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Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers
- vondur 1y agoDesktop memory has also increased in price. I think it’s twice as expensive for DDR5 than it was 6 months ago.
- piva00 1y agoI'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 1y agoSame, 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!
- formerly_proven 1y agoFeast and famine industry, it’s very traditional
- brianshaler 1y agoI think that's nearly exactly what I paid for 2x32GB at a retail store last week. I hadn't bought RAM in over a decade so I didn't think anything of it. Wish my emergency PC replacement had occurred a year earlier!
- distances 1y agoI got 96GB in June with a desktop upgrade, good timing and should be enough for a good while.
- big-and-small 1y agoIt's very noticeable: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
- zparky 1y agoYep, DDR5 prices have nearly doubled in less than 2 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5200.2x16384 https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5200....
- vondur 1y agoI 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.
- StillBored 1y agoWhile thats a sweet upgrade for people with an older desktop that can support a motherboard swap, its worthwhile to point out the ram is probably insufficient. RAM usage for a lot of workloads scales with core/thread count, and my general rule of thumb is that 1G/thread is not enough, and 2G/thread will mostly work, and 4G/thread is probably too much, but your disk cache will be happy. Also, the same applies to VMs, so if your hosting a VM and give it 16 threads, you probably want at least 16G for the VM. The 4G/thread then starts to look pretty reasonable. Just building a lot of opensource projects with `make -j32` your going to be swapping if you only have 1G/thread. This rule then becomes super noticeable when your on a machine with 512G of ram, and 300+ threads, because your builds will OOM.
- vondur 1y agoHa, I was going to purchase a 96GB kit, but that's when I first noticed that RAM prices were getting crazy.
- embedding-shape 1y agoAre 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 1y agoEven 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_ 1y agoDown stream this is driving up DDR4 demand as well :(
- guywhocodes 1y agoI was looking att filling my EPYC servers empty slots, what I paid $90/stick 2-3 years ago is now $430
- Scoundreller 1y agoThese 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoHas the death of Moore's Law been officially announced yet?
- renewiltord 1y agoMoore’s Law has nothing to do with price.
- forinti 1y agoIt does but indirectly. Less power and more integration mean things get cheaper to build and run.
- charcircuit 1y 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 1y agoGordan 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 1y agoRegular Monopoly/Duopoly like the storage market or Nepopoly like the GPU market? Either way, without competition expect it to increase further.
- markerz 1y agoIt'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.
- tuhgdetzhh 1y agoI 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 1y agoI’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
- tuhgdetzhh 1y agoI 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 1y ago> OpenAI's Stargate project to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month 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-already-run-out-of-production-2026-AHjZQ5PD 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-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...
- lousken 1y agoHave we given up on edge AI this early?
- recursive 1y agoDoes edge AI require less RAM?
- Macha 1y agoI would expect edge AI requires much more RAM at a global level due to less efficient utilisation.
- lousken 1y agoTons of resources are sitting unused within each and every computer sold today regardless of AI.
- lousken 1y agoLess 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.
- recursive 1y agoIn that case, this wouldn't be a signal that "we've" given up on edge AI.
- sleepyguy 1y agoManufacturers 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.
- tehjoker 1y agolower 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 1y agoIf 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 1y agoMaybe I can push for some HBM systems now
- yread 1y agoTo 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 1y agoMay you please help me out financially then, friend? ;P Willing to work for it, too!
- confirmmesenpai 1y agoit's ridiculous only if you compare it with Apple RAM prices
- ionelaipatioaei 1y agoI cannot express in words how much I hate this mentality.
- Ekaros 1y agoI 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 1y agoBest 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 1y agoThat'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.
- nostrademons 1y agoI think there's always been a rent-seeking middleman service. In the 80s it was retail: you'd go to a physical computer store to buy a game for $50 (note: that's $150 inflation-adjusted, more expensive than most games today), and the retail store, the distributor, and the publisher would all take a cut. In the 2000s it was the developer's ISP, web developer, and credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe. The shareware/unlock-code economy of the 90s was probably the closest you'd get to cutting out the middlemen, where you could download from some BBS or FTP server without the dev getting involved at all and then send them money to have them email you an unlock code, but it was a lot of manual work on the developer's part, and a lot of trust.
- philipallstar 1y agoNone of this is rent-seeking.
- andreybaskov 1y ago
- cstuder 1y agoIt feels like we're actually living in the Universal Paperclips universe.
- Thev00d00 1y agoPrime time to build an AM4 system!
- embedding-shape 1y agoAnd 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.
- forinti 1y agoI'm still happy with my AM3.
- embedding-shape 1y agoIn the end I just need more available PCIe lanes (so I can chuck more disks in there) and ideally PCIe Gen 5, otherwise I don't have much reason to upgrade.
- walterbell 1y agohttps://www.reuters.com/world/china/chip-crunch-how-ai-boom-is-stoking-prices-less-trendy-memory-2025-10-20/ 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-gpus-sitting-in-inventory-because-it-lacks-the-power-necessary-to-install-them/ 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?
- bigbadfeline 1y 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-intelligence/microsoft-ceo-says-the-company-doesnt-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-cant-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.
- riskable 1y agoHopefully 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 1y agoFor 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.
- estimator7292 1y agoEnergy and GPU costs haven't pushed the needle any, so I don't see any reason to expect that RAM costs will.
- muldvarp 1y 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).
- bigbadfeline 1y 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.
- muldvarp 1y ago
- Arch-TK 1y agoServer DRAM? More like all DRAM.
- nubinetwork 1y agoNot 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 1y agoI wonder if they old movie lawn mower man is going to become a reference for AI... They might need a dam...
- KurSix 1y agoThis 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 1y agoThis 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.