Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

The discussion mostly landed on a harsher but more grounded view than simple “price gouging.” Memory is a highly concentrated industry with only a few major DRAM makers, fabs cost billions, and new capacity takes years to build. That means even without explicit collusion, sellers can stay sold out, favor enterprise customers, and let everyone else bid up what remains. Several people still pointed to the industry’s real history of DRAM price fixing, so nobody gave the manufacturers much benefit of the doubt. But the strongest frame was structural, not conspiratorial: a sudden shock in AI demand hit a market that had spent years avoiding overbuilding after previous boom-bust crashes, so there is no quick elasticity on the supply side. That led to a broad consensus on behavior. People are stretching hardware lifetimes, postponing desktop and laptop refreshes, sticking with DDR4, and buying insurance or hoarding spares instead of chasing upgrades. Quite a few said modern machines are already deep into diminishing returns for normal development, office work, and gaming, so today’s prices break the old upgrade cycle without much pain. The bigger worry is replacement risk. If a DIMM, SSD, PSU, or GPU dies, the cost to restore a working system can now be wildly out of line with what the box was worth a year ago. The few optimistic notes were all about timing, not relief soon. New fabs and Chinese entrants like CXMT may eventually ease pressure, and several readers expect the classic memory glut to return after the AI buildout cools. Almost nobody expects that to help before late 2027 or 2028.