Rui Carmo
Much ado is being made about AI being the root cause of the current memory price surge, but the reality is a bit more complex than that. While AI workloads do demand significant memory resources, the underlying issues stem from a combination of factors affecting the entire semiconductor industry–the fact that Micron is shutting down Crucial shocked many PC builders, but if you look at all the charts and ponder the situation, you quickly realize that:
- Older RAM started climbing in price earlier as fabs switched to DDR5 production, which is now the standard across just about any kind of hardware (consumer, mobile, server., etc.)
- PC Part Picker’s charts don’t show that server RAM prices have actually been climbing slowly but steadily for over a year (just like flash storage, CPUs and other things that, guess what, are mostly fabbed in Taiwan and need to be shipped to the US).
- A sizable chunk of this is a direct consequence of the uncertainty created by tariff policies and geopolitical tensions affecting supply chains. Everyone has been padding their margins, just in case.
- And yes, it will always be more profitable to sell to data centers than to consumers. NVIDIA was the prime example of that, but of course cumulative pressure “spread out” that load to supporting components.
Plus there’s an inconvenient truth–most people do not build (or even upgrade) their own PCs anymore, so the market for custom builds is shrinking, which means less competition and higher prices for those who do.
I do find it highly amusing that people find that Apple’s M-series Macs are now in line with the market, especially since this dynamic doesn’t really apply to Apple–remember they fab the RAM directly into their CPUs, so they’re largely immune to discrete component pricing fluctuations.
Plus, of course, Apple can negotiate far better pricing even if they were to buy discrete RAM, given their scale and influence in the market. At best, they would be affected by IP licensing for specific RAM technologies, but that’s a different matter altogether.
What I don’t find amusing, though, was that I completely forgot to buy RAM for one of my machines over Black Friday. Good thing that borg was padded out with 128GB two years ago when it was cheaper…