Memory prices are up 500% in a year, and AI data centers have already booked 2027

Retail memory prices have climbed 500 percent in twelve months, and some kits now cost ten times the lowest price ever tracked. A 128 GB DDR5-6400 kit lists at $3,399, Tom’s Hardware found in its price tracking.

The cause is not a shortage of demand-side luck but of supply-side arithmetic. High bandwith memory needs many layers of ordinary DRAM per unit, so far fewer standard memory chips get made. The AI build-out buys those layers at contract prices that consumer retail simply cannot outbid.

DDR4 has become worse off than DDR5 in relative terms. With DDR5 out of reach for many builders, the scramble for older platforms pushed DDR4 kits up between 120 percent and nearly 180 percent, according to the same tracking.

2027 will be the worst year for memory supply in the industry’s history.

Kwak Noh-jung, chief executive of SK hynix

He is not alone in that read. He forecasts demand outrunning production capability well into 2030, and the chairman of ADATA, Simon Chen, has said the DRAM crisis could run for another ten years and dismissed talk of an AI bubble bursting.

The market research firms line up behind it. IDC says the shortage could persist well into 2027, and Counterpoint Research reported that global PC shipments fell 21 percent year on year in the third quarter of 2026 as the price rises hit demand. Shipments for the year are expected to land eleven percent lower, in what one analyst called the end of the era of bargain-priced PCs and tablets.

Even companies that build their prices around fair component costs have bent. Framework raised its laptop memory prices in July, then started refunding some customers in September after it managed to source a limited run of cheaper Micron LPCAMM2 modules.

What to do? If you need memory in the machine you own, buying now beats buying later. If you can live with the memory you have, wait and let the AI build-out price itself out. Graphics cards are holding up better, because the industry is buying memory rather than GPUs.

Sources: Tom’s Hardware price tracking, The Verge, Counterpoint Research, IDC