Last year you could buy 32GB of DDR5 for $72. Today the cheapest comparable kit tracked by Tom's Hardware is $392. A 128GB kit that once bottomed out at $329 now costs $3,399. That is not a typo, and it is not a temporary spike. It is the new baseline, and the companies that make memory just spent an entire earnings call explaining why it will not get better any time soon.
Everything in this article comes from public sources: Micron's fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call from September 30, Samsung statements reported by Reuters, and price data from Tom's Hardware and PCPartPicker. No affiliate links, no speculation dressed up as insider knowledge. Just the numbers, what they mean, and a decision guide if you need to buy hardware in the next few months.
What Micron actually said
Micron reported record quarterly revenue of $54.2 billion on September 30, and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra used the call to extend the shortage timeline rather than close it.
- Demand exceeds supply in both 2027 and 2028. Mehrotra said the company sees "greater tightness in the industry in 2027 and in 2028 versus 2026," and that the supply-demand environment is "only getting tighter."
- 2027 is largely sold out. Seventy-five percent of Micron's memory output for next year is already accounted for, and most current sales conversations are about 2028.
- Prices are going up. Memory sold for 2027 delivery carries "much higher" prices than 2026 prices. Micron's CFO noted DRAM prices rose in the high teens percentage-wise in the fiscal fourth quarter alone, with NAND climbing about 30%.
- There is no visible end date. "We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance," Mehrotra said. Micron plans $25 billion in capex for the first half of its new fiscal year and new factories coming online in 2028, but even then, he warned that production ramps up only gradually after clean rooms are built.
Read that last bullet again if you are waiting for prices to normalize. The single largest US memory manufacturer is telling investors it cannot see the balancing point.
Why your RAM stick is competing with an AI data center
The core of the problem is a capacity shift, not a shortage of factories in the abstract. Three things are happening at once.
HBM is eating the wafers. High-bandwidth memory, the stacked memory glued next to AI accelerators, uses roughly three times the wafer capacity per bit compared to standard DRAM. Samsung's EVP Kim Taewoo said this week that HBM will account for nearly 30% of DRAM manufacturers' wafer capacity in 2027, up from 20% this year. Every percentage point that moves to HBM is a percentage point not making consumer DDR5.
The trade ratio compounds it. Mehrotra explicitly flagged this on the call: as HBM node transitions happen, the wafer cost per bit gets worse, not better. Producing one HBM stack displaces multiple conventional DRAM dies that would have ended up in laptops and desktops.
Consumer memory is now the leftover. Micron's Crucial brand, which sold RAM to PC builders for nearly 30 years, stopped selling to consumers entirely after announcing the exit in December 2025. The stated reason was prioritizing "larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments," which is corporate language for: data centers pay more, and there is not enough to go around.
The arithmetic is brutal. Reports from the industry put AI data centers on track to consume close to 70% of global memory supply by the end of 2026. When three companies (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) make essentially all of the world's DRAM, and all three are redirecting capacity toward HBM and server DRAM, the consumer shelf is what gets rationed.
The numbers, if you have not priced RAM lately
Tom's Hardware tracks the lowest current US prices against historical lows, and the year-over-year data from PCPartPicker averages is worse than most people expect.
- DDR5-6000 32GB: $392 now, $72 at its lowest ever tracked price.
- DDR5-6000 64GB: $849 now, $159 at its low.
- DDR5-6400 128GB: $3,399 now, $329 at its low.
- A 2x16GB DDR5-6000 kit averaged $108 in August 2025 and $572 in August 2026, a 429% increase.
- A 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit averaged $222 in August 2025 and $1,272 in August 2026, up 473%.
And it is not just DIY builders. Reporting from early 2026 found that memory now represents about 35% of the bill of materials for HP PCs, which means prebuilt and laptop prices are absorbing the same shock. OEMs are responding exactly how you would expect: lower RAM configurations at higher prices. The shortage has also pushed up prices for smartphones, streaming sticks (Roku raised prices by up to 60%), and gaming consoles including the Nintendo Switch 2.
When does this end?
Here is the part where honesty matters: the credible answers range from "years" to "maybe never, at least not at the old prices."
- SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung has warned that 2027 will be the worst year for memory supply in the industry's history, with demand outstripping production well into 2030.
- ADATA Chairman Simon Chen went further and suggested the DRAM crisis could last another 10 years, while dismissing the idea that an "AI bubble" bursting will fix it soon.
- Micron's own position is that even with new clean rooms and $25 billion of capex, supply ramps gradually and the company can currently meet only half to two-thirds of demand.
For consumer prices to fall meaningfully, one of two things needs to happen: a major contraction in AI spending, or enough new fab capacity coming online to cover AI growth and leave surplus for consumers. Neither is on the near-term horizon. As Tom's Hardware put it, the era of cheap, plentiful memory is over, at least for now.
A practical decision guide
If you need to buy hardware in the next six months, here is how I would think about it, based on what the data says rather than on hoping for a sale.
If you are building a desktop now: Buy the RAM first, before the GPU or anything else. Memory is the component with the worst price trajectory and the least supply. Get the capacity you actually need (16GB is still workable for gaming, 32GB is the comfortable floor for productivity work) and skip the 64GB or 128GB tiers entirely unless your workload genuinely requires them. Those capacities carry the worst premiums, up to 10x historical lows.
If you can genuinely wait: Waiting is a rational strategy only if your machine is functional today. Prices through 2027 are contracted higher, not lower, according to Micron. Waiting saves money only in the sense that prices may rise slower than feared, not because a drop is coming.
If you are buying a laptop: Buy more RAM at purchase time, not as a later upgrade. Many modern laptops ship with soldered memory, and upgrade modules for laptops (SODIMMs) are getting squeezed by the same supply shift. Configure 16GB minimum, 32GB if the budget survives it, and treat a low-RAM configuration discount as a trap given what an upgrade will cost later.
If you already have 16GB or 32GB: Do nothing. Your existing memory is now an asset. There is no performance emergency that justifies paying 5x to swap working DDR5 for slightly faster working DDR5. Spend the money on storage or a monitor, both of which are still on normal price curves.
If someone offers you used RAM: Check prices carefully, because the secondhand market has repriced upward too, but verified used kits from functioning systems remain the single best value in the current market. Test with MemTest86 before paying, and prefer sellers with return policies.
The one thing not to do: Do not buy memory as an investment or stockpile "before prices go up more." That speculation is exactly what the market is already doing at scale, and RAM has no resale guarantees. Buy what you need to use.
The bigger picture
There is an uncomfortable irony in this whole story. Consumers were told AI would make their computers smarter and cheaper. Instead, the first mass-market effect of the AI boom on ordinary buyers has been a 500% price increase on one of the four core components of every computer, a 30-year-old consumer memory brand shutting down, and laptops quietly shipping with less RAM at higher prices.
The money is not disappearing, it is just moving. Micron posted record revenue while telling consumers, in effect, that they are no longer the customer. Until that changes, every PC purchase comes with an AI tax baked into the memory line item, whether you use AI or not.
Have you priced a RAM kit or a new laptop lately? Did the memory cost change what you bought? I am genuinely curious whether people are downsizing configurations or paying the premium, so share your experience in the comments.
I write about hardware, developer tools, and how the AI boom is reshaping the tech we actually buy, every week. Subscribe, it is free, and it makes sure the next breakdown lands in your feed instead of the algorithm's graveyard.
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