Here's why RAM prices are skyrocketing and SSDs and GPUs could soon follow suit

Another spanner in the works is we've seen just how important the US government considers AI to be for national security. We've seen the FBI director explain that AI innovation is "essential to safeguarding our nation's economic strength and national security."

We've also seen the Trump administration rename Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence . The US gov is clearly pinning a lot on keeping ahead in the AI race, which might mean pressure to keep demand up, perhaps even with subsidies from the administration.

On the other hand, off the back of the 'Hugging Face incident' , where several OpenAI models breached testing restraints and hacked the Hugging Place platform, there have been calls to have AI restricted, even by some AI companies themselves . Restrictions might slow down the AI industry freight train, but it's uncertain to what extent talk of restrictions will develop into actual restrictions.

So, rather than the last few months clarifying things, they have actually only really spurred further uncertainty. Whether AI demand will be sustained isn't only down to how well AI companies perform, but also what restrictions are placed upon the industry and how much the US government props it up. And regardless, there's little consensus over how long the memory shortage will continue for, though it's certainly not easing up right now.

Visible effects on memory pricing so far

You'll no doubt have noticed astronomical prices if you've been looking for a RAM upgrade lately. Charts on pcpartpicker.com are telling: since mid-2025, DDR4 and DDR5 consumer memory kit prices have climbed drastically, with particularly notable spikes for DDR5 memory since September 2025. That's true all the way from DDR4-3200 kits up to DDR5-6000 ones.

To take one concrete example, this 32 GB Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 kit on Amazon was stable at about $80-$100 for most of 2024 and 2025, but since October it started to climb up and up. Now, it's sitting at $553, an increase of over 5x. This, after a good few months of sustained DDR5 price drops through the tail end of 2024 and first half of 2025.

DDR4 isn't safe, either, as this 32 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 kit on Amazon shows. It dropped slowly from about $80 to about $50 over the course of 2024, where it remained stable throughout 2025 until the middle of the year. Then, it shot up in price over the second half of 2025 to $200, for a 300% increase to 4x the cost it was at previously. Now, it's at $258.

This trend fits all the market analysis we're seeing lately, which by now seems little more than pointing out the obvious: memory is now incredibly expensive. I recently compared actual prices today to ones from 2007 , to see just how far we've fallen, and it's not pretty.

Why the memory shortage affects RAM

The most obvious kind of PC hardware the memory shortage affects is RAM. The DRAM memory that is being gobbled up by AI customers comes from the same production facilities and lines that make the memory that goes into the best RAM for gaming . That's true not just for the latest RAM, too, but also for DDR4.

DDR4 memory is winding down production , which means less supply on the market. But we wouldn't necessarily expect this factor to cause such dramatically rising prices on its own. The fact that DDR4 prices are rising by such an extreme amount indicates that there simply isn't enough supply compared to demand across the memory industry in general, and that companies are looking for whatever memory they can get their hands on.

This tracks with what's been going on in the DRAM and memory industry behind the scenes. Samsung and SK Hynix, for instance, were reportedly charging customers up to 30% more for DRAM and NAND in the fourth quarter of 2025, and that trend will have likely continued.

Why the memory shortage affects SSDs

These price hikes are also affecting NAND flash memory, too, which is what goes into non-volatile SSD storage. Even if the SSDs in AI servers aren't the same as the ones we put in our gaming PCs, NAND production for these AI server SSDs can detract from NAND production for consumer SSDs once supply is limited.

Usually, AI servers use higher-quality SSDs than consumer ones, with different NAND, but when storage gets tight, AI server customers can start ordering more consumer-oriented NAND.

Adata has said that supplies of DRAM, NAND, and even HDD storage are now in shortage , for the first time in 30 years. And we've seen this reflected in SSD costs, with some of the cheapest SSDs now costing double what they did last year.

Trendforce's investigations have shown that cloud providers are increasingly being pushed towards QLC ('quad-level cell') SSDs like the ones found in many consumer desktops and laptops. This is driven in part because nearline HDDs (ones for infrequently accessed storage) are in short supply. Yep, that's right, even traditional hard drives are facing shortages and, surprise surprise, price hikes. Western Digital, for instance, has raised prices for all its HDD products .

I also received comment from SSD and memory maker Team Group confirming all this:

"We have indeed observed noticeable upward pressure on prices across the NAND and DRAM markets. The current situation is not merely a matter of price fluctuation but a result of an unprecedented supply shortage, primarily driven by surging demand for AI and DDR5 server platforms. In addition, as data storage demand in data centers continues to grow while hard drive manufacturers have yet to expand production, cold data storage has gradually shifted toward SSDs, further tightening NAND Flash supply."

Why the memory shortage affects GPUs

GPUs might seem a little further away from the memory price hikes than RAM and SSDs, but we've already seen that graphics cards are affected, too.

The memory that goes into AI datacenters is different to the memory that goes into our graphics cards, but memory makers are likely to divert production lines to the former as demand continues to increase, which means less GPU memory supply and higher GPU memory prices. And higher GPU memory prices of course means higher GPU prices.

We've heard word that Nvidia has raised the cost of its GPU kits for AIB partners , and that AMD has done the same with its partners for GDDR6 memory, too. These hikes have already reached the consumer market, as we see graphics card prices at retailers rising as the months go on.

We previously had comment from UK retailer Overclockers UK , saying:

"Due to the unprecedented explosive price increase in DDR4 and DDR5 desktop memory due to AI Server demand going into 2026, these price increases are now starting to impact graphics card [prices] with up to $15 price increases on 8G cards and upto $30 price increased on 16G cards.

"Once stock has sold out, expect some hefty price increases when Overclockers UK has to replenish stock at the higher cost due to the impact of memory price increases. In short NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY your GPU, as 2026 will see price increases."

Overclockers was right, of course, as 2026 has indeed seen many, many price increases.

Why the memory shortage affects gaming PCs

Pre-built gaming PCs, of course, use memory, so the gaming PC market is not too far downstream from the memory market has seen a big knock-on impact. As system builders and OEMs started to run out of the memory stocks they purchased before prices started skyrocketing, they've had to to order more, and have passed that extra cost onto customers.

We already knew this was coming, as in December 2025, CyberpowerPC released a statement saying that come December 7, 2025, it would adjust upwards the pricing on all its systems. The company said that "global memory (RAM) prices have surged by 500% and SSD prices have risen by 100%."

We've since seen gaming PCs shoot up in price, with great deals being few and far between, and deals that were previously great now climbing in price. I check for the best gaming PC deals almost every week, and I've been quite shocked at just how much prices have climbed. We're also seeing fewer and fewer PCs using DDR5 RAM, and fewer using 32 GB. Many just have a single 16 GB stick in them.

The cause is AI

The main cause of these rising memory and storage prices is the unprecedented scale of investment in AI.

AI servers tend to require an astronomical amount of storage and memory, and the processors have to be able to access data in said storage and memory pretty quickly. Training AI requires great volumes of data, as does running inference once the AI is trained—and often re-training is continually ongoing. Usually this data is unstructured, as AI will pull from lots of different areas as it learns and forms its neural network or probabilistic models.

SSDs are ideal for this when it comes to storage, and for memory, high bandwidth memory (HBM) is what most AI server companies are looking for. This isn't the same as the DDR memory we get in our gaming PCs , but the memory chips are DRAM just like we use in our familiar DIMMs. AI servers buying up HBM means less DRAM in the market for our RAM kits, which causes prices to rise.

Over the last few months, we've seen the AI industry receive and shuffle around some seriously mind-boggling amounts of cash and capital.

OpenAI's Stargate project was announced at the start of 2025 and plans to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure in the US over four years. That project is now thoroughly underway, and has even spread beyond the borders of the US into the UK .

We've seen Nvidia recently invest $100 billion into the Sam Altman-headed company, and OpenAI invest tens of millions into AMD and agree to purchase $300 billion of computing power from Oracle over the next five years. Plus many more deals and investments, such as with Broadcom —and these are just considering OpenAI, the poster child for this AI era alongside Nvidia.

Speaking of Nvidia, the company recently said it will be receiving "over $500 billion of third-party capital" from banks and investment companies. At present and ignoring the memory makers, it's one of the the only big companies actually making a profit from AI , alongside AMD.

With all this money being flung around and data centers springing up so quickly that they're having to be housed in tents , it's little wonder that the memory and storage industries are experiencing a drain in supply. Which is great for them, of course, as they can rake in the money from raised product prices and booming share prices , as well as sell out their entire HBM supply .

Memory shortages and rising prices have been predicted for a while now. Even over two years ago ago, for instance, Micron said that the AI would "impact the supply demand balance" as it's "made memory sexy again" . Storage shortages, not so much. Also in 2024, Trendforce analysis predicted that storage prices would decline by as much as 15% over the final quarter of the year, and there was no prediction of the shortages we're seeing now. Peaks and troughs are normal in the memory industry, due to the ebbs and flows of supply and demand, but the recent shortages and price hikes don't fit that mould. They're simply too extreme.

What's to come?

There's little chance that these memory and storage manufacturers will create much more supply than is currently needed any time soon, either. For one, this can sting these companies if demand unexpectedly drops, as they discovered in 2023 . Second, whirring up new or increased semiconductor production is no simple matter and can take years, and the demand from the AI sector doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Memory makers have started building new fabs , but these are unlikely to be up and running in time to help DRAM prices until 2028 at the earliest.

There is, of course, the chance that the entire AI industry gives a loud and audible pop as what many are calling the AI bubble bursts. To simplify, the reason some think the AI industry is a bubble is because there's tons more investment than revenue in the industry right now, which arguably means more and more money must be pumped into it to keep it going under the hopes that some day the revenue will appear.

To this end, a lot of the money involved seems to be flowing back and forth between the same companies. For instance, Nvidia invests in OpenAI, and OpenAI buys hardware from Nvidia. This creates what some see as a circular system where money is continually injected with little actual return, inflating the metaphorical bubble until eventually it pops like the housing market did in 2008 and the dot-com market did in 2000 .

We must remember, however, that although the dot-com bubble burst and swept away much of the internet as we knew it, it did leave behind the seeds for the internet as we now know it. In a similar way, the AI bubble bursting could leave behind the seeds for a less inflated world of AI rather than the current AI industry that we know.

That could still sort out the memory and storage market, though. As it stands, vast swathes of memory and storage capacity is spoken for by big AI companies well before it's packaged and ready to be installed into servers, most of it in advance. And these production commitments are based on the current rate of arguably inflated AI market expansion. If that inflation comes to a sudden end and reversal, we might be dealing with oversupply again and lower prices.

Much market analysis sees the current memory shortage lasting for another three or four years . This tracks with at least what some, such as ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger , think about the so-called AI bubble: that sure, it might burst, but that won't be for "several years." In which case, we might have to settle in for a long haul of high memory, storage, and even GPU prices.

There has been some indication that tides might turn for the better, however. Acer's CEO, for instance, recently reportedly said that "it's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030" and expects prices to drop around mid-2027. We've also recently seen AI company share prices drop , which some have taken to be a sign of the AI bubble deflating.

It's still all an open question, though. Different analysts predict different things, and it very much seems like a case of 'wait and see.'