A while ago people were saying RAM prices had doubled. Unfortunately, it’s time to face the new reality: they’ve already tripled.
According to price charts on PCPartPicker, RAM prices have seen explosive growth across the board. And it’s not just DDR5 — older DDR4 kits have jumped as well, with high-capacity kits seeing the worst spike.
For example, a DDR4-3200 2×32GB kit that cost about $120 mid-summer is now going for $360.
What’s happening? Market manipulation or real demand driven by AI?
The core issue is that modern AI workloads require huge amounts of memory, so chip manufacturers are selling batches long before they reach consumer retail.
In reality, there are only three major DRAM chip manufacturers: Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Everyone else either produces a negligible amount or simply assembles modules with chips sourced from those three.
Brands like Kingston, Corsair, Crucial, TeamGroup, Lexar, Patriot, etc. don’t fabricate DRAM ICs — they design PCBs and assemble modules.
Major markets collapsed first
The US and EU got wiped out almost to zero. Not just “expensive” — literally out of stock.
Amazon UK still has some reasonable listings, but they’ve already introduced a “1 kit per customer” limit, like wartime rationing. Ireland is heading the same way.
Real-world example
Two months ago I replaced a Patriot 2×32GB DDR5-6000 kit under warranty. It originally cost about €170 a year ago. Today the same kit costs €670. Six hundred seventy euros.
And sure, beef went up 3× too — maybe cows in Ireland just stopped eating grass.
But why is old-stock hardware inflating just as fast?
And don’t forget Nvidia’s recent deals with Samsung and Hyundai. As a result, everything in the ecosystem is getting more expensive — SSDs, GPUs, and soon enough I wouldn’t be surprised if even cars get pricier.
AI still demands massive RAM capacity
Even for home use, running local LLMs reasonably now requires at least 96GB, and ideally 192–256GB of RAM.
Buying RAM cheap is no longer realistic, but you can still order a full LLM-ready workstation for around €1,200 — at least for now.
I decided not to wait
I recently built myself a workstation with 192GB of RAM for around €2,000 — probably catching the last train before prices jump again.
But not everyone will be that lucky.
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