The RAM crisis has no end in sight: DDR4 prices jumped 24% in a quarter and even the old standard is now scarce
DDR4 is up 24%; chipmakers warn the AI-driven RAM shortage will persist until 2028.
The global AI buildout has turned memory into the tightest commodity in consumer electronics, and the pain is widening. DDR4 RAM, the standard that predated DDR5, has jumped roughly 24% in price over the last three months, and industry executives are now saying the shortage will not ease for at least one to three years.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told reporters that the memory shortage 'isn't easing anytime soon,' warning that the tightness in DRAM supply could persist until 2028. Micron made a similar call to analysts, saying RAM shortages will drag into 2028 and that customers should expect much higher prices, with the company's own fiscal third-quarter revenue up more than 345% year over year and net income nearly tripling as AI data centers gobbled up capacity.
DDR4 is the new scarce item
Until the AI boom, DDR4 was a near-end-of-life product with abundant supply and falling prices. That has inverted. With the three major DRAM makers (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) prioritizing high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators and long-term enterprise allocation over ordinary consumer memory, the older DDR4 and standard DDR5 capacity that would normally be plentiful is now scarce, and suppliers are raising prices across the board. DDR4 module prices climbed double digits in a single quarter, and analysts warn that the upswing is still accelerating rather than plateauing.
The squeeze is showing up in everything. Handheld gaming PCs, VR headsets, game consoles, and prebuilt systems are all repricing upward, with some manufacturers cutting specifications and soldering memory to hold list prices near their original targets. Memory has become roughly 35 percent of a premium PC's bill of materials in some categories, up from 15 to 18 percent, which leaves very little room to absorb cost elsewhere.
Why it will not resolve soon
The core of the shortage is a supply-demand mismatch that chipmakers have little incentive to correct. DRAM bit supply is growing only 15 to 20 percent in 2026, while demand is projected to grow 20 to 30 percent, and server memory demand is up 40 to 50 percent year over year. New wafer capacity from existing fabs takes years to come online, and the three largest suppliers are all reporting record profits, giving them no commercial reason to cut AI memory production in favor of the far less profitable consumer segment. Industry forecasts point to additional 30 to 40 percent price rises in the coming month, and memory now makes up a meaningful share of the overall cost of many consumer devices.
Some consumer devices that had not been affected in the early stages of the crunch are now showing the squeeze in their pricing as well, with several handheld and portable gaming platforms repricing upward and older laptop configurations quietly dropping RAM capacity to hold prices. The result is a market in which the standard 16 GB configuration that had become the norm in consumer systems is giving way to smaller capacities or higher prices, and the memory makers themselves warn that relief is years away.
If you are in the market for a new system or an upgrade, memory costs are likely to keep rising through the rest of the year at a significant rate. For most buyers, the practical advice is to buy the RAM configuration you need now, to buy used or off-peak where possible, to check the actual price of memory in a system rather than the list price of the model, and to wait for the AI memory cycle to peak if you can afford the wait.
Sources: TechRadar - Can the RAM crisis get any worse (Intel CEO comment, DDR4 +24%); Yahoo Finance / Micron - Micron says RAM shortages will drag into 2028, and customers face 'much higher prices'; Tom's Hardware - 32GB dethrones 16GB as top RAM capacity in gaming rigs despite memory shortage (AMD/Intel CPU share).
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