New reporting from Ars Technica shows just how dire the situation has become, showing that prices for essential PC components like RAM and SSDs have skyrocketed. This is due to the ongoing AI boom, with data centers reportedly consuming the world’s supply of memory and storage hardware, sending prices straight into the stratosphere.
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Take the Patriot Viper Venom 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR5-6000 kit, which increased from $49 to $110 between August and November 2025 – a 124.5 percent increase. Or the Team Delta RGB 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6400, which jumped from $190 to $700, a staggering 268.4 percent increase. Spike. At the time of this writing, the price of the Team Delta RAM kit has “dropped” and its most recent retail price reached $1,049 just over a week ago.
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SSD prices have also risen sharply, although they have not yet entered panic territory. However, RAM is a different story. If you’re eyeing an upgrade, you might want to wait a while.
As Ars Technica points out, memory and storage shortages are extremely difficult to manage because chip manufacturing depends on years of advance planning. The supply we are dealing with today is the result of production decisions made long before the current AI-driven demand surge. That inherent lag makes the memory market particularly prone to violent price fluctuations.
The pandemic provided a perfect example. Manufacturers were caught off guard by the sudden surge in demand for PCs and consumer tech in 2020 and 2021, only to see demand decline as purchasing habits returned to normal. PC sales rose, fell, then plateaued again – all in the span of a few years. This kind of volatility makes long-term planning nearly impossible for memory suppliers.
Until RAM supply catches up with demand from data centers and AI developers, anyone looking to boost their RAM will be better off waiting for the market to cool down rather than paying the current premium.
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