The price of RAM has already risen by more than 500%, in some cases almost sixfold in just a few months. What used to cost €180 is now close to €1100, a vertical rise that is crippling the domestic market.
In April 2025 I bought two 32Gb Kingston DDR5 RAM modules for 179.64 euros, one of the cheapest current prices (reduced from 1049.99 euros, they say) I have found for these same modules is 838.68 euros, but I have seen them for over 1100 euros.
The increase represents a rise of 366.86%. This means that the price has not only tripled, but has almost multiplied by 4.67 compared to what it cost a few months ago, and in many cases by five times or more.
Artificial intelligence is hoarding all DRAM production for HBM memory and servers, leaving the consumer market out of stock.
Price as at 1 April 2025
Price as at 4 January 2026
As early as November 2025, there was already talk that the global shortage of memory chips had driven up the price of DDR4 and DDR5 RAM and that demand for components for data centres and artificial intelligence had displaced production for the consumer market, causing prices to rise 172% year-on-year by the end of October.
In November, prices had doubled or even tripled. Today, they are already starting to see a five-fold increase with no short-term fall in prices expected.
It is now rumoured that these brutal price rises, largely caused by the hoarding of modules by AI companies, will also be reflected in graphics cards and other memory hardware. If it is already prohibitively expensive to build a computer at these prices, if they continue to rise and extend to all of these components, it will be practically impossible for the average earthling to afford.
There you have one of the many "virtues" of the much-lauded capitalism. The vast majority of the bald consumers can no longer afford to buy new RAM (and soon not even used RAM thanks to speculation) because it already costs almost as much as it did not long ago to build a whole computer.
The alternative, for the time being, if it is a question of renewing a computer completely, is to opt for pre-assembled computers because sometimes the big brands maintain old price contracts and it is cheaper to buy the whole PC than the RAM separately.
