Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/server-dram-prices-surge-50-percent

by walterbell • 9 months ago

140 123 9 months ago

vondur3• 9 months ago

Desktop memory has also increased in price. I think it’s twice as expensive for DDR5 than it was 6 months ago.

piva00• 9 months ago

I've just built a gaming PC (after more than a decade without one), for curiosity's sake I just compared the prices I paid for DDR5 2 months ago to now, and at my location it already shows a 25-30% increase. Bonkers...

pton_xd• 9 months ago

Same, just checked and the "G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo Series 64GB (2 x 32GB)" RAM I bought 9 months ago for $208 is now $464. That's crazy!

big-and-small• 9 months ago

It's very noticeable:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

zparky• 9 months ago

Yep, DDR5 prices have nearly doubled in less than 2 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5200....

vondur3• 9 months ago

I was able to get a bundle deal from Microcenter here in SoCal with the Ryzen 9950x, motherboard and 32GB of RAM for $699. They have since removed the RAM from all the bundles.

embedding-shape9• 9 months ago

Are those graphs specifically for the US? When I change the country in the top right, it doesn't seem like the graphs are changing, and considering they're in USD, I'm assuming it's US-only?

Is the same doubling happening world-wide or is this US-specific, I guess is my question?

Edit: one data point, I last bought 128GB of RAM in March 2024 for ~€536, similar ones right now costs ~€500, but maybe the time range is too long.

epistasis• 9 months ago

Even used memory has doubled in price. I was thinking of putting together a high-memory box for a side project, and reddit posts from a year ago all have memory at 1/2 to 1/3 of current ebay prices for the same part.

tempest_• 9 months ago

Down stream this is driving up DDR4 demand as well :(

guywhocodes• 9 months ago

I was looking att filling my EPYC servers empty slots, what I paid $90/stick 2-3 years ago is now $430

Scoundreller• 9 months ago

These price hikes do fun things to the whole market.

In one of the last GPU booms I sold some ancient video card (recovered from a PC they were literally going to put in the trash) for $50.

And it wasn’t because it was special for running vintage games. The people that usually went for 1st rate gpus went to 2nd rate. Pushing the 2nd rate buyers to 3rd rate, creating a market for my 4th rate gpu.

jdc0589• 9 months ago

I picked a really bad time to start working on a DIY mini-NAS. A ram upgrade is more than what I paid for the whole Thinkcentre M720q.

HPsquared• 9 months ago

Has the death of Moore's Law been officially announced yet?

renewiltord• 9 months ago

Moore’s Law has nothing to do with price.

forinti2• 9 months ago

It does but indirectly. Less power and more integration mean things get cheaper to build and run.

charcircuit• 9 months ago

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year."

I would say that a claim about component cost has something to do with price.

jandrese• 9 months ago

Gordan Moore died two years ago so I'm not sure who would be the official for declaring it dead.

But there have been plenty of articles over the last decade saying that it was done around 2015 or so.

brador• 9 months ago

Regular Monopoly/Duopoly like the storage market or Nepopoly like the GPU market?

Either way, without competition expect it to increase further.

markerz• 9 months ago

It's intense market demand by people with lots of money against products that have a very long supply chain. Even with multiple sellers competing, this kind of demand is insane, and the buyers pockets run deep.

The other way I look at this is that these companies have been collecting an insane amount of wealth and value over the last 2-3 decades, are finally in a situation where they feel threatened, and are willing to spend to survive. They have previously never felt this existential threat before. It's basically bidding wars on houses in San Francisco, but with all the wealthiest companies in the world.

tuhgdetzhh2• 9 months ago

I bet some are already buying the highest capacatiy DDR5 DIMMs in bulk to later put them on eBay in the upcoming major DRAM shortage.

Havoc• 9 months ago

I’ve been selling unused ddr4 on eBay. It’s not as profitable as one would think tbh even with elevated demand. Only making a profit on the ones I initially acquired 2nd hand

tuhgdetzhh2• 9 months ago

I think people who bought a high-end nvidia graphics card in the max. memory config pre-AI Hype, would have made a very decent deal on eBay. DRAM is yet to come.

dist-epoch• 9 months ago

OpenAI's Stargate project to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

South Korean SK Hynix has exhausted all of its chip production for next year and plans to significantly increase investment, anticipating a prolonged "super cycle" of chips, spurred by the boom of artificial intelligence, it said on Wednesday after reporting a record quarterly profit.

https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/korean-chip-race-sk-hynix-has...

Adata chairman says AI datacenters are gobbling up hard drives, SSDs, and DRAM alike — insatiable upstream demand could soon lead to consumer shortages

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/adata-ch...

lousken3• 9 months ago

Have we given up on edge AI this early?

recursive2• 9 months ago

Does edge AI require less RAM?

Macha• 9 months ago

I would expect edge AI requires much more RAM at a global level due to less efficient utilisation.

lousken3• 9 months ago

Less ram? Not really. Less hardware? Yes. That machine is already in the wild, so why not let it have proper AI accelerator + increase memory the machine has - also the data transfer problem is solved since it's on that machine.

sleepyguy• 9 months ago

Manufacturers learned a valuable lesson a few years ago: overproduction leads to lower prices. Samsung was the first to address this issue by scaling back, and other manufacturers soon followed suit (collusion, cough cough). The past couple of years have been extremely profitable for the entire industry, and they’re not about to increase production and risk hurting their profits.

I suspect they would rather face shortages then satisfy market demand.

tehjoker2• 9 months ago

lower prices are ok if they are selling more units, the question is whether the price point * units is Pareto optimal

overproduction means unsold units which is very bad, you pay a cost for every unsold unit

underproduction means internal processes are strained, customers are angry, but a higher price per a unit... can you increase the price by more than you are underproducing?

bob1029• 9 months ago

If we want to engage with game theory here, I would argue that overproduction is a much safer bet than underproduction from the perspective of Samsung, et. al. Underproduction brings additional caveats that manifest as existential risks. For example, encouraging your customers to move to entirely different technologies or paradigms that completely obviate the need for your product in the first place. If you leave a big, expensive constraint in place for long enough, people will eventually find paths around it.

I think the Nintendo ecosystem has been a pretty good example of where intentional underproduction can backfire. Another example might be that migration to SSD was likely accelerated by (forced) underproduction of spinning disks in 2011. We use SSDs for a lot of things that traditional magnetic media would be better at simply because the supply has been so overpowering for so long.

You can train your customers to stick with you by bathing them in product availability. Overproduction can be a good thing. Inventory can be a good thing. We've allowed a certain management class to terrorize us into believing this stuff is always bad.

9rx2• 9 months ago

I suspect they would rather face shortages then satisfy market demand.

Doubtful. A shortage is normally a scary prospect for a vendor. It means that buyers want to pay more, but something is getting in the way of the seller accepting that higher price. Satisfying market demand is the only way to maximize profitability.

Why do you think companies would prefer to make less profit here?

chronciger• 9 months ago

Why do you think companies would prefer to make less profit here?

Because if you make too much profit, you get regulated by government.

KurSix4• 9 months ago

Yeah, it's easy to jump to the collusion theory, especially with this industry's, let's say, history. But honestly, I think it's less of an evil conspiracy and more just good old-fashioned fear mixed with inertia. These guys remember getting burned hard by oversupply cycles where they were left with mountains of useless chips. Nobody's gonna drop tens of billions on a new fab that could become a pumpkin in three years if the AI hype train just slows down a little

And on top of that fear, you have the pure technical reality: you can't just flip a switch and start pumping out wildly complex HBM instead of mass-market DDR5. That's like trying to retool a Toyota factory to build Bugattis overnight. So you get this perfect storm: a massive, near-vertical demand spike hits an industry that's both terrified of risk and physically incapable of moving fast. So yeah, they're absolutely milking the situation for all it's worth. But it's happening less because they're master villains and more because they're both scared and incredibly slow

bluedino• 9 months ago

Maybe I can push for some HBM systems now

yread• 9 months ago

To be fair, RAM was way too cheap. I got 128GB for a laptop for 300eur. That's ridiculous. Now it's much more reasonable 720 eur (and sold out)

johnisgood• 9 months ago

May you please help me out financially then, friend? ;P Willing to work for it, too!

confirmmesenpai2• 9 months ago

it's ridiculous only if you compare it with Apple RAM prices

ionelaipatioaei• 9 months ago

I cannot express in words how much I hate this mentality.

Ekaros2• 9 months ago

I hope this AI craze will crash soon enough. Maybe then various things normalize in price again. And consumers get cheaper products with less limitations.

654wak654• 9 months ago

Best we're getting is probably a stop to the price raises, but no price cuts. Kids will continue to grow up not knowing a $600 flagship GPU or a $1000 gaming PC.

add-sub-mul-div• 9 months ago

That's exactly how it works. A whole generation is already unaware that you used to be able to buy PC games anonymously, offline, without a rent seeking middleman service.

gordonhart• 9 months ago

$1000 in 2010 is ~$1500 today — kids won't know these prices because the currency has been debased pretty rapidly in recent years.

zonkerdonker• 9 months ago

It really is a damn shame, but before AI, it was cryptomining. Desktop GPU prices have been inflated to nonsense levels for gamers, to the point where console vs. PC isnt even really question anymore.

nostrademons2• 9 months ago

Depends whether or not there's a big bubble burst that involves bankruptcies and Big Tech massively downscaling their cloud computing divisions. Most likely they'll just end up repurposing the compute and lowering cloud rates to attract new enterprise customers, but if you see outright fire sales from bankruptcies and liquidations, people will be able to pick up computer hardware at fire sale prices.

jonas21• 9 months ago

For $50, kids these days can buy a Raspberry Pi that would have run circles around the best PC money could buy when I was a kid.

Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build.

I find it hard to pity kids who can't afford the absolute latest and greatest when stuff that would have absolutely blown my mind as a kid is available for cheap.

nubinetwork2• 9 months ago

The Radeon 8500 from 2001 was even cheaper than that, roughly 300 USD... the voodoo 3 3500 from 1999 was roughly 200 USD... if you ask me, we don't need graphics chips as intense as we have now, but the way they crank them out every year and discontinue the older models ruins most of the value of buying a GPU these days.

embedding-shape9• 9 months ago

Is that really the cause of this price increase? I still don't understand if this price surge is specifically for the US (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691) or if it's worldwide, I'm not sure I notice anything here in Southern Europe, so either that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true.

confirmmesenpai2• 9 months ago

you should look more carefully, RAM prices are up across Europe, 40% or so

zrm• 9 months ago

In the US some of it could be tariffs. Micron is a US company with some US fabs but most of theirs are in other countries and Samsung and Hynix are both South Korea.

overfeed2• 9 months ago

that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true.

This is a global issue that is most severe in the US due to its share of hyperscalers and their, uh, scale. You may not feel the effects yet, but it is matter of time until someone notices your market has a RAM glut, while 30-55% of their orders aren't being fulfilled.

In all likelihood, the supply channels to your locality have a low turnover rate, and DRAM has a long shelf-life. If the high prices stay high for long, it's going to impact prices when your retailers try to restock. If the price shock ends soon, your retailer may not even notice it. Whether you ought to buy or not depends on your outlook on how things will shake out

KurSix4• 9 months ago

Even if the hype around LLMs dies down, the demand for AI compute won't disappear. It will just shift from giant language models to more specialized areas: computer vision, scientific computing (like AlphaFold), drug discovery. All of that requires massive amounts of hardware

ksec• 9 months ago

Beware of what you wish for. Without the so called AI craze you wont get enough money to fund the current 2-3 years cadence of leading edge Fab development.

cstuder• 9 months ago

It feels like we're actually living in the Universal Paperclips universe.

Thev00d00• 9 months ago

Prime time to build an AM4 system!

embedding-shape9• 9 months ago

And here I'm sitting with my AM4 system, debating if to go AM5, sTR5, sTRX4 or what when it's time for the next upgrade.

forinti2• 9 months ago

I'm still happy with my AM3.

walterbell2• 9 months ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chip-crunch-how-ai-boom-...

spot prices of DRAM, used in various applications, nearly tripled in September from a year earlier.. improving profitability of non-HBM chips has helped fuel memory chipmakers' share price rally this year, with Samsung's stock up more than 80%, while SK Hynix and Micron shares have soared 170% and 140% respectively... industry is going through a classic shortage that usually lasts a year or two, and TechInsights is forecasting a chip industry downturn in 2027.

Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction.

Are some HBM chips idle due to lack of electrical power? https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said the company has AI GPUs sitting idle because it doesn’t have enough power to install them.

If the PC supply chain will be impacted by memory shortages until 2027, could Windows 10 security support be extended for 24 months to extend the life of millions of business PCs that cannot run Windows 11?

bigbadfeline4• 9 months ago

Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction.

Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.

I guess, you offered the news hoping prices will fall... In terms of real economic analysis there's a lot to say here but let me point at only one of the many entry points of the rabbit hole:

"Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Microsoft and all other AI wannabes are hoarding GPUs and thus RAM, they hope to sell them to you for a price of subscription which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding and trust-like behavior against the public.

The hoarding and inflation economy we live in is a weapon against the public, at the moment, there's no visible force that isn't laboring diligently on the enhancement of that weapon, so the timeline of change is likely to stretch somewhere between far in the future to infinity... just hoping otherwise is futile.

If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.

As I said, this is just scratching the surface, there's a lot more which cannot fit in a single comment.

Edit: actually not. The parent comment was edited after mine, to include a link to MS inadvertently admitting to the hoarding of GPUs and RAM.

hexbin010• 9 months ago

the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines.

This makes me so angry.

The private companies told governments they want money and the governments replied "sure we'll just steal it from citizens and lie and sell it as a tax, no problem. We'll just go hard on the net zero excuse lol" ??

gruez4• 9 months ago

Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.

Where does it say it was funded by $150B of public loans?

which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding

All investment resembles "speculative hoarding'. You're pouring money into a project now with the expectation that it'll pay off in decades.

and trust-like behavior against the public.

???

If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.

Datacenters are actually associated with lower electricity costs in the US

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/10/30/the-data-...

riskable• 9 months ago

Hopefully this will put pressure on the market to produce much more efficient AI models. As opposed to bigger, then bigger, and then even BIGGER models (which is the current trend).

FYI: gpt-oss:120b is better at coding (in benchmarks and my own anecdotal testing) than gpt5-mini. More importantly, it's so much faster too. We need more of this kind of optimization. Note that gpt5-mini is estimated to be around ~150 billion parameters.

KronisLV• 9 months ago

For what it’s worth, even the Qwen 30B model has its use cases. And as far as some of the better open models go, by now the GLM 4.6 355B model is largely better than the Qwen3 Coder 480B variant, so it seems that the models are getting more efficient across the board.

muldvarp2• 9 months ago

We need more of this kind of optimization.

Who is the "we" in this sentence? The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?

The advantages of LLMs are tiny for software engineers (you might be more productive, you don't get paid more) and the downsides are bad to life-altering (you get to review AI slop all day, you lose your job).

bigbadfeline4• 9 months ago

The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?

This is already a fact and it's set in stone - making AI cheaper won't change anything in that regard. However, a cheaper AI will allow the laid-off software engineers to use models independently of those firing them, and even compete on an equal footing.

estimator7292• 9 months ago

Energy and GPU costs haven't pushed the needle any, so I don't see any reason to expect that RAM costs will.

KurSix4• 9 months ago

You're right. And it's not just about parameter count. Efficiency is a full-stack problem: from the architecture (like MoE instead of dense transformers), to the inference techniques (speculative decoding), to the data formats (quantization down to INT4/FP4). The shortage will force everyone to optimize every step of the process, not just "add more layers"

Arch-TK• 9 months ago

Server DRAM? More like all DRAM.

nubinetwork2• 9 months ago

Not just server memory, desktop memory has gone up for the same reason... it's all going to AI. Forget building a new gaming pc, or buying a laptop, or even an arm SBC, because the supply is just gone.

flamesofphx• 9 months ago

I wonder if they old movie lawn mower man is going to become a reference for AI... They might need a dam...

KurSix4• 9 months ago

This shortage is the best thing that could have happened for R&D in model efficiency. The "who has more parameters" race is about to hit the physical wall of hardware availability. Now the real race for efficiency begins: quantization, distillation, Mixture-of-Experts, new architectures

Hardware constraints are the single biggest driver of software innovation

kingstnap• 9 months ago

This is a silly take. From day zero everyone and their mother was trying every idea under the sun on trying to get inference costs down.

There are a huge number of varients of attention schemes, like seemingly thousands. More posted on arxiv and blogs every single day. There are similarly a huge number of papers and talks on quantization, codebooks, number formats, everything. Like genuinely covering everything from analog compute to training lookup tables in FPGAs.

The AI model architects similarly are not sleeping on things. They genuinely take a bottom up approach to the design of their model and make sure that every mm of die area is being used.

And top down of course has extreme influence with people spinning up entire hardware companies like groq and cerebras to do AI as fast and efficiently as possible. Everyone wants to be the shovel seller.

The idea that anyone is sleeping on increasing inference efficiency when $$$$$$$$$ are being spent is ridiculous.

And genuinely they have actually made massive strides. Some models cost almost nothing like GPT OSS 120B which can be used to create slop at the speed of light.

Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers

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