Memory prices are up nearly 500 per cent in a year, and every new PC costs more

Computer memory has quietly become one of the most volatile commodities a consumer can buy. Over the past 12 months, the price of a standard DDR5 memory kit has climbed by hundreds of dollars, turning what used to be a predictable, almost boring line item in a PC build into one of the biggest single costs in the whole machine. The driver is not a shortage of silicon in general, but a global scramble for the specific kind of memory chip that powers AI data centres, and consumer RAM is losing that fight for factory capacity.

The scale of the increase only becomes clear when the same memory kit is priced twelve months apart, rather than compared to some vague sense of “expensive.”

What PCPartPicker’s price tracking shows

Component price-tracking site PCPartPicker, whose average pricing data underpins the widely cited figures on this year’s memory spike, recorded a 2x32GB DDR5-5600 kit averaging $191 in August 2025. By August 2026, the same class of kit averaged $1,118, a rise of $927, or about 485 per cent, over exactly one year. That is the figure closest to the “nearly 500 per cent” now being quoted across the PC hardware press. Other DDR5 tiers moved by similar margins over the same twelve months: a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit went from $222 to $1,272, up 473 per cent, while smaller 2x16GB kits rose between roughly 355 and 429 per cent depending on speed grade. At the very top end, a 128GB DDR5-6400 kit that once sold as low as $329 has been tracked as high as $3,399, close to ten times its lowest-ever recorded price.

Why AI data centres are eating the wafer supply

The underlying cause is a manufacturing reallocation, not a raw materials shortage. High Bandwidth Memory, the stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators, requires many individual layers of memory silicon to build a single module, so redirecting a wafer from ordinary DDR5 production to HBM removes roughly three times the equivalent amount of standard DRAM from the market. Memory manufacturers SK hynix, Samsung, Micron and China’s CXMT have all shifted meaningful production capacity toward HBM because of how lucrative AI datacentre contracts have become, leaving PC and smartphone makers competing for whatever commodity DRAM capacity is left over.

DDR4 hasn’t escaped the fallout

Builders hoping to dodge the DDR5 spike by sticking with older AM4 or LGA1700 platforms running DDR4 have found only partial relief. With DDR5 pushed out of reach for many budgets, demand has piled into the DDR4 market instead, and pricing data shows DDR4 kits up anywhere from about 120 to nearly 180 per cent year over year. A 2x16GB DDR4-3200 kit that averaged $105 in August 2025 averaged $281 a year later, for example, while a larger 2x32GB DDR4-3200 kit rose from $222 to $614, up 177 per cent. The increase is smaller in percentage terms than DDR5’s, but it removes the fallback option that budget builders have traditionally relied on during a memory price spike, since even older-platform builds are no longer a reliable way to dodge the shortage entirely.

The same pattern is showing up in Europe

The squeeze is not confined to the United States. German technology site ComputerBase, tracking the European market, has reported average RAM prices there up 345 per cent compared with September 2025, and found the pressure spreading into adjacent components too, with hard drive and solid-state drive prices both climbing more than 125 per cent over the same period. The consistency between the US and European data points suggests the shortage is being driven by global allocation decisions at the manufacturer level, rather than by any one region’s retail market or currency movements.

Chipmakers say there is no near-term fix

Industry executives have been unusually blunt about how long the shortage could last. SK Hynix chief executive Kwak Noh-jung has forecast that 2027 will be the worst year for memory supply in the industry’s history, with demand expected to outstrip manufacturing capacity well into 2030. ADATA chairman Simon Chen has gone further, suggesting the current DRAM crunch could persist for as long as another decade and dismissing the idea that it represents an AI investment bubble about to burst. Underscoring how tight the market has become, hyperscale cloud companies have reportedly already locked in advance deposits for close to all of the world’s 2027 DRAM production capacity, and mainstream DRAM chips are now said to be worth more than half as much per kilogram as solid gold, an extraordinary valuation for what has historically been one of computing’s most commoditised components. All four major memory vendors, SK hynix, Samsung, Micron and CXMT, have reported revenue increases of at least double, and in some cases several times over, in the space of a single year, which helps explain why none of them have shown urgency to redirect capacity back toward cheaper consumer-grade DRAM.

What it means for anyone building a PC now

For a buyer assembling a new desktop, the practical effect is that memory, once a fairly fixed and forgettable expense, is now capable of adding many hundreds of dollars to a build depending on when the parts are bought. A separate, continuously updated retail price tracker of DDR5 and DDR4 kits shows the volatility has not settled since the 485 per cent figure was recorded, with day-to-day swings still common as stock of any given kit sells out within seconds of appearing. Analysts tracking the market have advised builders who do not urgently need new hardware to delay a purchase where possible, since a resolution would likely require either a major contraction in AI infrastructure spending or several more years of new fabrication capacity coming online, neither of which is expected soon.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview