This is the PCPartPicker chart that I monitor: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.... - $900 for 2x32GB, used to be $200 a year ago.

The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on.

Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(

GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this.

Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?

I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.

I looked at my eBay receipt from 2023 and I paid $84.98 for a "Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4" listing and now the equivalent on eBay "Buy It Now" is $374.99 for "Kingston FURY Renegade 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 RAM 3200MHz (KF432C16RBK2/64)". What a timeline it has become for consumer computing three years later!

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened.

Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.

Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.

All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.

I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.

"The costs are negligible and justified when compared to all the benefits. If you look at the performance gains, the overall cost has in fact been reduced."

- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.

I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I've been collecting some DDR5-based systems for months, but with the prices, they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty). I've priced them at about what the CPU + RAM + SSD would sell for separately, and I'm not willing to go much lower than that.

And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).

Same thing with storage.

I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.

"back in my time", a dialup and 32 megs(!) of ram was enough for most stuff, including internet browsing.

I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc.

Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore.

edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.

AMD just brought the popular 5800X3D back out of retirement to give people maintaining the DDR4 based platforms something to buy. Last I checked used DDR4 was half the price of used DDR5 after the prices of both shot up.

Pretty insane. I built a Framework Desktop PC back in November. The motherboard (with 128G DDR5 RAM) was $1800. Now it's $2859. Almost 60% increase in 6 months.

I'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.

Time to migrate all those electron "native" apps to actual native code. I bet with some decent optimizations 4GB will be more than enough for casual user, and still with some free memory to spare.

It's unbelievable and it's only getting worse.

A 2x32GB DDR5 kit I paid $150 for 11 months ago costs $910 today from the same retailer. A 2x16GB DRR4 kit that was $105 last year is now $230.

The RAM alone in my newest machine would sell for over double what I paid for the entire machine one year ago.

I tried to buy new SD cards for my camera. The cards I used to buy at $28 are now $80-120... if you can find them. Another cheaper card I used to buy for $19 is now $46. It's just absolutely insane at this point.

My strategy of just buying the best quality parts within my budget when I need a new build has never failed me yet. Is pretty insane that I bought 4x 32gig dd4 ram for $400 in 2024; literally the same part I paid $200 now goes for over $900:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7X9P1W

Consumers need to start playing legal warfare against the companies for openly distorting the market. The ramifications will only hurt us and there needs to be a true comeuppance.

Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.

I am thankful that both my partner and myself are in a pretty good spot when it comes to our gaming PC's. I had hoped to double my RAM at some point but I am still at a comfortable spot.

I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.

The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.

To me, this is just one more thing that makes the current times we live in "not fun".

How are people selling RAM (and GPUs) these days? I have a bunch to offload but Facebook Marketplace and eBay don't sound like they're very great for small, very expensive ($1-3k) electronics...

Crazy... I hope this is temporary. If this is the new normal, we're all going to be priced out of computers eventually.

The demise of personal computing. All according to plan

I like to look at the memory I bought a little less than a year ago which has gone from $300 at time of purchase in summer 2025 to $1250 to $1500 today. Absolute insanity.

Crucial has "good" prices for DDR5 6000mhz memory on Amazon. The downside is you have to wait for shipping -- I had to wait a couple weeks. I bought when these were $300 and equivalent memory prices were like $500 at the time.

Been solid so far for 6-ish months.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-6000MHz-Overclocking-Desktop-...

It's amazing that after all these years, a famous criticism of Neuromancer seems to have been mooted. That is, the bit about Case having that stash of stolen RAM that was his "big score" for the moment, and how Linda Lee stole it from him, yadda, yadda. For years people have read that and said something like "WTF? RAM isn't valuable enough to be a black market commodity".

Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!

Hobbyist computing is dead for the foreseeable future. These prices are untenable.

How much of is this is actually due to the AI hype cycle, and what's the impact of the global energy clusterfuck that is the Strait of Hormuz?

All started by openai wafer capacity commitments that aren't being met anymore... The ECC ram systems I've bought are now worth more than the original purchase price of the entire system and I've been debating on just selling them since they're now worth nearly double their value which would outperform any stock trades I've ever made any given year lol.

This is insane. Didn’t know how bad it got. I bought a mini PC a few years ago with 64 gigs in it for a home VM server for like $600 total. Looks like I’m keeping it a while.

Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.

Crazy, the other day I looked in my local store order history and say that I bought G.SKILL RipJaws V F4-3600C18D-32GVK, a DDR4 32 GB 3600 MHz kit of two sticks.

I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation.

Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).

My unraid server alerted me today that one of the 28TB HDDs is at 100% capacity. I bought that drive for $290, a year ago. Today, it costs $590.

I'm at least happy I went for DDR4 RAM when I was building this server.

I bought a prebuilt mid-2025: 32GB DDR5-6000, 2TB SSD, 9800X3D, 5070 Ti for $1900. This happened to be good timing but you can still get these specs for a similar price occasionally eg [1] was $1899 last week. Luckily for me I bought a DDR5-6000 64GB kit for $200 for no real reason. And yeah that same kit is almost $1000 today. Plus I still have the old 32GB kit.

If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too.

Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc.

But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite.

[1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-...

[2]: https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...

250 EUR (that is with VAT for 2x16 GB DDR4 [1] seems like a fair price.

[1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...

I guess I'm old and haven't paid much attention recently, but $375 for 32Gb doesn't sound that bad to me.

But then again I remember spending hundreds of dollars as a high school student to upgrade my family's 8Mb desktop to 40 Mb.

At one point I remember DDR2 ECC coating like $150-$180

Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.

Lord help you if you build an HEDT with a boatload of “tuner” memory to get a meaningful boost on actual productivity where memory latency and secondary/tertiary timings matter.

I built in February 2025, and my two 48GB DIMMs were $440. Last month I checked and they were $1800 if you could even find them still in stock.

For my workloads it was like getting 2 - 2.5 more CPU cores worth of performance, so it was worth it, since the CPU was already as beefy as it could be. It was a reasonable premium then. Today? I’m not sure the math would still math.

I remember when 32MB of RAM cost $375. I paid it anyway, even as a poor undergraduate, so I could avoid swapping while running g++, emacs, and X11 at the same time, on my cheap linux machine

I was in the US two weeks ago, looked everywhere for 1 module 32 gb ddr4 sodimm, couldn't find it anywhere. But apparently it was pretty expensive as well (from the price tag on the empty shelf in best buy)

I bought 64GB of DDR4 in December of '24. Best timing-the-market of my life.

Take your ram budget, buy micron stock, wait a few days, sell it and buy ram lol

I bought a PC with 128GB of memory and a 3090 TI to do research on GPT-J in late 2022. This is the first time I've bought a piece of hardware that's appreciated in value.

I understand that standing up memory fabrication plants is no small feat, but how much of this is due to memory fabricators' patent moat? To what degree is this caused by IP barriers vs. the difficulty in actually manufacturing the things? If it's the case that even older-generation / process-node RAM is also going up in value, aren't those 'easier' to produce?

Is it just me or do I have the feeling that we have gone too far with our memory requirements? Why everyone now suddenly need 32Gb, 64Gb or hundreds of additional Gb of RAM?

Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments?

For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of any kind, nor I train LLMs at all), a system with 16Gb seems to be more than enough for a vast number of applications.

Not protecting the consumer segment, as well as industrial, corporate and government usages is not fair and a short term move in a democracy, in particular with who is in management these days

Now some will bill Taiwan and Korea the same way they bill consumers and industries when they need RAM, should they need us.

Chinese companies were at least producing more and more to brace for restrictions from western manufacturers

Just looked for my order receipt out of curiosity, this was in Jan 23: £160 for Kingston FURY Renegade 32GB (16GB x 2) 6000MT/s DDR5 CL32 DIMM Silver

GPU prices have gone 5-10% down in the last month.

Maybe we can start to become a little less profligate with our memory usage.

There certainly is lots and lots of potential.

Not just AI, tariffs also affect price.

Take memory in house Apple (the talent is already there) its time again to kick another hardware supplier out and move on ala Intel, Nvidia, AMD, IBM, and Qualcomm outgoing in 2027-2028 if you want to continue to built devices and actually sell something to the public.

8G ought to be enough for anybody.

Kicking myself for not getting the other 2 sticks when I built my computer. I didn't really need them and had them in the cart, just never pulled the trigger.

Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.

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Honestly that seems slightly down even if it’s still ridiculous. The ram I bought for $100 a year ago was $500 a couple of months ago. Could just be the particular sticks I got though

I've taken advantage of this.. Over the last 6 months I actually made money on my old PC parts inventory, but don't plan on buying any new hardware anytime soon.

I bought 96gb (2x48gb) of relatively high speed DDR5 last year for about that price... the price inflation on ram and storage is insane.

this is almost certainly a us tarriff/China sanctions thing rather than an AI thing. sticks here outside of the us tarriff system never really changed, I just bought like a month or two ago 128GB DDR5 for $500 at a time when US best buy was listing the same kingston 32GB sticks for $200 each.

That said, getting hold of them was hard and needed a special order.

I bought a server with 768GB RAM a couple of years ago, for cheap. Today just the RAM itself is worth more than I paid for the entire server. DDR4... Same thing with SSD, two years ago you could buy 4TB SSDs for like 250 USD, and today its more than $700. Madness!

Man, I remember my first 8MB cost over $400.

I am counting my blessings after updating my and my wife's gaming PCs right before all of this happened.

Does anyone know when will prices for RAM and drives drop to 2025 levels?

The question is to buy or wait.

I just bought 128gb ecc ram ddr4 2667mhz $850 which indeed was +50% of purchase.

Well, if this helps back to native, less Electron bloat, great.

It’s time to bring back all the old software hacks that were so common in the 90s

While back I recalled I had 16GB of DDR4 somewhere. I went and found it in an old bin box. It's now in my safe in case I need it for a machine.

This is the stupidest freaking timeline...

I built a little home server last year, and only put 32 of the total 64 GB I wanted. The rationale was that RAM is cheap, and I could spend that month's fun budget on a 8TB harddrive instead.

Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.

Can we just go back to pre-AI world?

So I thought I would not be paying for that LLM BS just because you don't haven't been suckered into a subscription... I guess I was just lacking sufficient _intelligence_ to realize this kind of thing would happen.

Regret not buying more RAM last summer. And SSD:s as well. Prices are silly.

The most disappointing part is not the price alone, it's that despite the price increase, the quality of the modules are still the same or even worsened.

Here's another data point for you all. Last year in April 2025 I bought 32gb DDR5 at $123.69. I checked it this most recent April and the exact same product was $679. All prices in Canadian dollars.

And yet there's plenty available if you have the $375. That only makes sense if there's no shortage, but plenty of price gouging under the guise of a shortage.

Crap I regret never buying DDR5. Now I'm stuck on AM4. For now no issue but it can't last too long.

I fucking hate AI

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We're all grownups, why should we care about RAM prices? /s

This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.

Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.

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Must feed the AI slop machines!!

As an ancient person, and considering my sense of inflation of other things I actually buy, This doesnt sound that high to me. At some point in my life CPU Ghz stopped rising and cores was the only thing to grow, and that seemed to be more slowly than clock rate did. So I guess I fully expected that asymptote to apply to RAM too. If you plot price per GB of ram across last 25 years the memory prices growth is barely a bump in the chart. In (nearly) no other physical product do we expect prices to plummet over time whilst simultaneously getting way better. Maybe we're just spoiled by the first 50 - 75 years of wild innovation that most new things go through before they asymptote ?