices are up 300% from 2 years ago. For spinning disks. Why?

the memory kit i bought earlier this year has been within ~10% of the price for the past 8 months. do with that as you may. a simple ddr5 stick of 6000 mt/s cl30 if wondering.

ever since i had my own money, gpu or general hardware had some excuse to fleece us. however, with ram the blatant collusion throughout history does not invite confidence.

this looks as dramatic as it does because the recent trend happened right after a major crash in prices. throughout the years, the usual price for an 8gb stick would hover around 50-80 usd (albeit laptop one, might be lower for desktop). ddr5 also started being 50-100% more expensive than the incumbent when it first dropped. it took a better part of a year to be in a similar price bracket as ddr4.

all this to say, this situation sucks but those of us with 64+ gigs, bought during the last crash, are eating good but got used to using much more memory than they really need.

while it is insane to pay a decent cpu price for 16 gigs today, getting a "good enough" computer still makes more economic sense than a max plan from a frontier lab.

My Dell rep quoted me $736 for a single 16GB RDIMM for the newer Dell Pro 16 laptop, which retails at its baseline configuration with 16GB for ~$1000.

It's crazy if you think that some years ago were the cheaper part of a personal computer compared to motherboard, cpu, gpu and so on.

I would be very surprised if the cost of the inputs being hoovered up by AI drops after this. Without ever forming a real cabal, I think the functional behaviour of the disparate people in this supply chain are going to hold on to the profit margin because there isn't a clear basis to stop them.

Sure, some imaginary perfect market would drop. This one is far from perfect, and it may drop by marginal percentages. It won't drop back to what it was before it went up 4x in price.

I would be very surprised if a market for older, superceded chips takes off, not because it isn't a brilliant idea, but because in order to use them, you have to make boards and systems which can consume them, and right now, the people who do that for a living are making a good living selling stuff as inputs to the people making a good living selling memory at inflated prices to the AI factories.

It's turtles all the way down.

What’s dumb is even older tech has gone up. Look at microsd and usb thumb drives. There’s a lot of price gouging just because they can. There’s a real shortage and then there’s just “it’s memory so price go up”

Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?

If this was a competitive market some suppliers would be ramping up pc memory and avoiding the AI buildout. But instead we see all of them diverting to GPU memory and cutting production of PC related parts universally. This sure looks like a coordinated move.

I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life. Consumer DRAM will stay very high while the cartel retools and moves back into that space. This means that the cartel wins and pays no real price for it when they shift back to producing consumer ram, they step immediately into a massive demand for pc RAM and keep raking in $$$. But they all have to do it in lockstep so that they have a market to come back to. Otherwise someone would become the king of PC ram and they couldn't re-enter easily if/when the AI server market fails. Being in lock-step means they rake in more money and mitigate the risk of an AI bubble, all at the cost of the consumer.

At least that is what this looks like to me. They know they could make a lot of money ignoring the AI server build out but they all magically didn't. A competitive market would have seen a spike in price when this much demand came in, but the lockstep movement of the big three shows that they are coordinated and not competing.

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...

I've got a dead older GPU (RTX titan, 24GB of GDDR6). It's been a paper weight for a while, core is damaged, but I realize I could probably sell it or just the memory chips for a decent price on eBay.

Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.

I've inadvertently stocked piled a bunch of DDR4 memory over the years. Usually bought them on an impulse when I saw a good deal, hoping to use it later when someone in the family/friend wanted a new gaming PC or for my own homelab projects. I'm happy with just using DDR4 at this point. The motherboards/CPUs are still relatively cheap either new or on secondary markets. With a decent GPU, the performance difference between DDR4 vs DDR5 is marginal. Most people won't even notice it. My point is, if cost is a factor for a new build, then stick with older hardware. Especially if your use case is gaming or home server.

Inflation, cost of living, purchasing power... I feel like life is getting really difficult right now for most people in ways it hasn't been in decades. I don't think memory prices going up this much this fast is good. I think it's a sign of how bad things are and that we are heading in a terrible direction. I think we're going to get a BIG wave of inflation in 2027.

Intel should probably restart their Optane and also get back in RAM.

I have written a llm compression quantization library called glq because of the high ram prices. Glq uses qtip Trellis quantization which are efficient at low bpw 2-4 bits. As a gamer and ai developer I want to squeeze more out of the same hardware. Glq runs with vLLM.

Open source https://github.com/cnygaard/glq

Pypi glq https://pypi.org/project/glq/

You will not believe the amounts of ram I will buy once the whole thing crashes. Like my raspberry pi clone will be running on a terabyte of ram.

I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure.

If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?

I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.

I already decided I won’t be upgrading any hardware for a few years and I’m going to ride this out. As right now we’re seeing that all prices of everything electronics is going up, my biggest worry is that once memory prices go down, the rest of the electronics will stay high. Eg after the price hike of all Apple electronics, will they go down again in prices in a few years after RAM goes down?

If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent.

I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.

This is more concerning than anything else happening in the AI space.

Really happy I got a new PC last year with 128 GB of RAM, 4 TB SSD, and an RTX 5090. This would have been prohibitively expensive now.

Ram, hdd, ssd, even blu-ray writers are expensive. I purchased mdisc blu-ray writer for $70 in 2021, I see people are trying to sell the same device for $500+ wtf

Are we observing corresponding work to make things use less memory though?

I've switched a lot of things to WASM and use way less RAM.

I'm really happy that I bought 32G of RAM and a 2T M.2 SSD for my desktop two years ago. In retrospect, of course, I should've bought 64G and 4T.

But what about Apple, with their memory-carrying SOC, one would think they are in a very cool position?

What do I read to quickly get a grasp of how economics works, from a high level perspective?

Storage has more than doubled as well. The same SSD (4TB M.2) I bought in September 2025 for £229 is now £500.

I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...

We had last bought 24TB+ (4x 24 racks, and some miscellaneous) of DDR5 4800 and 6400 last year while finishing a move off of AWS entirely. I tried to be responsible and prioritize a cold and warm spares of all our equipment and over allocation to ensure proper redundancy capacity. At the time it was a hard pill to swallow looking at our budget; but a few months ago we've started to offload some DIMMs on various channels. What went from a cost analysis between a cloud provider, to having to manage transit, circuits, equipment, a IP blocks, etc etc and all the operational obligations that come with it.. it ultimately covering our hosting costs entirely for the next ~18months *at least* (while "only" coming at the cost of having slightly less cold spares sitting in the bottom of our cages).

Given we're all 9004/9005 now, and that (from what I understand) Venice will support 6400. Will hopefully buy back in a glut comes ready for the next bubble. It's been wild, I even posted a small 32GB DDR5-4800 that was not getting recognized for $100 on eBay and it was literally purchased within ~15min of being live.

I cross my fingers that my 10 years old laptop and desktop will hold until the crazyness ends

While I regret not getting 64GB, I do not regret getting an additional 32GB stick for my PC, for a total of 48GB before the ram crisis kicked off. That's probably in the range of $600+ today for just $120.

Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"

I guess it's high time to stop using memory inefficient programming languages for any serious work.

Time for memristors?

Well this seems sustainable.

I'm waiting for China to start selling cheaper memory. They can have my money. The greed of US billionaires need to be lanced with a hefty kick in their wallets.

No hope in US but I hope EU regulators are taking note of this working on fix as we talk.

I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market.

The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.

So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.

I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.

My PC built February 2025, with a 5090 and 64GB of ram, is literally worth more than double than what I paid for it. I'm actually concerned what my home insurance would do if it was stolen, since the cost of replacement is so much higher than my invoices say.