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RAM prices expected to rise another 40-50% in Q3 2026, and then 30% more in Q4 as AI demand outpaces supply
sanitationhttps://www.techspot.com/news/112934-ram-prices-expected-rise-another-40-50-q3.html
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mycodesucksLet me check…
Yeah, Morrowind still runs fine. I’m cool.
Guess I’ll keep using my DDR3 machine for a few more years.
Legit thinking of selling RAM sticks to rich people so that I can pay rent a bit easier lol (not actually loling)
ChafHell yeah, another fellow user of DDR3. It’ll live forever!
I don’t really see a reason to upgrade, my i5 from 2009 is still running fine. Damn, now that I’m writing it out, that does sound old
Isn’t ddr4 pretty affordable at this point?
Not really. A lot of regular consumers got priced out of DDR5 so they went back to DDR4 and now it’s insanely priced too. Like $150+ for a 2x8GB sticks
black0utTruly hate this timeline
I’ve been looking at used PCs and usually those are just missing the gpu, but now I’ve been seeing no RAM and no SSD. At least with the gpu only being missing it was semi functional if there was integrated graphics, but now you are just basically buying a brick until you can get 3 components that cost 400 or so USD
I started building a RAID before the prices of hard drives popped off, so I got the enclosure and one drive, I was going to buy the other drives when I had some spare cash. Now a single 8tb HDD (not even solid state!) is $450 CAD and there’s no way I can spend $1350 to finish this thing so it’s just sitting there.
I had the exact same plan, luckily I had a couple of other 1TB drives lying around I’ve made a RAID from. but i took a screenshot of the drives I wanted when I bought my first 4TB drive, and then I looked at them again 11 months later…
Lower price is from 06/25 and the other is 05/26.
Honestly, what’s the point in selling the machine at all at that point. Clearly those components are worth more out of the machine than in.
Ram demand expected to drop another 40-50% in Q3?
If you’re going to measure demand in a way that makes sense for a demand vs supply formula, you must do it in a way that’s independent of the price.
Prices are increasing because demand is high, and supply is not keeping up.
NeshuraI wouldn’t say demand is high I would say demand is glitched and infinite. The AI bubble has gotten to such a scale where all the existing parts are already sold but even further they have sold parts that don’t even exist yet for datacenters which haven’t even started construction yet in order to satisfy a projected demand curve the sales people dreamed up in order to somehow promise a slight profitability of this entire mess.
Fair enough, I meant consumer demand as in not ai and data centers
Couldn’t even buy a Raspberry Pi nowadays :(
samus12345Now it’s paying for RAM with a bonus Pi attached.
KissakiI’m so glad I bought 128gb RAM in my new PC 1 year ago…
Same.
It was actually FOMO when it felt like we were in a memory IC price trough. I got a 2TB SATA drive too.
…because you can now sell it? /s
Ellipsis are wrongly used again. Why do you people keep using shit you do not understand?
Do you fully understand your limbic, respiratory, and nervous systems? If not, better stop using them fuckface.
Although I’d argue you’re not doing a great job at using your limbic system anyway.
Does anyone here know how to get the DDR5 Chinese RAM?
mlgAli express but the prices end up being the same because the demand is still to high for China to match the supply.
I think they’re a bit cheaper if you buy within China, but globally it ends up being better to pick a good OEM with proper warranty.
I tried buying some rather cheap DDR5 RDIMMs through Alibaba. The process to actually buy is pretty vague, and I found that the suppliers I contacted really suck at communication. The two I spoke to, didn’t acknowledge the details I was actually asking about, and spoke broken English at best. The shipper I spoke with, Cooperate Logistics, had fairly clear communication, but was very slow at conversation - it took about two or three days for our dialogues to conclude. They tried to buy the goods on my behalf, but they couldn’t - the supplier had to send the goods over to the shipper’s place, THEN it would go to me.
There is potential in buying from Alibaba, but many of the suppliers feel sketchy, and the bad communications make it hard to feel trust. I ultimately gave up. 😔
I’m pretty sure they can only make DDR3 so far.
They’re actively producing DDR4 and 5, with Corsair notably having purchased supply from CXMT for use in their Vengance line, just not for North American distribution
Like one of the guys says in the comments, highly unlikely. We’re already seeing some downward pressure on prices the past couple of months. The market simply does not support another 90% of hikes (between this guy’s Q3 and Q4 predictions)
Chinese brands are still producing and still adding supply to the global supply chain. Countries that can utilize chinese ram will buy them because they are cheaper, and they will keep producing more because they still can get a price premium from all the pent up demand.
Still gonna be a few years before prices come back down, but i’ll be amazed if we see much more of an increase.
We’re probably seeing demand destruction. I’m curious if the thin-client thing that a lot of these companies seem to want will actually take off. I’ve also been noticing a lot of “cyberdeck” and retro handheld stuff lately; I wonder if that’s related.
Retro handhelds have been increasing their prices due to the shortages every month or so. Since they don’t build in massive numbers they’re some of the most affected.
How is that their fault?
There are consumers, who are willing to pay more. Basic economics
They were grouping together to all raise prices at once. If everyone who sold food suddenly raised their costs together, would it be fair? There’d be consumers to buy it. Basic economics!
Just because people would pay more for something, doesn’t mean they should have to
We don’t know, but we have another explanation: consumers went to buy from all three memory manufacturers at once, offering the same, high price.
The problem lies in 3 companies owning a monopoly on dram production and all conspiring together to make things shit for everyone who isn’t them
The problem is the fact demand is higher than supply, which memory manufacturers are trying to solve.
If they’re competing with each other, which they are, it’s not a monopoly.
3 companies can’t all have a monopoly on the same thing lol
They very much can when they’ve been proven to collude to keep prices up.
If any one of them started making more RAM, they’d make a lot more profit than the other two. If all 3 did, they’d all still make a bunch of profit, but not as much as right now. They have an agreement that nobody ramps up RAM production so everyone gets to keep super high margins.
In the past they’ve literally agreed upon a target price to keep…
harkJust need to sign a few more multi-billion contracts of massive data centers that will totally get built out.
Anonymous_LeakerI’m glad I saved the 120gb of old DDR3 ram, that is in a server. No way I am buying that new shit. Even used is expensive.
Then micron is going to lose money as they have been getting businesses to lock in for 5 years.
Yeah, I’m not sure they’re going to go up that far into the future.
That is potentially 100s of millions that Micron left on the table.
Who does that?
At this rate I’ll be able to part out my homelab and pay off my mortgage soon
No1Hetzner just raised their VPS prices for the second time in two months, 300-400%. Not sure how much more of this I can bear lol
I bought some DDR5 RDIMMs, 2x16gb 5600mhz. Cost me $606 at Ebay, but I haven’t yet got a chance to install and test them. Word of warning: stay on top of your shipping order, and if the seller is slow to ship or the shipment is late, message them and open a case with Ebay.
Hopefully my sticks are the real thing, but the biggest problem is the belabored shipping. I bought a Threadripper 7965WX on Ebay for $1500, and the return window is closing. It sucks when a seller holds up an entire project by being dumb about getting stuff mailed.
Maybe the big 3 are scared that there might be a chance that they are not going to fully win the anti-trust lawsuit and are hiking the prices up, so when they eventually get slapped with a fine of 0.1% of their quarterly profits they can offload that on the customers too.
KokeshI guess we should dog in and wait for the AI to come crashing down and all kinds of memory stuff going way down.
My friend, I’m sorry to tell you… That’s not how this is going to go.
After the crash, no matter how you shake it, three truths will be standing between you and affordable ram at home.
None of the backlog of product that had been fabricated will be useful and adaptable for Consumer equipment. They can’t just repackage any of the HBM products to fit in our computers.
Every ram manufacturer will suddenly be facing a cash flow problem as their principal (and in some cases, ONLY) accounts receivable will be dodging them and checks won’t clear.
All of the equipment thst manufacterers the memory chips will need to be retooled and all of the supply chain paths to packagers and Distributors will need to be spun up and rebuilt.
All of this hurts the memory pricing we pay at the end of the line.
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i’m so happy for all the price gouging millionaires and billionaires
Yeah yeah. Let’s see those AI balance sheets come next financial quarter. They were looking pretty fucking dire last round.
I’m so happy all the RAM can sit in storage depreciating, waiting for a data center that is not built and lacks power infrastructure.
All so Nvidia can profit by getting gamers to use GeForce now instead of owning your own hardware.
You will own nothing and be happy.