If you’ve been planning a RAM upgrade, you might want to brace yourself. Samsung is reportedly pushing DDR5 contract prices way up—some increases hitting around 60%—and while these are enterprise numbers for now, they almost always spill over into the consumer market sooner or later.
Reuters reports that Samsung has bumped the price of 32GB DDR5 modules to about $239, which is nearly 50% higher than last month. Other capacities, including 16GB and 128GB sticks, are apparently seeing similar jumps. These aren’t retail tags you’ll see on Amazon yet, but they’re still important because they give a pretty clear idea of where the broader market is heading.
The main culprit behind all this is reportedly the AI wave. Big tech companies are scrambling to expand data centers, and those setups chew through enormous amounts of specialized HBM memory to feed modern AI accelerators. With demand exploding on the enterprise side for HBM chips, Samsung and other DRAM makers are funneling more of their production capacity toward those higher-margin orders. That leaves less room for consumer-grade chips. The result is a shortage of standard memory chips (and price hikes) for consumer hardware. And it’s not only DDR5 DRAM—smartphone prices are also tipped to rise in the near future due to this shortage.
With Samsung already rumored to increase the prices, it wouldn’t be surprising if Micron and SK Hynix roll out similar hikes. And because memory contracts often span years, the impact tends to spread slowly but steadily into the consumer space. Even DDR4 could end up riding the same wave simply because manufacturers will charge what the market allows.
For PC builders and gamers, this is yet another headache. GPUs have been volatile, inflation hasn’t exactly gone away, and now RAM—one of the simpler, relatively cheaper upgrades—may start costing noticeably more.
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