Why have RAM prices skyrocketed?

The Corsair Vengence 64gb 6000mhz ram i bought for my sffpc was 784 yesterday on Amazon and today its damn near 900 dollars. Insane. I bought it November 2024 for like 220 bucks.
 
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pendragon1 said:
i hope people are refusing to buy at these retarded prices. please do not set the precedent, like gpus...
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The problem is, with all the idiotic AI data center construction ramp up the RAM manufacturers will just up and leave the consumer market completely like Micron/Crucial if the diy/enthusiast revenue stops flowing. So instead of paying crazy high prices, there won’t be any RAM/NAND available at all for enthusiasts and DIY, at best it’ll only be night up by prebuilt manufacturers and at worst will only go to the higher margin short term (which is still a few years) data center purchase agreements.

Just an altogether shitty situation brought on by the AI bet being the new “too big to fail”
 
I have a lot of DDR 4 laying around as to have hung on to my AM4 stuff, I have a 32GB kit of Owly 3600Mhz Cl 18 from a long ago real Black Friday sale doing nothing at the moment but out pacing gold and silver prices.
 
freeagentt said:
Ehh..

I never really liked Micron anyway.

I will be that guy to say it :)
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It was cheap and it worked on early AM5 builds to get everything up and working and keeping my cost at $369.98 for that 7600x / B650 board/ 32GB of memory, I really never could tell that much of a difference with the 5600Mhz vs 6000Mhz and the 7600x while gaming, could being different for an X 3D chip with lower clock speed.
 
Enthusiasts know how messed up it is, but what I see now is people who did not luck out and build earlier this year is they just buy down to 32GB. They are paying more than what it used to cost for 96GB+ (at much faster speeds and lower CL even) and thinking they are getting a deal because it is "cheaper" than everything else right now.
 
AM4 platforms have even gotten a resurgence (not that they ever went away) thanks to this madness. Crazy that even 32gb of DDR4 is close to $200 now. I think I paid about $70 for my sticks three years ago for DDR4 3200. Not looking so bad now huh?

It's kinda sad when older budget CPUs on the AM4 platform are more expensive than AM5 counterparts. See the AM4 5600x vs. the AM5 7600x. The 5600x is now $189 and the 7600x is $174 both shipped/sold by Amazon and not a third party.
 
This makes no sense , my 1st real gaming pc was the Micron mmx200 PC a long time ago.
I have used there memory, ssd and solid state drives.
I hope they remember this when the Ai crash comes and they try to get this market back.
BFGtech, evga. all tried to make it by changing and now they are all but gone.
 
I mean, Micron doesn't really owe anyone except their shareholders anything... if they get back to building DRAM I will totally buy their products again
 
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pendragon1 said:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-eeJP0J7c
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that quite the unhinge intro, taxpayer do not care if Micron memory is in a micron facing product or a third party one not even for a second, at all, them concentrating to make the most ram they can and not spend any time on distribution, marketing, consumer product return, etc... seem a clear plus for taxpayers with the current situation.

The part around 8 minutes is really important, rest of it is all pure speculation or already set in place trend unrelated to the announcement.
 
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GN Steve mentions this in the video but if corps corner the market on products and only sell to other corps it’s anti consumer and makes ownership of things impossible for regular people. This is just another step towards owning nothing and being happy…
 
TheHig said:
GN Steve mentions this in the video but if corps corner the market on products and only sell to other corps it’s anti consumer and makes ownership of things impossible for regular people. This is just another step towards owning nothing and being happy…
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If they sales memory to Google who put it in phones or memory to Corsair/GSkill that put it in a ramstick, you can buy it and own it as much as if it was an Micron phone or a Micron ramstick. Seling to an other business does not mean it does not end up in a customer product.

Samsung make memory, samsung does not sell ramstick, you can own products that has samsung memory on it (like an 5080 gpu), I would imagine most electronic part maker always sold only to other business, that really not special. As any of the main 3 ever had customer facing gddr product ? We still bought 7800xt with that memory on it.
 
I get that. It’s the implication here and my comment is not a 100% accurate description of what is going on with Micron. It remains to be seen if this is anything more than just business following the revenue/ demand. If supply is so constrained they had to make a call and chase that money.
 
TheHig said:
. It remains to be seen if this is anything more than just business following the revenue/ demand. If supply is so constrained they had to make a call and chase that money.
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Not sure the distinction you are making here ?

Different business effort has different margin, the "easy" part of putting dram on stick, managing its sales, marketing it, dealing with customers, is a lot of competitors/easier entry low return type of business, a bit like making GPU by MSI versus making the gpu die/ram that goes on it. Once putting all their effort on the better margin part become so much jobs that they can put 100% effort on it (the high margin really hard thing they do) and it is not enough still, removing all distraction, capital and effort that does not goes into it make a lot of sense.

This is the same as following profits as is resource constraint making calls and chasing that money (those 2 statement are the same one).

as for a signal about the balance of production between HBM/ddr/gddr/etc... it can be a small one, a bit like AMD not having a founder edition for RDNA 4 being a signal it was not a generation they would put much effort or trying to sales much seem to be quite a strong one.

But here, not sure how much of a signal it is, in the sense, of course they are making as much HBM as packaging/controller bottleneck let them do and the rest goes to the rest, before or after this announcement, this is not really a "news/signal" about those efforts/intention/direction and was true before and true even if it is was not official that Crucial ramstick still existed.
 
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daglesj said:
Three years from now you'll be picking up DDR5 from the obsolete/bankrupt centers for $1 a GB.

Hopefully!
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You "might" got super cheap HBM (which you can't use on your PC), but unfortunately they don't have unwanted DDR5 you are looking for in most of the abandoned AI systems. The production capacity of the DRAM plants used for HBM during those years of AI boom will be gone for good, the Big 3 (SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron) will probably return to consumer DRAM market, but there will be no "post-mining GPUs" sort of used DDR5 for the price to crash dramatically.
 
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zoomrix said:
Companies are getting desperate... This is crazy.
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I'm thinking this AI hype is all built around:
C-suites/shareholders are always looking for more $$ to buy second, and 3rd mansions, yachts, etc...
C-suites/shareholders do not like paying peasants a working wage..
C-suites/shareholders get braniac idea that "Hey.. we can hype up this AI crap and replace peasants with AI"
More peasants in breadlines is good for society
 
ingramlihk said:
the Big 3 (SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron) will probably return to consumer DRAM market,
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they probably will never quite it to start with, in the big 3 latest revenues results.

60% to 80% of their DRAM revenues where in their non-HBM business (not volume, revenues... if we can assume it is much higher revenues per GB, in volume it is way more than that).

Micron last quarter, 45% more revenues in the mobile ram business, if you combine all of their 2025 revenues from the HBM, high capacity DIMM and server DRAM side that was less than 33% of their revenues of fiscal 2025.

Not sure where the idea that the big 3 will quite iPhone business, who will have to find ram from someone else (or that we would not have phone in store in 2027), seem way overboard.

Thug Esquire said:
Samsung, meanwhile, realigning to reap some of those profits from DDR5 demand.
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A lot / also because they have been struggling at making HBM all year, it is a good way to present their HBM yield struggle, how hard it is to make them (and the impossibility to transfer all your production to it because of the massive bottleneck) seem lost in part of the public discourse.
 
Paid about $650 for 48GB of Corsair 9200 Ram about a week ago. (Had a coupon) Would much rather have gotten more, but am afraid that the prices will continue to climb even higher for the foreseeable future, so had to make due with what i wanted to get atm.
 
kamxam said:
Paid about $650 for 48GB of Corsair 9200 Ram about a week ago. (Had a coupon) Would much rather have gotten more, but am afraid that the prices will continue to climb even higher for the foreseeable future, so had to make due with what i wanted to get atm.
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Damn bro, that's a tricky situation but I could totally understand why you did what you did. It's basically why I bought a 5090 cause I'm not certain what's going to happen to GPU prices for the next coming years. Also like having a backup rig just to have something to fallback on in case buying replacement parts are not sensible and can part out if need be. No telling what can happen in today's crazy world lol.
 
I figure in my case when prices go back to normal eventually i'll up the total ram. Still have 96GB of 4000 speed ram in my current rig, and have some 32GB DDR4 kits still laying around for projects if needed.
 
The RAM I purchased for my main PC is now more expensive than the RTX 5080 I picked up recently.

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I got the 5080 from BB on a PM from MC for $900 in October.
 
The RDimms I got for my current machine was $799 last year when I built this. Now it's out of stock and $1300, damn.
 
The Cobra said:
The RDimms I got for my current machine was $799 last year when I built this. Now it's out of stock and $1300, damn.
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You’re lucky at less than a 100% or 2x price increase

For the typical suggested config on AM5 from just 6 months ago (2x16gb ddr5 6000mts cl30) the average has gone from about $125 to easily $350, so almost 200% / 3x increase. And it’s only getting worse.

Good luck to all building right now.
 
I wanted to do another build for my sim rig, now I'm going to wait it out. I don't feel like paying $400 plus for 32gb of ddr5 ram.
 
I just remember the dot.com bubble, Web 2.0 (never did find out what that was), QR codes are the future and "everyone needs an APP!!"

If it's IT and rich boomers are involved on the investment side, you know to step away.
 
daglesj said:
I just remember the dot.com bubble, Web 2.0 (never did find out what that was), QR codes are the future and "everyone needs an APP!!"

If it's IT and rich boomers are involved on the investment side, you know to step away.
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dot.com bubble was one of the most successful affair, web 2.0 has well, QR codes has been in the developping world extremely big deal (texting there has been used for application side things way more has well) and app vs website on mobile, app kind of won.

Has for stepping away from the Internet, google/amazon (dot.com) or Facebook/youtube/wikipedia (web 2.0) has an investor can get quite hard.

if ram price follow the Internet 1996 to now dot.com bubble or web 2.0 after that trajectory, they will cost near infinite in 2050....
 
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