A 32GB stick of DDR5 RAM cost about $150 in the summer of 2025. Today it goes for $300 or more. That's graphics card money. For the price of one stick you could buy an entire new Radeon RX 7600 or an Intel Arc B580 and still have lunch money left over.
RAM is your computer's short-term memory, the chips it uses to hold whatever it's working on right now. DDR5 is just the current type. And it's gotten brutally expensive.
Samsung kicked it off in November 2025 with a 60 percent price hike on the deals it signs to supply the companies that build phones and PCs. It then doubled the price of the phone memory it sells Apple in February 2026, and raised those deal prices again in April 2026. Micron and SK Hynix, the other two major memory makers, did the same. Everyone who puts a memory chip into anything is now paying way more for it.
The cause is AI. The factories that make laptop RAM also make HBM, short for high-bandwidth memory. That's the pricey, fast kind of memory stacked right next to the chips inside Nvidia's AI cards. Those factories pump out as much HBM as they can, and the normal RAM you buy is the leftovers.
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Why HBM eats so much factory capacity
One Nvidia AI card carries up to 192GB of HBM. HBM is just a stack of regular RAM chips glued on top of each other so the graphics chip can read it faster. Because HBM stacks 8 to 12 layers, every gigabyte of HBM uses about 3 to 4 gigabytes worth of factory output. Every gigabyte of HBM made for an AI customer is 3 to 4 gigabytes of laptop RAM that never got made.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron control about 70 percent of the world's RAM supply. By mid-2025 all three pointed as much capacity at HBM as possible because AI customers were paying nearly double. By spring 2026 the squeeze hit store shelves.
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What it costs you right now
| Memory part | September 2025 | Today (May 2026) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 32GB DDR5 stick (store price) | ~$150 | $300+ | roughly doubled |
| Single DDR5 chip (bulk price) | ~$6.84 | $30+ | 4x higher |
| Server DDR5 RAM | baseline | +70% Q1, +30% more Q2 | ~2.2x higher |
| DDR4 RAM (older systems) | baseline | up 60 to 90 percent | some kits cost more than DDR5 did a year ago |
| Phone/laptop RAM (LPDDR5X, the low-power type) | baseline | tight, prices passed to buyers | baked into 2026 device prices |
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What already got more expensive
- Nintendo Switch 2. Price hike confirmed in May 2026. Nintendo is reportedly selling each console at a small loss, which it has historically refused to do.
- Sony PlayStation 5. Price was raised earlier this year. Sony also pulled PS5 memory cards off shelves because the chips inside them sell to AI buyers for more.
- Sony PlayStation 6. Early reports say the launch could slip, partly due to memory cost.
- Lenovo Legion Go 2 (SteamOS edition). Jumped about $650 between announcement and shipping.
- Pre-built PCs. Major brands have raised RAM-tier prices and many ship with less RAM by default than last year.
- Phones and laptops. Most major Android makers have warned that 2026 models will cost more, citing RAM as a main reason.
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Why this is different from past RAM spikes
RAM has spiked before. The 2017 to 2018 spike lasted about 18 months. That one was a short-term supply problem with normal demand. New factories caught up, prices fell, life went back to normal.
This time the buyer pulling RAM out of the market is the entire AI industry, and AI buildout is not slowing down for at least two to three years. Samsung and SK Hynix have already told customers their HBM is sold out for years. A new chip factory takes 2 to 3 years to build and start shipping, and most of the new ones are still waiting on permits.
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What you can do about it
If you are building a PC, buy the RAM now. Prices are not coming back down this year. Locking in 64GB today is one less thing to overpay for in 2027.
If your computer feels slow because of low RAM, upgrade now. A 32GB kit at today's price is still cheaper than the same kit next year.
If you are buying a console, the price drop that usually happens 18 months after launch is probably not coming this generation. The used market will stay expensive because new units are.
If you run servers at home, don't overbuy on a new build. Used DDR4 servers off corporate refresh cycles are a sensible option for now, but that supply is shrinking.
If you run a real cloud bill, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have already passed memory cost into per-hour pricing on memory-heavy server types. If your bill jumped, that's why.
When this ends
As of April 2026, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are all telling investors the AI memory squeeze runs at least through 2027. Some forecasts say longer. The most optimistic outlook has regular RAM prices starting to drop in late 2027. The pessimistic one runs to 2029. Either way, the next two years of buying computers, phones, and consoles is going to look more like 2018 than 2023.
Nikkei Asia, TechPowerUp Micron Forecasts DRAM Shortages Beyond
