We are in the middle of a massive spike in RAM prices. It’s so significant that analysts are coming up with ridiculous names, calling it a "Memory Supercycle" or a "RAM-pocalypse." The second of those is my favourite, but that’s not the point.
Further fuel has been thrown on the fire with rumours appearing all over the internet of Samsung reportedly doubling the cost of DDR5 RAM. Thanks, Samsung. Always looking out for the little man.
The fact that these price rises are coming on the back of a supply and price squeeze of GPUs does nothing to fill me with confidence going into 2026. I might even need to resort to scratting around in the depths of my sofa crevices to see if I dropped any large notes down there, in case I need a new laptop for graphic design any time soon.
The days of RAM being a relatively cheap, predictable component are over, and even though the reasons for this are complicated, AI is the single biggest contributing factor. An AI boom has required the production of high-density DDR5 modules to power massive large language models, at the cost of consumer hardware, such as laptops made for animation or the like.
Unfortunately for us, these enterprise-grade chips offer much higher profit margins than consumer RAM, leading major manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to prioritise AI production. That means the leftovers for the consumer market are suddenly becoming a scarce, expensive commodity.
If you didn’t feel like a small fish in a big pond already, then I imagine you do now. It reminds me of when I was young and the big bully kid would take his ball away because he didn’t like the way the game was going. There wasn’t anything that I or my small-bodied friends could do about it. We had to suck it up and deal with the scraps, probably choosing to kick a Coke can around instead.
There’s also not a huge amount that laptop brands can do about it. They might be bigger fish than we consumers, but they still hold little bargaining power. As a result, we’re likely to see many laptop brands reducing standard memory specs and increasing retail prices.
This is a major problem considering the fact that we've become accustomed to 16GB being the minimum for our creative laptops lately and that we're even beginning to see 32GB in fairly straightforward productivity laptops now.
The reality is that we're either going to have to adapt our workflows or start saving now. Either way, we’ll be the ones paying for the AI boom that none of us even asked for.
