Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
That’s according to BlueSky user Steve Lin (spotted by PCWorld’s own Mark Hachman), who snapped a photo at Central Computers, a retail chain in central California. The store cites a global shortage in memory chips causing prices to change drastically every day. “Because of this, we can’t display fixed prices on certain products at this time,” reads the sign posted in front of a case full of Corsair RAM. “If you have questions or want current pricing on any item, our team is happy to help.”
A Reddit poster saw similar signs at a MicroCenter store, citing “market volatility” (via Tom’s Hardware). Another user in the BlueSky thread showed a photo that appears to be a Best Buy case of RAM, showing a 32GB set of two DDR5 DIMMs going for over $400 USD, a 64GB kit for over $900. A look at Best Buy’s online shop shows that as of today, that pricing is accurate.
For the sake of comparison, I bought a pair of Patriot DIMMs at the same capacity and 6,000MHz speed a year and a half ago for $155. This is, in a word, insane.
Best Buy
There are a lot of moving parts here, between a higher demand for DDR5 as DDR4-standard processors and motherboards finally exit the market, and prices in the United States in particular being stressed by a year of wildly fluctuating tariffs and exceptions. But the biggest driving factor is the booming construction of “AI” data centers, feeding a massive and growing industry with an unquenchable hunger for memory and storage. Data centers aren’t gobbling up the same consumer-grade memory that goes into new laptops and gaming desktops, but there is a limited amount of production capacity popping out memory modules from factories.
If a memory producer like Samsung, Micron, or SK Hynix can max out its capacity with gigantic, profitable orders from companies producing memory and storage for data centers, it will. That leaves little room for the production of new consumer-grade memory, and even less for the memory sold in its own packaging as RAM DIMMs and solid-state drives, since the lion’s share will go to PC manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo.
As prices climb higher, it’s possible we could be seeing other exacerbating factors, such as scalpers buying up what scant supply is available, or retailers getting in a cheeky little bump hoping it’ll go unnoticed in the chaos. That’s what happened to graphics cards a few years ago, between the cryptocurrency boom and higher demand for gaming PCs during the pandemic. While prices for completed laptops and pre-built desktops are slower to change as their long manufacturing times lock in rates from weeks or months before, it seems inevitable that the cost of completed consumer electronics will rise, too.
Memory prices may get a much-needed correction before too long, either from the market adjusting itself around a new reality, or as demand for new and as-yet-unproven “AI” capacity goes down. Economists are in dread of the “AI” bubble collapsing so quickly and catastrophically that it takes the rest of the U.S. economy (and large chunks of the global economy) with it, in a mirror of the dot-com boom and bust of 2000. At that point, memory should become more affordable…though we might have a lot more to worry about than our Counter-Strike frame rate.
